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'.""

Comments

"Don't make me think!"

[MarkEst1973]

Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug is an awesome book that all software developers should read.

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.

Re:"Don't make me think!"

[arkanes]

Theres a fine line between "make it simple" and "make it stupid". It's a hard line to walk, and I think Torvalds is right that Gnome has moved too far to the stupid region (disclaimer: I'm a Gnome user). Simple interfaces are fine as long as the functionality is simple, or there is no need for customization. Phones are in fact an excellent example - we've come a long way from needing to wind your phone up and whistle to clear the lines, but as we add functionality to phones the interfaces have either become more complex (cell phones) or lagged behind the features (most desktop phones). There is nothing wrong with customization, and I like the power of KDE in that respect. The much-maligned Gnome file dialog is a great example of the problems in Gnome. The old one was really, really, really horribly bad. The new one is simply barely adequate. The interface designers at Gnome really read too much into thier title - they want to change the way you interface with the computer (see spatial browsing for a classic example of the reasoning) instead of assisting you to interface on your own terms.

KDE devs speaks up for GNOME!

[Balinares]

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...)

Re:Good reason to use GNOME, then

[igb]

Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces.

Is that true? I've got 20 years of Unix use behind me, and I've used the whole gamut from Suntools through NeWS through a variety of X options (olwm, olvwm, twm, fvwm) and then Gnome (on Linux and Solaris) and KDE (on Linux). I don't think I ever used Motif for more than a day or so, and I never used Nextstep.

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

Re:Ah, the age-old battle

[arkanes]

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.

Re:Torvalds is 'out there'

[Sketch]

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:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ap pa.html

Hell. He's right.

[Slartibartfast]

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.

He's not God but he's close enough!

[Loundry]

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.

Re:Inevitable

[molnarcs]

I was wondering how long it would take for this discussion to come up on Slashdot. It's noteworthy really only because Linus comes across as a 13 year old arsehole

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:

"Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing than useful to the user. This is not a wise decision."

Because it means there is no usability at all for many features: you can not *use* them, they are not there at all, they are forbidden to the user by some higher usability being.

Usubility for a given feature starts to become debate-able only where the feature is already present, where something can be done *at all*. Before, there is the land of un-usability.

What type of printers do you think users in many enterprise environ- ments are used to? It is the 60 pages per minute model, that can do duplex and stapling and punching and cover-sheets-on-cardbox-paper and watermark and foo and bar and morestuff..

. I was one of the guys who pushed for adding all features (which the underlying CUPS provided) into the user interface of KDEPrint.

And I know for a fact that KDE's power in printing matters (given to it by CUPS) was the one feature that determined a pro-KDE decision in Linux desktop rollouts in Europe.

I also know that the printing dialog of KDE can be improved a *lot* from where it is now. However, this is much more difficult than just removing most features and declare their un-usability to be the new religion of usability.

We'll work on that for KDE 4, but without removing any feature (we will rather be adding some more, because the wonderful CUPS 1.2 gives them to us for free).

Cheers, Kurt

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!

Linus is right and thats why I use Gnome

[grumbel]

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.

Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT!

[drgonzo59]

Actually research kind of supports what you say. In an Human Computer Interface (HCI) graduate class I took a couple of years ago we read a paper that compared how people did the same task using a text console and a point-and-click interface (mostly copying, renaming, moving and creating files). It turns out at first people figure out the point and click interface faster but they are more likely to remember how to do all those tasks using a command line. In other words the researchers called those people back a week later and the ones who were using the command line remembered better how to do the tasks.

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).