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Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.""
It depends on what you're using it for.
Are you a geek, who wants a productive interface? KDE is the way to go - actually, I prefer Windowmaker myself.
OTOH, are you an end user who wants a simplified UI? Gnome is the way to go.
Linus, obviously, is a geek and chooses the former. However, that does not make the choice universal.
That's the best part about Linux and Open Source in general, isn't it? The freedom to choose and use what suits you the best?
I respectfully disagree, I like KDE but there is absolutely a need for simplification in the linux world. I think Gnome was chosen for Ubuntu, for example, for very sound reasons. The notion that simplifying your interface being an idiot attractor is true, but that's not a bad thing. Idiots are people too, when we talk about our interfaces and what software we like we have to understand that we are perhaps an exlusive 8 percent of the world population, if that. There are a lot of people out there that haven't had the educational opportunities we enjoy. Giving them free software they can use seems like something we shouldn't sneer at.
Linus is increasingly 'out there' in his hyperbolic statements. First the BitKeeper fiasco, now the start of a new Gnome/KDE flamewar. Ever read his daily postings on kernel trap? They are obnoxious. I am surprised the kernel effort holds together as well as it does. I personally take his statements on Gnome as anti-advice. He is becoming a most unsafe guardian. Can anyone imagine who would lead the kernel effort if Linus was shoved aside?
an ill wind that blows no good
I think Torvalds is the prototype of power-user.
A large part of gimmicks and interface nazism in today interfaces aims at the average or lower-than-average user. As a long time kde user switched to apple, I quickly realized that most of the use-cases I was used to were difficult to obtain with the OSX interface.
Is that a real problem? Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces. Give a dumb interface to a smart guy, and you obtain the Torvalds situation. Give a smart interface to a dumb guy and all you'll obtain is whining about its complexity.
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
From his message:
it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Everybody is entitled to his or her opinion, but Linux has grown beyond the scope of "just" Linus Torvalds. The freedom of choice that we enjoy as users of the operating system is among its finest attributes.
Is it possible that Gnome and KDE are simply designed for different audiences? Newbies and other users may enjoy the more straightforward approach that the Gnome developers strive for. Slightly more advanced users such as Linus may prefer a different UI. (I kid, I kid!)
Do you like German cars?
So stop taking what he says as gospel. Yes, he is incredibly intelligent. And yes, he has a very good grasp about what's going on most of the time.
However, this is the same guy that got upset at the Samba guy for reversing bitkeeper.
I'm not arguing with his statement, btw. I've always liked KDE better than gnome. What I am saying is let the poor man have his opinion without starting a flame war.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
KDE is too keen to put every single bloody option whether advanced or not straight in your face, rendering it a pain to find the simple settings. Not only that but the defaults are horrible including the single-click-to-launch paradigm. I spent a good while looking to change that behaviour, foolishly thinking it might set be somewhere desktop prefs which it isn't - it's in the mouse settings. On top of that, you only have to look at Konq or KMail and you'll see six or seven menu items in a row starting with Configure.
The one thing you can hand to KDE is that it is consistent, but it sorely needs to be streamlined. It's not hard to see why enterprise versions of Linux use GNOME - it's so much simpler and cleaner. I truly expect that supporting 100 KDE users would be significantly more work work than 100 GNOME users.
Yeah, well, he didn't make an announcment or a press release you know... He voiced his opinion on a mailing list - and I think Linus is pretty good at that :)
Incidentally, I had exactly the same experience. I migrate users to free software, and we offer two choices: FreeBSD backend, Kubuntu desktop. Why? The same reasons he cites. In the past two years, we heard a lot of "usability" noise from GNOME devs, and imho they are all bogus. Why? Because people throw around words like "usability" too easily, leading to circular or unsubstantial arguments, while real usability studies are not conducted at all. I haven't read a serious usability study for a long time. (maybe this will change with openusability and all). And no, I don't consider a study conducted with people who are absolute computer illiterate (not knowing that the right mouse button is good for something) representative. They are a very specific subset of users, they are NOT the majority, and making design decisions based on experiments conducted on this very small subset of the userbase is WRONG. That is Linus' point. Is he politically correct? Of course not (" This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.")
My girlfriend is absolutely computer illiterate: she thinks (well, thought) that Office is the OS that runs on his laptop. Being lazy and all she often sits down to my computer (instead of opening her laptop) to browse the net. Sometimes she doesn't even notice that instead of firefox, she is using konqueror. There is a small set of functionality that users expect at specific areas of your screen: first buttons should be back and forward, they expect an input field for URLs at the top, maybe a google search bar... and that's it. If they are there, they are not really "confused" because there are additional buttons (kget, print, even cervisia) to the right side. They don't even notice it. It is the same with the file dialog: were users really bothered by the input field? I very much doubt that - and just like Linus, I was not aware of ctrl + L until someone told me here on ./. And in the past years, I hear one bogus "usability" claim from these so called "usability experts" after another (spatial nautilus anyone?) No evidence, no empirical study, just "we say so as usability experts" with some outlandish theory to back it up... so yeah, I think he is right on spot (and yeah, yeah, we know, diplomacy is not his forte).
In order to turn off the ugly minimizing animation that comes with metacity you actually have edit the code and cut out the relevant part*. People have submitted patches to make this an option but all have been refused. Linus is right. Gnome developers don't care about their users. I still use Gnome cause I like the look and feel but if you want to change certain parts you basically have to either edit the code or use their system registry editor. In a twisted sense, Gnome is for power users.
*There might be an option to turn this off in the system registry but it also turns off other features. For example a window now turns into a wireframe when you drag it.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
You can use Konquerer as your file manager while in Gnome. I use it for my Debian machine running fluxbox. The reason why I prefer Gnome over KDE these days is because KDE installs all this useless crap that I don't want on my machine. Seriously, some of their micro-apps are just pointless and a waste of space. Best example: "keyes". Who wants to run a program where two eyeballs are constantly following my mouse around the screen? Seriously...
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
The problem, of course, is that many apps these days require the gnome libs to run. Look at firefox as an example. Pretty much any GTK2 app will want gnome-settings-daemon running. I personally use Windowmaker with ROX, but I still have to have the gnome daemons running to ensure that fonts and such are rendering properly. This combined with rox now using a window for its pinboard (this is apparently the new standard way to do things ... KDE does it too) instead of the root window is annoying. Now I can't have a screen saver or movie running on the root while I work, nor can I easily pin up a windowmaker menu, since releasing the button now makes the menu disappear (I know, don't use a pinboard).
I'd be happy if all of the 'framework' crap just went away and developers would just use standard communication methods between programs. XDnD and XDS are plenty for me, and don't require a friggin' background process.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Second, Linus expressed an opinion on the GNOME list. Linus writes in on both GNOME and KDE. There are 2 types of people that post to BOTH lists;
Finally, that Linus posted to GNOME in a discussion. He was not teaching. He was holding a discussion with other developers. His postings almost certainly have been taken out of context here on
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The parent makes an interesting about the importance of how well a desktop is maintained on a given distribution. While one may say that either Gnome or KDE is a better, the end-user experience for many users is largely dependent on the integration and packaging done by a particular distribution. As an extreme example, consider the largely unusable KDE packages that Redhat shipped two years ago. Personally I've found that a "polished" and well-integrated version of a given desktop (e.g. Ubuntu on Gnome, KDE on SuSE) is always superior to a poorly maintained desktop, no matter how HCI-compliant or feature-packed that desktop may be.
For many people, the choice of whether to use KDE or Gnome will be automatically dictated by the distribution that they happen to choose. After all, most people aren't particularly concerned with pseudo-religious debates concerning Gtk v Qt or C v C++, especially since we seem to have so many zealots in the real world these days.
He had an opinion on the subject-matter, and he stated it. You are free to disagree with his opinion, but does that mean that he shouldn't voice his opinion? And I don't really see what the fuzz is about. There are quite a few people around the net who are irritated by the removal of features in Gnome. Apparently Linus is one of them. There are also lots of people who prefer KDE, and apparently Linus is one of them.
Aside from being an moral-booster for the KDE-guys, I fail to see the drama in this case. Linus doesn't like GNOME. And he told why he doesn't like GNOME, and his reasons are valid. He's not ordering people to use KDE. He simply said that he recommends KDE over GNOME, and he stated his reasons for doing so. Does this mean that the GNOME-guys are going to pack their bags and start using KDE instead? No. GNOME doesn't need Linus's endorsement to survive.
Like I said, I fail to see the drama here. Is Linus being "self-centered" when he said that "I prefer KDE over GNOME"? That's his personal opinion, and they are all in a way "self-centered", and there's nothing wrong with that. Surely he's entitled to his opinion?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
What on earth has he done that would make people respect his opinion on GUIs? That's like respecting Stephen Hawking's ideas on interior decorating because he's such a great physicist.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Linus is making the biggest mistake all geeks make (myself included, but I learn, he might).
People don't want you to give them lots of features that get in their way.
They want you to give them something intuitive that does the basic things they need done first.
As a lead developer of Audacity, I have to disagree. Yes, users want a simplified interface that doesn't get in their way. They want the most basic things to be as easy as possible. But once they've done those basic things, they want to do something else. They want more functionality. For any given user, that added functionality is pretty simple - but every user is different. There's not a single feature in Audacity that we could remove that wouldn't upset thousands of users - and not just power users - ordinary users who really just need that one feature!
Making an interface simple is good. Removing functionality isn't.
God, you have an inflated sense of self-worth. Let me fill you in on a little secret: knowing how to survive by hunting/gathering on the savannah, build a house, or build a car from scratch are much more "elite" skills than being able to write papers about long-term effects of Charles VIII's invasion of Italy in 1494 or even the ability to write your own window manager.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Ha ha-- mod parent into -5 oblivion for being too funny for words, please.
I respect Torvalds' opinion because
But to be balanced about it, I don't think much of Torvalds taste in automobiles and my GF thinks he chooses dorky clothes. Yet despite these criticisms, I do think that I will now favor KDE over Gnome. Because Linus is my hero and he is a champion of FOSS and all that's holy in the binary realms.
1. I'm pretty sure that over the years Torvalds has become somewhat proficient in the use of GUIs, which is sufficient experience to come to an informed opinion about what's good or bad about their use;
I'm pretty sure that over the years Hawking has become proficient in the use of rooms, which is sufficient experience to come to an informed opinion of what's good or bad about their style.
2. I'm pretty sure that Torvalds knows how to think through the long term implications of design philosophies, such as whether to put rubber blades on the swiss army knife so users won't cut themselves;
I'm pretty sure Hawking knows how to think through the long term implications of decorating philosophies, such as whether to put lighter tones around recessed lighting so that shadows are balanced.
3. I'm quite certain that somewhere along the way, Torvalds has learned to avoid stirring up unnecessary controversies since he seems to limit himself to only one or two a year;
Hawking also has stirred up very little controversy, given his advanced take on physics. I don't understand what that has to do with his competency in interior decorating.
4. Yet despite that last point, he said this not only once, but twice, in a forum where it really counts.
(because all the world leaders are reading the "desktop architects" mailing list). Wow. Must be important that we all switch to KDE.
Were you trying to refute the parent post? The poster has a valid point - Linus Torvalds is not a usablilty expert any more than Steven Hawking is an interior designer.
Linus Torvalds is a brilliant man, but he has also been known to be opinionated, and to occasionally say things that stir people up. See the legendary Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds thread. (Please don't say Linus was correct in that exchange - it's really irrelevant. I mention it only as an example of Linus showing his opinionated engineer self.) However, Linus has learned over the years when to shut up, which is why you will noticed he only sent a few messages to that thread and then you stop seeing messages from him.
I really don't know why people try to cannonize Linus. He's just a guy.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Only about 1 in 1000 people who start martial arts earn a black belt that's 0.1% and since most people don't even try martial arts it having a black belt far more "elite" than a 4 year degree right? Wow, I didn't relealize how l33t I really was!
I'd say: who the hell cares? I don't care about this stupid GNOME-vs-KDE war that's artificially being kept alive by Slashdot. I use KDE apps in GNOME and vice-versa.