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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'.""
I stopped using either a while back, because both of them required too many mouse clicks and interface searching to get them to do what I wanted, and to clone the setup from place to place. Give me an ASCII configuration file that I can just copy any day. No, it's not "user friendly," but it's Geek friendly. I can read the docs.
I've even started setting up new accounts on my machines using FVWM with a sane default configuration. People tend not to futz with their configurations too much anyway, and the startup time and resource usage is just much less without the overhead of KDE. And, what's more, these are all grad students in Physics, and I *want* them to get facile with Unix. They really ought to know enough Perl to read and write files and manipulate numbers, and know a little programming. Having to figure out text configuration files would be a good exercise, as whiny as it may make them....
Not for everybody, but certainly for me. As a geek, I much prefer FVWM to the overhead of Gnome or even KDE.
-Rob
Actually, Gnome works "well enough" these days. It does what I want it to do. This is on Ubuntu. KDE is arguably better, but I don't care much at this point, since Gnome is the better maintained one on Ubuntu.
:-).
I'd love to have Konqueror as a file manager, but also this is in lesser extent than previously. Gnome just doesn't suck anymore
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Moi aussi.
People see me doing that sometimes, and wonder why I'm going through so much trouble. I have a hard time convincing them that once you've learned it, the shell is far more efficient. (Especially since I type fast.)
I do have a handful of shortcut FVWMButtons on the left side of my screen (virtual screens, clock, xterm, emacs, etc.) for my most-used things, but, yeah, when I have to really do something with the filesystem, give me a shell I know how to use anyway.
-Rob
If J Random Anonymous guy posted a similar message to slashdot/his blawgh/etc, he would be ignored or marked as a troll and flamed crispy.
Is there any reason to treat this differently?
The goal is simplicity in all things. Someone shouldn't have to think about what is going on, it should be obvious.
The most interesting thing about that book is that the author applies the same principles he espouses for websites to the book. The book is very easily digestible. So, if it works for the web and it works for the book... what else can it apply to? If you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion you'll realize it applies to lots and lots of things: your code, desktops, phone VRUs, brochures, etc.
Linus is a smart guy and I respect him, but the goal is simple.
Interesting. 'Interface nazis' (oh look, it's Godwin's Law already) brought consistency to the Mac platform and the Windows platform, and to be honest, that encouraged a lot of success there. Yes there were other issues, but consistency shouldn't be ignored. Additionally, GNOME is getting a lot of play on Ubuntu and Fedora desktops. Consistency breeds ubiquity?
One other thought: maybe this can be a strength of Linux. GNOME takes the intro/simple desktop crowd, KDE takes the ultra-config-alicious crowd. We can start saying things like "Start out with GNOME, but if you feel like a little more control, just check the KDE box when you log in."
Gnome's problem is that, well, they don't have a usable interface design to stick with in the first place. This goes back as far as 2000 - "systems administrators still struggle to install applications on Linux and that antiquated versions of Gnome, a graphical-oriented user interface for the operating system, continue to ship with different distributions of Linux" "http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/st ory/0,10801,54030,00.html"
My girlfriend (with absolutely no computer knowledge whatsoever) can use KDE just fine, I really don't know what GNOME is trying to accomplish.
For me, Gnome has been offcially hijacked by the suits ever since they switched the window manager from Sawfish to Metacity--very symbolic the move from a fun scriptable-in-Lisp WM to the most staid and prim window manager around.
It's for the best, I guess, since some kind of boring desktop is needed for corporate adoption of Linux. When you think about it there was bound to be a split between those who need a highly standardised environment (for tech support and the like) and people using GNU/Linux as their personal desktop, who want to be able to customise everything and have lots of little amusements. So although I much prefer GTK to QT, I'm going to have to agree with Linus and suggest that people who are not big businesses but just ordinary computer geeks should probably just use KDE.
I was pleasantly surprised to see KDE developpers rally to GNOME's cause, or at least, advocate the use of GNOME for those for whom it works, regardless of their own opinion. Both DEs are there to stay and the sooner people accept this, the sooner we can build a strong integration layer and move on toward world domination. (Which is why the GNOME people really should get rid of Ximian and its DE fundamentalists if they want to make any progress, by the way -- at least until Ximian gets out of their corporate-love funk and re-learn the OSS virtues of collaboration...)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I have one problem, and its with your screenshot of a Gnome desktop and the comment about toolbars. There are two applications in there that appear to be both Mozilla and OpenOffice. Both of these applications, from what I know, do not use the Gnome widget sets in preference for their own. I believe you will have this same problem with these applications on other desktops like KDE. I know both running on Windows look different from the other Windows apps.
.NET stuff, note that this is coming from a long-time Java and C developer. I think that with Mono, the Linux desktop can grow without people having to load 20 different runtimes to get app X to run. Hell, I'm running Windows XP right now and have Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, Java, and the .NET framework on my box to run various applications. That is stupid. I think everyone should focus on improving Mono and adding language X in to it.
As for the various different programming languages on Linux I can say that I think people should use Mono exclusively. A Qt# would be nice to see (if its not out there already). And before someone goes bashing me about the
Also, Mono should stop trying to mimic Microsoft's implementation. Screw them. Make a break and improve. I played around with it a bit and found it silly that on Linux it was compiling assemblies into files with the extensions ".exe" or ".dll". To hell with crossplatform. We need one framework that can run assemblies from many languages.
I didn't mean that. If Linus had said "Personally, I prefer KDE to Gnome" then we could all ignore him and use whatever desktop environment we liked.
However, he wants people to use KDE, based solely on personal preference, which is nothing more than zealotry "Please, just tell people to use KDE". Because, you know, people shouldn't even get a choice in the matter. It doesn't even affect him.
I'm not saying that people are going to use KDE more because of this, I'm just condoning his actions.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
I wouldn't go that far. Not to belittle what he's accomplished (far more than I am capable of), but the amount of code written by Linus in the Linux kernel is very small these days and most of that is stuff leftover from his early days in the mid 1990s. At that point he was frankly nothing but an upstart computer science student who wanted to write his own kernel. The community support and open source nature of the license he used is what ended up developing Linux into a usable system today.
> If Aqua was only available for linux... :-(
It is ! But it's called GNUstep
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I agree with you. To an extent.
KDE leaves a lot to be desired for an average user, but Gnome lacks some of the things the power user wants.
This is an age old debate that will carry on until someone successfully does both. Apple's have a very well-thought interface, but it is tougher to get "down and dirty" with it. Windows is a little "Grundgier", and then for ultimate control over your interface, you have Linux.
But to a non-Linux user, both Gnome and KDE are intimidating.
Why can't there be a fair compromise. A simple, easy to use interface that behaves just how you would expect it to... and has the power to do anything you could want? It's not an impossibility, and I think it's something that both KDE and Gnome aren't aiming for. Neither is MS or Apple.
Anyone care to accept this task?
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
I've recently switched to a Mac, and I find the UI rather fine. Indeed, I've started using Mail.app, having never found a GUI mailer I liked (I used MH for about fifteen years, then five years of Mutt).
My seven year old also likes Macs. She's found switching the dock to the left and changing her wallpaper easy, and she's very fond of Dashboard.
I think it's quite possible to have a GUI that suits all needs.
ian
Do it. There's a lot of interesting answers. Most interestingly, it seems that the problems which Linus (and popular opinion) ascribes to Gnome user interface design decisons are actually considered bugs by Gnome developers. It seems that, when giving the choice of working on sensible defaults or in advanced configuration options, Gnome devels prefer the first, so that sometimes applications misses the advanced configuration; but they're not actually opposed to them (provided that they have a nice UI, separated from the basic options). It's a matter of priorities.
So Gnome is not about "dumb users", it's about focusing on an usable system out-of-the-box. If you like customizing your WM, you'll probably hate Gnome, because it's not their focus. I hate WM customization, so I like Gnome better than KDE (and ratpoison better than Gnome). OTOH, I love customizing my programming environment, so I like Emacs better tham vim or gedit. Differente things for different people, really.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I'm a geek who likes productivity and I use Gnome. It's nicer looking, and cleaner. Which is not to say that it's lack of customization doesn't piss me off, and I've tried moving to KDE a few times, but KDEs look & feel is just... icky. Lack of consistent artwork, busy interfaces, lots of popuppy balloony things (the animated tooltips on the Kicker drive me insane - I want the tooltips, but I want small simple ones, not enormous ones with special effects). When someone manages to ship Gnome with the power of KDE, or KDE with the consistency and cleanliness of Gnome, please call me. I still use a few KDE applications - Amarok is way better than Rythmbox, and I switch between KDevelop and Anjuta depending on what I'm doing.
Well this could be the other argument: "Gnome is for idiots, KDE is too, for that matter any windowing system is designed with idiots in mind. They are just dumbed down. My choice is CLI, there are so many programs written for it and it is not intuitive at all, just like a system interface should be."
Laugh, but when I built my first Linux system I got by for almost two years with just the CLI because X wasn't stable enough in those days to run on my crappy Compaq hardware.
ircII epic, a cmdline IM client whose name I can't recall, pine, and MCL. Yeah, I spent most of my time on the internet playing MUDs and chatting on IRC. But I was more then happy with my CLI only Linux box. I didn't even need to boot into Windows to do my banking -- because back in those days my credit union had a dial-in system. They supplied front end software but you could easily access it through minicom if you wanted to.
In fact, other then Firefox and a Word Processor I could almost get by with a CLI only environment in this day and age.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Linus is posting exactly the same as he always had: He says what he thinks, and doesn't pull any punches when doing so. If you think this is "new" behaviour for Linus, you haven't been around long enough. You might want to read this little exchange from 1992:
p pa.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/a
-- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
I personally like the design philosophy behind Gnome (The Sensible Default) in general, and spatial browsing and the file dialog in particular, but I switched to Kubuntu over the weekend after Nautilus crashed for the zillionth time on me. I just couldn't take it anymore--the file browser is the fundamental component of the Desktop and having it freeze/crash every time something out of the ordinary happens with a remote share is just too much*. And it's slow. I like all the functionality it offers, with the previews and what not, but browsing a large media directory is an exercise in patience while the 2.4Ghz Celery processor wheezes and gasps to produce thumbnails.
So I switched. I can say without reservation, that on my machine KDE is fast. Konqueror is waaaay faster than Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany and it doesn't seem to peg the cpu on plugin-filled pages (or when it does it doesn't seem to affect the rest of the desktop). Kontact/KMail/KOffice look much more integrated than Evolution/OO.org (I also found Evolution to be very slow). KDE also seems to follow Windows paradigms more closely, so I have fewer "support issues" from my wife (it's her machine).
That said, I much prefer Gnome's aesthetic. Honestly, why would anybody want to wade through menus and menus of configuration? A right-click on any app has:
Configure Part-of-app...
Configure App...
Configure Window-bits-of-app...
Configure Panel...
Configure KDE...
That's just annoying. I also prefer Gnome's approach to menus, and it's religious commitment to reducing clutter. KDE's shiny icons I don't care for either, but all these complaints are things that can probably be configured away (Hah!).
Torvald's complaints are wrong, but his conclusion is right. KDE is fantastic.
Todd
PS I still use Gnome on my machine, I am a glutton for punishment.
* After Miss Naughty crashed 3 times while trying to delete the Firefox lock file (why does Mozilla still have this idiotic profile dialog?), I tried to log a bug using the bug buddy tool, but it required sendmail be configured, or save to disk. I swear I couldn't get the chooser to save it and gave up, very disgusted. Probably user error, but I was still disgusted.
I like Gnome. A lot. I like not having to be tied into the KDE window manager. I like all sorts of its nifty functionality.
Except, as noted, when said functionality goes away.
This has been happening for *years*. With every new incarnation of Gnome, I wonder what feature is either gone, or disabled by default. Now, granted, disabled-by-default isn't a bad thing, per-se. If you're a savvy user, it's expected that you'll be able to figure out how to enable it. But sometimes, it ain't that easy -- especially when the menu options aren't all that intuitive.
I mean, what the hell's up with their whole funky "system paradigm" in Nautilus? "Intuitive," my ass. How about a simple hierarchy like most every GUI OS sine the Mac, fer Pete's sake?
Argh. It ain't enough to make me switch to KDE -- I *like* Enlightenment, dammit -- but I certainly see where Linus is coming from, and agree wholeheartedly.
I'm sorry, Miguel, Havoc, etc., but in your attempt to figure out how to appeal to the lowest common denominator, you're pushing away "real" users -- the ones who started using Gnome in the first place, 'cause it didn't try to wrap them up in KDE-cotton.
Sure, advanced users like Mr Torvalds probably are better served by a desktop environmnent like KDE. Here they can configure things that "idiot" doesn't care about or even know exists.
The problem is, that there are more "idiot" users out there in the business world than there are Linus Torvaldses. If we design for the Linus Torvaldses of the world, Linux will get a very small user base and that will make Linux less interesting to companies porting software and drivers for the Linux platform.
The elite user is also perfectly capable of replacing a simple Gnome deskop with another more advanced one (e.g. KDE). However, the "idiots" will not be able to replace KDE with Gnome. That's why Gnome is better.
When it comes to GUI design the "it will confuse the user" point of view, is just as valid as the "it is too complex to do" point of view. Not realizing that, is a very common mistake by people with an engineering or computer science background.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
End-users with prior Windows experience tend to take to KDE much better. That's only partly because KDE is more similar to what they're used to in Windows. What's often missed in the aim for "simplified" is that for real-world use in business etc., simplified doesn't mean that it should lack functionality, only that the functionality should be well-integrated.
Gnome fails on that front. Speculating, I wonder if it's because geeks designing the interface they think is suitably simplified for use by those different from themselves gives the worst of both worlds - geeks often aren't good at figuring out what people other than themselves want.
I used Gnome myself for years before switching to KDE, and I have to say switching totally transformed my "Linux desktop experience". Admittedly,
But I know salespeople who've tried both Gnome and KDE and come down firmly on the KDE side.
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.
You are bucking against human nature. Linus is an authority figure, and whatever he says will instantly be heavily-laden with the appeal to authority. People are easily influenced by authority. How else should they make their decisions? By relying on their own incomplete experience? By trusting their own faulty judgement? By following their peers who are tainted with the same faults? Obeying some impersonal authority figure seems just as good if not better than any of those other choices, and the fact that authority figures are obeyed proves this.
I'm not stating that authority figures *should* be obeyed, only that they are by the virtue of the "bugs" in the human mind. Nor am I attempting to make a misanthropic argument. I'm just trying to point out that we are all influenced by authority, and that it's probably more powerful than you realize.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
How about this? Use whatever makes you happy? Only users that have no idea on the installation of a Window Manager shouldn't have the right to choose.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Fluxbox is so wonderfully lightweight, and rox-filer file manager is just so functional, i can get by just great - and it goes blazing fast.
The thing i like best about flux+rox-filer though, is if it crashes, its easy as heck to recover from - not that it crashes a lot. Theres not much TO crash... kde and gnome were always crashing once every few days for unexplained reasons (but i think it had a lot to do with background services). Fluxbox has gone fine for weeks, and it does "what i need" (i use my computer utilitarianistically).
I think it's safe to say that the reason most of the Slackware community wasn't upset by the fact that Gnome was cut is that most of us didn't use it in the first place. I would say that, on the whole, the Slackware userbase isn't one that needs/wants things to be dumbed down for them. I personally know a number of Slack users who treat window managers as a way to display a lot of terminals and a firefox instance.
As for me, XFCE does the trick for me. It's fast to configure, it improves the appearance of both GTK and QT applications (GAIM, for instance, looks very pretty... amazingly) and it displays things at a sane font size. (I spent a long time trying to get everything a uniform size in KDE, it never really worked) And did I mention it starts much faster than KDE or Gnome?
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Diplomacy is not Linus' forte - and it never was, and we know that. Just so it happens that his opinion does not coincide with folks who invested a lot of emotion in supporting GNOME... and now, suddenly, he "comes across as a 13 year old". Sure.
On the other hand, Havoc later admitted that some missing functionality was NOT a usability decision. But whenever it comes down to defending some very questionable choices, I always hear these bogus "usability" arguments: it is less confusing this way, less bloated, $insert_bogus_usability_argument_here. And that is precisely Linus' gripe. Kurt Pfeife (I hear now: but he is obviously biased because he is a KDE guy - but shut up and listen to the argument) summed it up well:
Computers are about empowering users. Now there is a difficulty here - you want to enable your users to do more, and do it easily. And that is what makes UI design an art: how can you provide more without confusing the user? GNOME's answer is simple (again, this is Linus' point): take functionality away, or don't provide it at all. A very easy way to cut the gordian knot, but it is not the right way imho. The right way is to do proper research (not on a very limited set of computer illiterate users, who don't know that the right mouse button is there for a reason - results won't be representative at all) - and organize your functionality. That is what the last two paragraphs are about, that is Linus' point, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not. Calling him names or ridiculing him is kinda ironic: you accuse him as coming across as a 13 year old, yet this is what you do in your own post. You don't reflect on the points raised by Linus. You probably didn't even read the entire thread (otherwise you'll see that Havoc's post comes off as a kind of confession - yeah it was not a usability question at all, and that is where Linus' criticism is mainly targeted at). And apparently you are +5 insightful. Way to go folks!Actually, Linus still writes a lot of code in the kernel. Is it still 10's of thousands of LOC? no. But he is writing more than the average coder does and that is on top of merging other code in.
As to an expert in kernels, I would go that far. He did develop one, he did his study in CS, and he currently does most of his work on nothing but the kernel. So yeah, he is an expert at it.
In fact, if you ask others who are doing kernel work, I would be shocked if most, if not all, did not rate Linus in the top 10.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But if you use the -kde -qt flag it will only compile KDE support if it is absolutely necessary?
Nice choice using rat poison, I hate to have to move my hand from the keyboard.
Personally I think that what computers should really have is two mouse cursors one for each hand, with each mouse having half a keyboard on it, that way you wouldn't have to move your hand from the keyboard, and you could to two things at once! Which would come in very handy when you are use something like gimp, you could be drawing with one hand and the other could select different color from the palette at the same time.
At least I find it obvious that the are other types of people/users than me. Not only do they think and behave completely differently, but also like different things. Btw. since when did Linus become a usability god anyway.
Not at all surprising. Both are getting more and more out of touch with their users, only caring about their ideas and possibly their corporate ties. Here's hoping Linus will see in what he criticises in others the flaws in the way his own project's development is going.
I am trolling
Here's a case in point. When I was providing Windows support for end-users a few years back, I'd been using Windows 95 and NT4 for about a year myself. I'd explored the various ways to create an application shortcut and decided that the most efficient way to do it was to open find your EXE in Explorer, then right click and drag the shortcut to wherever you wanted it and select "Create Shortcut Here". Why on earth anyone would use the stupid wizard interface is beyond me. So when it came time to show users how to create shortcuts for folders, or documents on their desktop, I assumed that they would agree. IN general, they did. But here's what shocked me. There was another support guy who worked with me who chose to actually use the idiot wizard! Why?! And since he'd been showing the users how to use the wizard when I wasn't around the users were getting confused. In many cases they thought that we were teaching them separate things and started creating shortcuts multiple times using each method. I confronted him on it and he said he didn't even KNOW that you could create a shortcut using my method. WTF!!!??? How do you do support for people without knowing every way to do something? It was at that point that I made the decision that having more than one way to do something for most users is a HORRIBLE idea.
Yes there are different working styles and there should be ways to accomodate them. But... when you are dealing with basic end-users who don't know the difference between the monitor and the computer, you really need to have just one way to do things. What's really needed for ANY UI is a way to restrict users to only one way of doing things until you can say for sure that they've progressed to a level where they can do things in more than one way and actually "get it".
Normally I agree with Linus on a lot of what he has to say, but I can't agree on the KDE issue. I think all the UIs on *nix are kind of screwed right now because they won't cooperate with each other well. Even though many of the Gnome people have come out saying that they don't make changes because "users are stupid" I have to say that users can be quite stupid indeed. We all know that. The solution is to have multiple experience levels (like Xine does) that would let administrators assign users to various UI user levels (that can be created by the admin) in relation to their level of knowledge. If it was established as a standard across UIs then this wouldn't be much of an issue. For the people who can handle and need to have more than one way of doing things, they can get assigned to an advanced user level. For the people who need to be told to switch on their monitors lest they think their PC is off, they can be assigned to the neanderthal user level. Etc...
Enlightenment is the only UI I've seen for *nix that actually looks and feels "right". It's just a shame that KDE and Gnome don't want to play nice and let their apps run without needing to load those stupid and unneccessary services... For my general comments on UIs, see here.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Linus is absolutly right about Gnome being dominated by 'interface nazis', but thats also exactly the reason why I like Gnome. As oposed to most other OpenSource software Gnome isn't build by stacking layers of layers of hacks on top each other, but instead Gnome developers often take a step back and redo stuff the right way, not just the way people got used to. Sure thats always causing a lot of flameswars and discussion, but its also a necessary thing if you want to end up with something that is actually a good interface and not just one which you have getting used to. So, yep, switching from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2, from Sawfish to Metacity, from old filedialog to new and soon from Galeon to Epiphany was quite painfull at times, but at the end of the day, I got almost all features back that I need and a whole lot of useless stuff cleaned up.
Of course it might be nice if some of the new stuff would be introduces a bit more gently and probally more backward compatible, at least for the time when the new stuff isn't 100% ready for prime time, but the stuff that gets done is almost always worth doing. Oh well, and I would like if they would finally drop Nautilus and use something that isn't just broken-by-design, but maybe that will happen one day anyway...
Those that want all the bells and whistles and configurability should simply use KDE, which really looks and feels for most part like a standard Windows interface on steroids, for me however all that configurabilty is simply useless most of the time, I prefer something that 'works at default' and doesn't offload the creation of a usable interface to the user.
How on earth can this be considered intuitive? How would a first-time user know about this? (Notice that even Linus didn't)
I hate to say it, but I'm with the Gnomes on this one.
If it is the Gnome team's goal to have people who are not computer enthusiasts, just computer users, use Gnome then making things simple is the rational way to go.
A power user like Linus Torvalds can take care of himself.
Ordinary users who aren't interested in computers, who just want to use them, will be turned off by making things unnecessarily complex.
When is a desktop unnecessarily complex? When another existing desktop can get the same job done without forcing the user to learn or do more.
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.
That's a terrible comparison. It would be closer to respecting Stephen Hawking's ideas on telescope design and manufacture because he's such a great astronomer. Don't forget that in the end, all of us are users, and user friendliness is the single greatest factor of hardware/software adoption (see Linux). Linus in the end is a user, he uses Gnome, he uses KDE, he sees what works and what doesn't, just like anyone else, the difference is that he is also a computer scientist himself that has done many respectable things, so that's why he gets increased respect.
It doesn't matter what else you do, in the end you're a user. But I bet it made you feel pretty clever to come up with your non-sequitor comparison to try and prove your point, didn't it? I think it's pretty stupid to say you don't respect other programmer's points of view when designing an interface. It's not like there are 'interface-only' programmers you go to that only do interfaces, and nothing else, where only they can tell you why a particular interface is good or bad. But apparently you think that the person who designed and built the OS is not qualified to critique applications that run on top of it.
When I bought my PowerBook, I took a little time to learn the MacOSX interface so I could be as fast with it as I was with my KDE desktop. It wasn't that difficult:
*M -> minimize a window (the only bad part of you have to click it to get it back)
*H -> Hide the app (can be clicked back to or *TABed to)
*TAB -> Goes between apps (interferes with the only good multi-desktop tool I've found, so I never use multidesktops).
*` and *~ -> Walk between windows of the same app.
*W and *Q -> Close windown or close app, respectively.
Plus I have a quick show-all windows and show-desktop Expose setup in the 2 bottom corners.
The file dialogs rule. When you drag them out to fill the screen (instead of being a little patch in the middle), they remember it. You can have them in the column mode (*3) so that you can quickly whip around, and you can DnD shortcut dirs to the side bar just like in KDE. It's awesome.
The only thing I hate is that I can't switch to focus follows pointer (not as big a deal on the smaller screen of the laptop, but I'd be very angry about it on a desktop), and the fact that sometimes my current window loses focus when something else starts to whine about something is annoying. Nothing should ever steal my focus.
The X11 support in MacOSX is pretty shoddy, too. I simply don't use apps if they require X11, because they integrate poorly with the system, and don't follow the interface standards that the normal Carbon and Cocoa apps do.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The elite class has always been educated, so not really. Now if all you know is how to write papers you may have some trouble amassing wealth and leveraging power against the working class, but the educated elite have always used such education to survive much more comfortably and healthily then the workers (until they get a little too comfortable and it is obvious, then the workers kill them and create openings fora new elite.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Thanks, arkanes, for posting this; it's clarified my thinking on this issue a bit. I love GNOME, but there's no real customization[1]. I hate KDE, but there are a million options. What's the source of my love of GNOME and my hate for KDE?
KDE feels wrong.
That makes either zero sense or a sixth sense, but there's something in KDE that drives me nuts. It's as if KDE is playing a supersonic buzz that I can't hear consciously. Whenever I use it, it feel like things are happening just outside of my conscious perception. I want to ask the interface, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be just sitting there?"
That is exactly how I felt when I used KDE. What is the Katrix?
When Patrick removed GNOME from Slackware, I decided to try KDE; I wanted an option in case I decided not to keep GNOME current manually. KDE's bazillions of options were, at first, thrilling, but I eventually left because it just felt wrong. (I went back to the emacs of windows managers, fvwm. My personal customizations aren't as good-looking as GNOME, but now my desktop does exactly what I tell it, exactly when I tell it.)
[1] I think someone's already mentioned that there's a GNOME trend against --geek_opts going back to at least the metacity/sawfish switch... why not just have an advanced options option, like gtk-gnutella or All-In-One Sidebar?
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
While there should definately be effort put into making something simpler for new users to use, it should NOT ever be used as an excuse to remove functionality beneficial to those who have more experience.
Three words - Metacity edge flipping (or more appropriately, the lack thereof). Edge flipping is an incredibly popular feature with experienced users, and while I agree that it should be off by default because it can be confusing, that is NOT an excuse to turn the window manager into crippleware by completely removing that feature. (The only other options are to give up some UI consistency with the rest of Gnome by using xfwm4 and possibly introducing significant compatibility issues such as by using sawfish. Another option was brightside, but it was always a hack designed to work around missing functionality in Metacity that should be there.)
Sadly, my favorite IM client Gaim has also given in to the crippleware mentality... Numerous features are not only hidden or off by default in Gaim 2 (which I could completely understand), but they have been completely removed.
I still use GNOME for now - I'm still angry with the KDE developers' cavalier attitude towards the GPL (remember, KDE was not legal until TrollTech changed the Qt license - the KDE developers could have acknowledged the problem and fixed it by adding an exception for Qt to their license, which I believe is allowed by the GPL if all contributors consent to it, but instead they chose to ignore the issue for over a year.), plus I think GNOME looks better for now. Unfortunately, I may need to change soon because GNOME has been becoming less and less useful to me as the years have gone by.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you're willing to pay the fees you can develop a closed-source application with Qt. And you can even use all the KDE stuff - it's made LGPL for this very reason. I think this is about the right level of "incentive" to have - you can make your program closed if it's really important, but it'll cost you. With a pure LGPL toolkit like GTK, all the little utilities could end up being closed-source freeware or shareware, which I think would be a bad thing for linux.
I am trolling
As far as the whole KDE vs. GNOME thing, I was using KDE for the longest time because it had all those option and all the flash. But when I installed Ubuntu, started to login more often with GNOME and eventually switched compeletely to GNOME. The problem the way I see it is this. KDE seems to try to look and act like Windows - because it wants to cater to the people who switched over from Windows and doesn't want to confuse them. Windows interface though is broken if you ask most HCI people. GNOME is trying to do the right thing and follow the best HCI practices. These, at first might confuse people, but after a little getting used to they will find themselves being more productive.
The best UI(Desktop) if you ask me is Mac's OS X. It is the most consistent and the most minimalistic. Apple has invested more than anyone in their interface design and it pays off, also it show what a good interface should be. I think GNOME is closer to Mac OS X than KDE.
But on the same note I am not a UI religious fanaticl. If KDE 4.0 comes out with an imporoved look and works better and can be made more minimal I would use KDE (or whatever comes along that gets the job done faster).
For the lesson in set theory. What a wonderful guy!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
What surprises me most about E17, is that there's so much cool eyecandy, but it still runs smoother than any other DE I tried. I really hope it becomes stable someday.
;).
I'm not afraid of the command line, but what made me stop using it was because it segfaults when doing some stuff, and I screwed up my whole Linux install because I switched from one repository to another, which seemed to be a bad idea in retrospect
Now I use xfce4, but I have the other desktops too, and I sometimes log into a different one for a change in scenery.
Well, I think that everybody perceives KDE as a Windows GUI replacement whereas GNOME as a Mac OS X replacement. Still, I stopped using GNOME because it's not usable anymore - I can't quickly fix various annoyances and don't have time to walk through all gconf settings and find the right one. I would rather use IceWM w/ some desktop than GNOME.
If that is their methodology, then their study was flawed, and your argument is highly specious. They might better remember how to tell you how they did the task, because they're communicating with you in words and they communicated with the computer in words. However, the people who used the GUI might still be faster at the task, or even remembering how to complete it, than the command line people were they sitting at the computer, because they would be able to use their somatic memory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
By "called them back" I meant all of them where called back to the location of the study and were presented with the same interface as before and where asked to repeat the tasks but were not told how to to them again. The ones that use CLI had a better recall rate. And you explained pretty much why - because humans learn leanguage and words well and faster than they will learn to recognize and remember the vizual appearance of the icons+the behaviors.
Linus on slashdot: "Screw slashdot." Details here. This is getting better and better - and there is some very sound reasoning (not for the screw ./ part) in the linked post above. If anyone is still interested.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you GUI fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of 3 Ghz white box loaded with KDE for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one directory on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running tsch, which by all standards should be a lot slower than KDE, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Pico is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux distros, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a GUI that has run faster than its shell counterpart, despite the vast number of volunteers working on GUI/Linux. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs a shell faster than this 3 Ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the GUI distros are superior interfaces.
GUI addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a GUI over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces."
It is nothing like that, some people want simple and then powerful. Others want powerful and then if possible simple. It's all got to do with how your brain works.
An example for this would be, GNOME had a simple new "Add to panel" UI in 2.12 that the KDE group like so much they copied it with some minor difference. For GNOME 2.14, the GNOME developers thought on how they can make this UI more powerful and came up with a way better UI, but still kept it simple.
GNOME's main focus is to be simple and then powerful, so a lot of UI will be copied by KDE once they reach the powerful stage or if it is better than what they currently have. But KDE main focus is to be powerful and then simple. So when they both reach perfection I will not be surprised if a lot of their UI's look almost identical.