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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'.""
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don't serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn't possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it's the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screensho t34ji.jpg
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view - they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what's wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your "Menus & Toolbars" capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It's a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don't support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need
Kudos to KDE!!!
in your face Gnome!!!
Thanks Linus.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You are an expert in operating system kernels. Please keep to what you do best. Users will vote with their own desktop. There is no need for you to teach people what GUI and desktop to use.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
The only thing really wrong with GNOME is Nautilus. It's always been incredibly buggy and slow. If they ripped Nautilus out and replaced it with something usable, GNOME would be next to perfect.
Unix developers are not known for their quality interfaces. man == help? A dozen incompatable widget sets from Athena through KDE? The ability to modify your window manager through endless flat files, yet no way to do drag-and-drop between applications in a consistent manner? Much less cut-and-paste.
Coming from crappy-GUI-but-you-can-customize-it-all-you-like land, Linus is making the classic propeller-cap mistake: he thinks GUIs should have a myriad of options. Does he not realize that this is one of the primary reasons that Linux has failed in the userspace marketplace? Most computer users -- and by most I mean 98% -- do not wear propeller caps.
For these 98% non-Linuses, a user interface needs to do three things properly:
Linus wants a #4 Be Customizable, but in my experience people who complain about that have never themselves succeeded in making a UI for which the first three are true. I have absolutely no doubt that Linus falls in that category. Sounds to me like he needs to go sit in a corner and let the real GUI designers do their work.
You are no doubt truly the elite of computer science, spouting off the same, tired, and old "ANYTHING THAT ISN'T COMMAND LINE IS FOR LAMERS" bullshit, but I usually like to use my 1000 machine to AT LEAST play DVDs on it.
But hey, look at me, I'm gonna get modded down because I want my piece of machinery to do more than a fucking minitel could in the eighties!
But still, what does a geek like Torvalds know about what the average user wants on their PC? Last time I checked most people want their computer to "just work" and don't really give a crap about how. Gnome is marketing to this audience more and more by making sure that new features work properly without excessive options and implementing them in a way that DOESN'T CONFUSE THE USER.
Pretty much, this article is just a hunk of bull, posted by a KDE fan, in hopes that his choice of desktop environment being in-line with the almighty Linus Torvalds will cause his dick to grow an inch.
Fuck Linus; use what you like.
-1, flamebait!
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.
Well, maybe they should demand a refund.
I've been wondering for years why some deep-pocketed company with an agenda other than 'selling software' doesn't buy TrollTec and LGPL QT. Would that end this controversy once and for all? Probably not, but at least KDE and GNOME could compete on the merits rather than on their licenses.
.NET hype hasn't lured too many to the ultimate Windows-only lock-in).
Always thought IBM would be the natural choice, but doesn't seem to be in the cards - especially now that they've sold off their PC division. Traditional desktop-based GUI software doesn't seem to be a priority for them.
Now I think Apple ought to do it. I know Apple has their own development toolkit(s), but what they really need is application portability, not Mac-specific apps. Nobody but Apple themselves and the top tier shrink-wrappers do native Mac apps. Win/Lin/Mac QT apps with a toolkit supported (for a fee) by Apple and free for the rest of the world would be a huge boon for portable software (if
Seriously, the software model of the future's gonna be cheap or free software in support of hardware sales. And for sellers of non-windows hardware, that means availability of portable software is the key. As far as I can see, Apple's still a hardware company, and unlike IBM, their hardware's oriented toward desktop computing.
The only fly in the ointment would be a Microsoft threat to pull the plug on Office for the Mac. Now, I don't see how they could legitimately do that based on Apple giving away a software development toolkit. But you never know...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...