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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'.""
Let me get the ball rolling here...
All the Gnome users I've ever known fall into one of three distinct classifictions:
Discuss.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
..."Use Windows."
This way to the egress...
If Torvalds posted that here, he'd be at -1, Troll in under ten seconds. Unless, of course, he signed it with his own name, at which point it would be at +5, Ass Kiss.
I must be number 3... and I do all of my work from the shell anyway. :)
Get E!
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
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?
Gnome developer Havoc Pennington's response points out that "reducing complexity" was not, in fact, the reason the particular dialog in question doesn't have all the options Linux wanted:
"Just for the record, since I made this decision I can tell you that 'might confuse people' was not the reason. More evidence for my point that 'might confuse people' is the reason made up by others, not the reason given by the decision makers."
Which is not to say that Linus is wrong (in the e-mail he writes that "If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times. And only ever from Gnome.") -- I'm not a big fan of Gnome's lack of features (at least as compared to KDE), but it's not like anyone on Slashdot really conforms to the "average computer user" concept. And Linus surely doesn't either. Maybe Gnome is better for Mom and Grandpa. I'll stick with KDE, myself.
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
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.
slashdot reports.
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 do all my stuff in the console anyway....wich shell does linus recommend?
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
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.
I run my own computer business and supporting idiot users is something I must do everyday. I prefer KDE but I think many users can benefit from gnome. I think many can use a Mac easier then Windows. There is merit to having a GUI that is KISS.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I've used both GNOME and KDE, but I decided to use GNOME. Been using it with Fedora Core 3 for over a year now and it works just fine. What's this big problem with GNOME anyway? My 2 biggest complaints are lack of a "show in groups" in the nautilus file view and closing multiple instances of the same program from the taskbar (there's no close all, you have to click close on each one).
Gnome has always seemed to me to be a UI made to look excessively [fill in the blank]: Cute, shiny, hiding the ugly (but important) functional details underneath a glossy appearance. I started using Gnome initially when I didn't know about KDE. I switched over to KDE when I realized that KDE gives me more flexibility to customize the UI to my heart's desire, whereas Gnome is starting to look more like what Windows would have looked like had Bill Gates ported that UI to run on *nix platforms.
Blackbox/Fluxbox anyone?
"Please, just tell people to use KDE.
"Use vi, too. And vote Democrat. Oh, and cats are better than dogs. You know what else? Abortion should be legal. So should euthenasia. And as for toast? Butter side up!"
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?
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 in almost all of his messages: if they hadn't been written by "The Linus Torvalds", I doubt people like Nat and Havoc would bother writing such well-thought-out replies to such unpleasant, ignorant flames.
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"
In 1998, I was a very active participant on the Gnome UI mailing list. In fact, the very first Gnome User Interface Guideline was in part based on my proposed one (google for "Rogue GNOME style guide" if you care about the details).
Two things shocked me back then, and from Linus comments it appears that neither of them have changed.
One is that Gnome has a ton of great contributors - and just as many who are not as great. Unfortunately, in areas where the matter is more discussion and consensus based and you can't prove your point by just coding it, the vocal trolls crowd out the valuable contributors.
Two is that within those who contributed the the UI discussion there was a surprising lack not only of experience in the HCI field (ok, I had just started out there myself) but also a strong resistance to pick up the vast literature available or trust in actual end-user studies.
The last was what caused me to quit. How can you design a user interface without talking to the users? You can't. Anyone working in HCI knows that. Assumptions == Disaster
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Typically a user of the SuSE distribution, I have had the opportunity to use very good implementations of both KDE and Gnome. I have no qualms with saying that KDE has some nice applications (AmaroK stands out). In fact, at one point, I was using KDE because Nautilus could not interface with a specific BSD SFTP server, while Konqueror could; but when I figured out how to do it, I switched back to Gnome. I like Gnome because it feels _designed_, whereas KDE simply feels like a hacked~together copy of Windows. Granted, there are obvious differences, and even improvements, but, while individual applications in Gnome may be behind the similar applications in KDE, I see in Gnome to be something far greater than what KDE will be. I use Gnome because of the future I see for it: I want to be a part of what gets it there.
My girlfriend (with absolutely no computer knowledge whatsoever) can use KDE just fine, I really don't know what GNOME is trying to accomplish.
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!
In case anyone is wondering, the parents post was brought to you by oooGalaxyooo, a well know Anti-Gnome troll who spends his days copy and pasting the exact same message into every discussion on the net that might be in any way related to Gnome.
Btw, he's the guy who brought you the wonderful successful GoneME fork of gnome, which is indeed gone now.
For more information, feel free to visit his hompage:
http://www.akcaagac.com/index.html
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.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-Dece mber/msg00027.html
Just a sample:
We're not aiming for "powerfully extensible". We're aiming for "Just Works". Some people will
hate that. Some will love it. Personally, I'd rather have passionate users, lovers and haters, than be than average and ignored, and I think you'll find most GNOME developers feel the same way.
Personally, I think Linus ought to know better by now than put out a self-centered post like that. There are more users in the world than just geeks. Most aren't geeks, in fact. For Linux on the Desktop to survive beyond the lifespan of its proponents, it needs to acknowledge that, not fall trap of intestinal power struggles.
Thank goodness. Maybe now the Gnome devs will figure out that they need to stop assuming that every user is an idiot; maybe they'll actually put good and inituitive features in their file manager now that Linus has said this. I personally don't like KDE's interface too much, but Gnome is what makes me want to bomb the Gnome dev mailing list with reports on its shortcomings. Too bad I don't have the time or will to actually do this.
"Users will vote with their own desktop."
Ugh. You mean one will 'win' in the end, and we will get "one desktop to rule them all, one desktop to find them"? No thanks. Give me choice. I, for one, use neither KDE nor Gnome.
/usr/games/fortune
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.
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.
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."
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
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).
> 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.
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
It's a very slick example of what Gnome needs to do more of. Gnome has focused its efforts on simplifing the interface for the masses. They've made good progress but the masses seem unimpressed.
It's time to think about finding elegant ways to put that power back in while keeping it transparent to the masses.
Ah, but see, what you're seeing on the Mac is actually elegant simplicity. There's power lurking there.
Sure the playlist selector in iTunes only has one button to add a new playlist, but hold down the Shift key while your mouse is in the playlist area and the button turns into an add new Smart playlist button. Or in the Browse area, click on the column header to Genre, Artist or Album and you zoom back to the top of the list.
These sort of rewards await those who explore. But for the faint of heart, the simple interface still functions.
I invite you to press CTRL-L in nautilus, or any file browsing dialog.
It's just Crap.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Use Kubuntu instead.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
Mod parent up!
I remember seeing a poster in college stating that about 1% of the world's population has a four year degree. That impressed me. I realized that I was becoming part of an elite. The eight percent mentioned by the parent post seems a bit off based on this. Maybe complex expressions on the command line at times are the ideal tool to accomplish a specific goal, but lets remember who we're leaving out.
Meh
With regards to KDE versus GNOME, the best thing to do is let nature take its course. What I mean by that is let people use which one they prefer. From past experience, those who use KDE end up being more productive. And increased productivity often times leads to increased financial success.
I recently did some consulting for a firm which allowed their developers and administrative staff to use GNOME or KDE. It was each employee's choice which to use. When review time came around, a study was done into which desktop was used by the most productive users.
By far the most productive users, both developers and secretaries/financial officers/etc., were those who used KDE and related software, such as KOffice. The developers who used KDE were the ones who wrote the code with the fewest number of bugs, and the secretaries who used KDE were the ones who were able to produce letters and documents with the fewest drafts.
There was one notable exception, however. One developer who reported using GNOME was amongst the top three (I believe it was) developers. Further investigation revealed that while he was using GNOME, it was only as a program launcher. He was using KDevelop, Konqueror and other KDE software while working.
Overall, they weren't sure if it was a matter of productive people choosing KDE, or KDE allowing people to be more productive. I instinctively feel it was some of both.
The best thing to do is let people use what they want. In the end, their choice will either help or hinder their productivity. Those who are no productive will lose their jobs, and slide into irrelevancy, leaving only the productive. From my past experiences, it would appear that GNOME has become the least productive of the two desktops.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
I can sum it up quickly: While KDE has much better applications, and has a nice Kontrol Panel, QT is bloated and slow. Gnome's applications are underdeveloped and lack the features that KDE's applications have, GTK2 is quite fast. Personally I use Gentoo and set my use flags to comple GTK2 support and remove QT support, and for user interface I use fluxbox and aterm. This is quite fast and works well for me. I assume that Linus is refering to newbee's to and kind of _nix. I personally will not be using KDE, I don't care what Linus says, who made him Jesus? I am sure that Jesus would use a command prompt. Hello? 10 Commandments??
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.
Try using elinks for a web browser and WordPerfect 5.1 in Dosbox. :)
~ roscivs
You are an expert in operating system kernels.
Not hardly. He's an expert in one operating system kernel. Check his exchange with Shapiro about EROS to see Torvalds out of his depth.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
http://betterdesktop.org/ - an ongoing and very recent usibility study.
Gnome isn't perfect neither is KDE. I personally find that I don't like the default settings for either desktop. The thing that turns me off of KDE as a whole is that even knowing already what I'm going to want to change it takes me forever to step through the mess that is kcontrol and to remove the mess that is every application under the sun from kicker. As a desktop I prefer Gnome, it does everything I need it to do without causing me much pain to get it to the point that I like. However, I still install KDE simply for konsole and kate the two apps I could not live without.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
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.
As a desktop environment, I prefer KDE, but when I develop GUIs, I use GTK. Actually, I use wxWidgets, which under Linux, uses GTK. The reason they wrap GTK for Linux is licensing.
When it comes to the Linux kernel, I am a firm believer in open source. Hardware should have open interfaces. This isn't idealism. The kernel needs to be STABLE, and the best way to ensure that is to have drivers open source. This makes the kernel portable and upgradable.
But when it comes to userland, where the kernel is able to isolate a process so that it can't damage anything else, there's less need to be so concerned. Plus, one of the things that's going to bring more open source software to Linux is the adoption of Linux by companies that produce closed-source applications. Oracle for Linux is important because more people will use Linux.
The issue with KDE is the Qt license. It's pure GPL. That means you can't write a Qt-based application without your entire application having to be under GPL. That isn't always favorable. So the wxWidgets people, wanting to be somewhat looser with their licensing, chose GTK, because it uses the LGPL license.
I started using gnome back in Redhat 6.0 (I think). It always did everything I wanted it to, so I still use it.
My brother uses KDE, and every year, we have a flameware about it around the dinner table for the holidays. (Much to the joy of the relatives)
I will cary on with Gnome because otherwise, it would spoil Christmas!
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.
I've used Gnome. It's a very satisfactory system. It'll sell, if you let it. Anything that makes the user think, won't. Because it's just the user-interface model. It's not what they want to think about. They want it to disappear, like a steering wheel or an automatic door.
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.
My girlfriend is absolutely computer illiterate: she thinks (well, thought) that Office is the OS that runs on his laptop.
Talk about usability issues!
...the last great war of the third age of mankind...
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.
So let me guess, you are a gnome user =)
Linus is a programmer, a very good one. He has simply pointed out the corner that gnome has painted themselves into by not utilizing true OO principles and modern design patterns. This a fact, not an opinion and is evident to any modern programmer. Gnome needs a paradigm shift to survive the long term. The KDE developers have put great effort into the KDE framework and it has paid off big time. Unfortunately, this meant the have ignored usability concerns. But usability is far easier to correct than poor frameworks and the lack of truely reusable code.
I use gnome on my desktop at home and KDE at work. But its common sense as to which platform has the better implementation.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
I know and use many programming languages, but Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
Hey, you love your language, I'll love mine.
The truth is that I don't care if they know Perl or something else. I'm not asking professional-level programming here. I'm asking them to Get Shit Done with Unix. Read files, write files, multiply a column of numbers by something else, plot something. It's the sort of stuff I used to do in C back when I was in grad school, but is easier to do in Perl. Perl is a great language for Getting Shit Done for many of us, even if it doesn't satisfy somebody's anal-retentive definition of Proper.
-Rob
I heard he's 8 foot tall and that he farts thunder and pisses lightning.
==========
Error in module creativity.dll : Unable to create witty comment.
Abort / Retry / Ignore ?
I'm just condoning his actions.
Condoning his actions implies you agree with, and to some extent support him. Your post speaks differently.
Perhaps you mean condemning?
Oh well, I'm still mystified as to why this is either a) removing your freedom of choice, or b) zealotry. A man gives his opinion. You're free to do whatever you choose.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Gnome has three problems all centered around how it manages its applications:
#1 All applications store their configuration data together in one place
#2 Configuration data is not human readable or editable.
#3 Configuration data is not designed to be easily read and manipulated by other UNIX tools (All Data is an XML markup format and can only be manipulated by tools which are schema aware and schema compliant)
This duplicates all of the worst design characteristics of the Windows Registry system.
The gnome design approach is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
The biggest problem with gnome is its design "decision" to copy the
Windows Registry paradigm. "decision" is in quotes because I am guessing that the Gnome designers just automatically used that type of design after being exposed to windows.
Every Gnome app is broken. Why:
Because every Gnome app must register all of its configuration and
setting information in the gnome "registration system" which is primarily
a functional copy of the worst design decision Microsoft ever made.
(Or their best one since it forces many home users to buy a new computer
every three years, cause "this one is slowing down too much")
The Windows registry system forces all application thru the same choke
point containing a data set the grows rapidly and continuously over time.
As the data set (Registry info) becomes larger and larger the speed of
access to the registry gets slower and slower, finally dragging the system to
its knees.
At this point, unless the user has professional help advising them to reformat
and re-install everything, a task which most fear deeply and reasonably
avoid, many users will go out and buy a new Windows
PC and start the same cycle all over again.
What has this to do with Gnome?
Simple. Gnome has the same problem and they got there by ignoring the
most basic design principles of UNIX put forth by the creators of UNIX in
1978 in the July/August edition of the Bell System Technical Journal.
These design principles can be summarized by one statement:
Keep It Simple Stupid.
Every book or article published about the UNIX design philosophy all say
the same thing and yet, GNOME broke those rules.
How to fix it:
Decentralize config info collections
use human readable/editable text in config files
make sure that the config data can be manipulated by traditional Unix tools
when used as filters.
Until these changes are made Gnome is a more a Windows system than a *NIX
tool.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccchhhhhhhhhhh.
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
We got Linus on our side! Pbbbttthhh!!!
I've been using Gnome (on FC and Ubuntu on my personal, business, and client systems) and KDE (on SuSE systems at the college where I teach) pretty much every day for years. I know the keybindings, the shortcuts, and the configuration options for both, and I'm including coverage of both in a book I'm writing. I personally prefer Gnome (gasp! - a longtime *nix user, a competent programmer, an experienced sysadmin that ... prefers Gnome!) but that's by a small margin.
But as I've been writing the book, I've realized that both include some pretty hoary crud from a user perspective. (Before I get flamed: yes, of course FC uses a heavily themed version of both desktops, but don't skip the line above where I noted that I also use Ubuntu and SuSE).
Take KDE's configuration system, for example -- you can get to the configuration module for, say, the Window Manager in several different ways (through the Control Center, or a right-click on titlebar), but the user interface is very slightly different depending on how you get there (butons vs. tabs? different numbers of options on the buttons and tabs?) -- why?! What purpose does this serve other than confusing the user? People criticize Gnome's [various versions of] load/save dialogs, but KDE's use of a horizontally-scrolling display of variable-width columns brings new meaning to the phrase 'user hostile' (and copying it from a braindead Windows design is no defense). What about configuration options that have proliferated to the point of absurdity? - such as window focus options that include "focus follows mouse", "focus under mouse", and "focus strictly under mouse" (when the differences are not documented except in some obscure post on a developer's list)??!?
Gnome is no better. Why can I drag'n'drop a wallpaper or a desktop theme onto the appropriate configuration dialog, but not a GDM theme? When I successfully install a new personal font using the fonts:/// location in Nautilus, why doesn't the new font show up in that Fonts window??!?
Both desktops have significant shortcomings. The features and shortcomings of each will rub us in different ways. But without friendly competition between the two camps -- thankfully, augmented by cooperation through freedesktop.org -- I think the free desktop would not be anywhere close to where it is now.
So long live diversity, choice, and friendly competition!
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.
The problem is that they keep voting Windows...
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
All I want to know is how do I make the new Gnome file dialog let me traverse directories that start with a dot. I recently was forced to switch to evolution for email and have since been forced to make symbolic links to all my dot-directories in order to make use of them.
Is there a better way?
*sigh* back to work...
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.
Honestly, I think the best approach would be to follow an approach similar to apple and MS before MS jumped on the VM bandwagon. Running a VM is a huge and unnecessary overhead, since developing in C# isnt' really that much easier than any other OO language if you're using a solid safe library.
.NET/Mono is language-agnosticism, since multiple languages can target the platform.
Just use C++ - and have strict code conventions. No arrays except for optimized internal loops - only safe vectors. No unmanaged "new"s - only refcounted or auto_ptrs for heap objects. With auto_ptrs, no pointers - only weak references. Pick a common C++ library to use for common problems that aren't in the standard library (eg. XML serialization).
Then you can take advantage of OSS and do platform-specific compiles and get optimal speeds, but also get the safety and ease provided by VMs.
Then, pick a standard scripting platform. Think lightweight - monsters like Python and even worse Mono/.NET have too much overhead. Something more like TCL or Lua. Use that platform for scripted interactions, serialization, and quick config tools. Sure, it would be slower than C#, but if you need speed you should be coding natively anyways.
Switching to a VM means you always have a bloated VM running, and that keeps your platform off of lighter hardware when there's no reason to be. Except for introspection, C++ has most of the tools available to these VM-langauges at a fraction of the speed/memory cost. VMs fill a space between native apps and scripting languages that generally isn't necessary for desktop apps.
The only real advantage I see to standardising on
So if the same comment was written by someone else it is troll.... Why is that? Judge a comment by it content and context, not by who ever wrote it. How do you know the thought process that went in when a "Troll" writes it compared to Linus. For all you know they had the exact same reasons to write this, and probably both were mentioning to improve it. Your comment smacks of elitism if nothing else.
But i do agree his post seems be completely taken out of context.
Ps. not beating up on linus, just using him as an example....
How do we even know that this really is Linus Torvalds to begin with? An email to a mailing list could EASILY be spoofed. And just to throw in my oppinion, I'm a programmer and "Linux Power User", if I really wanted balls to the wall configurability, I just drop down to a terminal. For every single other instance in the universe Gnome works, works well, and is not cluttered by crap I might use once every 10,000 years. It does have some short comings, but they appear to be getting addressed so I frankly don't give a crap what this guy says. And now I can't wait for the next scheduled release.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Problem with focusing exclusively on the "dumb users" as you put it, is the fact you limit the flexibility and scope of the system. As many have pointed out, simple configuration changes on Gnome could require registry hacks or worse, modification to souce code and a recompile of the system. Ouch.
Ideally these "dumb users" after using a given environment will expand their knowledge and no longer fit the mold of the "dumb user". Sadly, without an environment that can grow with them, they are stuck.
Solution? First, don't take a lowest-common-denominator perspective. Build a system that empowers those with the skills to expand and enhance the system by providing a rich API. Second, encourage an initial, simplified experience that allows neophytes to be productive quickly but strategicly place those advance features in such a way that the user can slowly learn and become more productive with the system.
Thats why I think KDE is a better overall system. It provides enough familiarity with desktop environment concepts people already learned to be productive quickly but also provides features to help users become more and more productive with their system (attaching scripts to the right-click menu, dcop, ioslaves, development enviornments, pykde, etc..).
Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:
AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.
K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.
DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.
Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc
KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.
Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)
KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)
Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.
Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.
MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).
Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.
Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.
KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):
Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.
QT designer for GUI development
Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.
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.
This posted snippet is just part of the stuff that Linus said. You can read some more of this interesting thread here: The Linux Attitude
I don't know... for my money, it just doesn't get any better than the flamewar on the mailing list. Nothing like Linus calling Gnomers "interface nazis" and Nat calling KDE'ers "feature sluts (who never saw a checkbox they didn't love)".
Hilarious... I love these guys - that was a great laugh for the day.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
I agree with the philosophy that is wrong to clutter an interface with every possible option.
It intimidates ordinary people and drives them away. It also irritates power users who do not use those options all of the time, but who have to step around them when they put in an "all of the time location".
For example, I love the KDE, but I never saw why it was necessary to have the option to add a device on my context menu for my mouse. That is something I do once in a blue moon. The context menu is for things people do all of the time.
Is there a happy medium? Can power user options be exposed and easy, while at the same time keeping them out of everyone's face on a day to day level?
And just to clarify. I am not making a judgment on Linus' comment. I gave up on trying to use Gnome years ago. KDE always worked for me. When I 1st tried Gnome the excuse was that "it started a year later and was thus a little behind KDE but it will catch up".
Now almost a decade into the project and with an order of magnitude (10 times for those who don't know) more money spent on development Gnome was still far behind KDE when I gave up on it sometime around 2002 or 2003.
PS: Since I stopped trying to use Gnome so long ago I won't make any specifc coments about the curent quality. For all I know Gnome may have surpased KDE since then.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
Okay, love Linux... LOVE IT! Been using Linux since I installed Slackware off of 3.5" floppies. Had to drop it professionally for a few years when I was in the corporate Windows-is-ubiquitous world. Came back to it three years ago with REL2.1 and SLES 8 as platforms for IBM Websphere.
This year I'm a crazy Ubuntu person (my work laptop runs Hoary/5.04 for business and pleasure).
Now, Linus is god of the kernel and if he says one processing model is better than the other, then I'll listen. BUT, Linus has never shown himself to be an expert at UI nor do I think he should be passing off idiot vs. expert judgements about users.
Computers should be as easy to use as toasters whether you're an idiot or a savant. Windows ain't there. Macs are pretty close. KDE has always felt like it was trying very very very hard to be Windows and instead making for just as cluttered a mess. Gnome is easy, simple and gets what you need done. For me (and I am a UI designer with an HCI background) Gnome is to Linux/BSDs Desktop application what Tivo is to Linux Media Center application.
Does Gnome need more work, sure it does. But the framework and methodology lend themselves towards simplification rather than confusions and obfuscation.
my 2 cents,
cheers,
Levendis47
--==[ AOL YIM ICQ : Levendis47 : levendis47@yahoo.com ]==--
I imagine most Slashdot readers are traditional power users, so I'm not surprised people want lots and lots of things to configure and tweak. I'm a little saddened that so many posters don't understand where Gnome and Metacity are coming from, and why there might be problems with lots and lots of configuration knobs.
Typical users don't configure things. Your typical user might tweak a few really simple settings like their desktop background, but they're never going to touch the "Wireframe or opaque resize" checkbox. Heck, I have problems convincing people with LCD monitors try switching from simple greyscale antialiasing to subpixel antialiasing (ClearType) to see if they like it. Most love it when they see it, but they're so scared by the fairly technical configuration that they don't want to mess with it. Ultimately adding lots and lots of things to tweak means your probably spending lots of time trying to satisfy a very small percentage of computer users. If you're trying to satisfy the mass market (and Gnome is), that may not be a good use of your time.
More options means more bugs. Every time you add an option, you need to debug it. And you need to debug its interactions with all of your other options. More options means slower development time to ensure correct interaction between all of the options. To just pull two examples that have irritated me, Metacity is a pretty small piece of code for a window manager, and it still had really annoying redraw bugs in the "low resource mode" (wireframe mode). The wiki backend MoinMoin has a number of options to control how it displays pages for logged in users. I fiddled with them and somehow found just the right combination that caused it occasionally fail to close links. I banged my head against it for an hour or so trying to create a test case to submit as a bug, but couldn't craft one. I ended up giving up and turning off one of my configuration changes.
Designers are supposed to make decisions, not shrug and ask the user. Sometimes there is reasonable debate on an option. Sometimes different use cases need different options. But all too often an option is added because a designer either doesn't know what to do, or is trying to support some unreasonable user. Some options are simply bad. For example, windowshading (a form of minimizing that keeps the title bar visible but hides the rest of the window) is pretty much dead. While may make sense for some specialized uses, as a general solution for desktop windows it's a failure. Yet more than one window manager drags around an old "double click title bar to windowshade?" option.
It is, of course, possible to go too far. Gnome pushes very far in the simplification direction and they've made mistakes. Just one example, Metacity's author fought against wireframe resize and move for a long time, claiming, "But computers are so fast now." Not such a good argument for an operating system famous for working great on older computers. Definately a bad argument for a window manager designed to be small and fast. It's finally been added as a hidden option (something like "low resource mode").
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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
I would add KOrganizer to the list. It's nice having good, complete calendar/scheduling software while waiting on Sunbird or whatever the Mozilla organization eventually craps out (and I mean that in a good sense).
Also, re: Konqueror, it's great as a Linux file manager, but I personally avoid it for web browsing and I don't support it on websites I develop. Why? The rendering engine sucks, and therefore I would have to write an inordinate number of workarounds. And writing those workarounds aren't worth it, as an extremely small percentage of hits to my sites come from Konqueror.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
You forgot the most important one for us programmers: Kate It's the best text editor I've ever used.
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?
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!
"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."
I guess you missed that.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You are Emmanuel Goldstein, and I want my five pounds.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Perl is interesting because it was developed by a linguist and modelled after human languages
That's a myth- a retroactive redefinition of the origin. Perl's design was taken as a union of the styles of sh, C, and awk. The only way to base it less on human speech would be to mix some Lisp in there.
The fact that Perl programs can whimsically shift between so many different approaches to describing a program is part of the reason it's risky to suggest to low-intensity developers.
rather than by a Math geek modelled after a strict theoretical model
That much is true. A language based even roughly on math principles will have some coherency to it. Perl's willingness to combine all varieties of syntax (including, as you point out, some created solely for perverse amusement) can easily be seen as more of a flaw than a charming advantage.
AmaroK is the BEST music player on any system I've ever seen/used. The only thing that comes relatively close is MediaMonkey.
Too bad AmaroK is nix only, and MediaMonkey is windows only.
Anyone wanna port AmaroK to OSX86?
It does if you mount the network share. Create a mount point (say, /mnt/cd_source) and mount the share on that point, and add the files you need from that mount point.
:)
There are almost always multiple ways to solve a problem.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You *can* use a different WM with KDE. Just set the KDEWM (iirc, do a grep on /usr/bin/startkde) environment variable to whatever WM it should use. Additionally, you might want to kill off kdesktop to get access to enlightenment's desktop menus.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I find it interesting that others on this board will use a nearly exact opposite of that argument in the form of "If you don't use it, it's bloat!"
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
The only thing a window manager is good for is managine more than one terminl windows at one time.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
To Quote Linus:
No.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
When user interfaces means that something CANNOT BE DONE, it's not about
"usable design" any more. At that point, it's about UNusable design.
Any Gnome people who argue that it's about "usability" have their heads up
their asses so far that it's not funny. I've argued with them about this
before, and I know others have too, and mostly given up.
"Usability" is an issue only if you can do something at all. But if you
can't do the thing at all, it's pointless to talk about usability: the
thing is BY DEFINITION not usable if it cannot be used for a specific
task.
Then a person that claims that it's usable for something else is a FUCKING
IDIOT.
And in that FUCKING IDIOT vein:
> The majority of end-users want a simple printer dialog.
This is a great example of being a F.I.
There is no such thing as a "majority of end users" in general. For
example, maybe _I_ am in what you _claim_ to be a majority, in that I
want a simple printer dialog - because I have a simple printer, and
even simpler printer needs.
So a simple printer dialog doesn't bother me, and as such you can count me
in your "majority".
But I can guarantee you one thing: the _vast_ majority of people are part
of a specific minority when it comes to something. This is somethign that
the F.I. "interface designers" in the Gnome sense seems to continually
overlook.
For example, maybe I don't care about printers. But I _do_ care about my
mouse. If I can't control the left/middle/right button actions, I get
really upset. Again, the "majority" of people may not care, so by your
majority argument, the mouse setup should be so simple that the majority
of people can never get confused. But I _do_ care.
In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It
can be true for any particular feature, but it's simply not true in
general.
To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is
the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest
minorities is the universal set".
It's a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two
majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact,
because these things are absolutely not correlated.
And the technical term for somebody who claims to do user interface design
and not understand this fact is a "FUCKING IDIOT".
And this has _nothing_ to do with "technical users". Even totally
non-technical users care about something. In fact, it might be their
printer, and having a way to set the paper type and resolution by hand.
Another way of saying this: we're _all_ "special" some way. We're damn
quirky, even the nontechnical among us.
But hey, just continue to remove all that confusing functionality from
Gnome. I don't care. I voted with my feet.
Linus
Gnuyen
That something does not render the same in other browsers as it does in MSIE does not mean the other browsers are broken; it's more likely that MSIE is broken, and as soon as MSIE 7.0 gains dominance in the Windows market, your site will break since MSIE 7.0 will render sites more closely to the way Konqueror does than to the current MSIE, especially if you are using higher-level DTDs. Microsoft knows their browser is broken and they have a lot of work to meet web standards, so if you're coding for MSIE quirks to get things to render correctly, you might find your site breaking in the near future. MSIE 7 will supposedly be detecting for the use of older quirks but if you are using a higher DTD all bets may be off.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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
now that somebody has mentioned gimp, i will write my little rant here.
:)
e mber/msg00028.html for some examples (including starting with ~)
gimp is the gtk app i use the most. i immediately noticed changed open/save window. it seemed pretty nice overall, but lack of address bar was driving me nuts.
then somebody mentioned that typing "/" would allow to enter path directly. this was pretty nice, but there are two things that make this dialogue so irritating i prefer clicking instead of writing.
first, if i start typing with ~, this doesn't work.
second, if autocomplete kicks in, it works _completely different from any other app_ and BLOODY AWKWARDS.
i have screamed at my monitor how much i hate it.
let's say, i have a directory "/mnt/net" i want to get to by typing it. what i get is "/mnt/net/t/net". wtf ?
turns out, if autocomplete kicks in and it has only one suggestion, my further typing _is not_ replacing the suggestion, it is appended to it. if this is not a bug, somebody has seriously screwed up.
basically, if i type a path in, i type it pretty fast. current implementation basically forces me to pause after each bloody character to see wether i will be able to continue my writing or something has been autocompleted.
this implementation has so many problems i am surprised it was pushed in this state, especially given all these usability zealots
see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-Dec
Rich
At different times in my life.
.07, .13 1997
Timelines were roughly:
KDE 1.0/E pre
Gnome 1.2 1999
KDE 3.0 2002
Gnome 2.x 2004
Gnome 2 KILLED me. Really awful and stunted, when it came out. I hadn't looked at KDE in about 3 years, and was very surprised at what was done - especially KIO slaves, etc. I ran my app/pen platform on OpenBSD and Debian w/ KDE 3.x, including betas.
Now, I work for the 'other side'. I have limited time to check out X front ends, but when I fire up Ubuntu, I can see where Gnome was heading when it went 2. The teams UI guidelines are minimalistic. In the early stages this meant 'crippled.'
In rough terms, I think Gnome is aiming to be the OSX to KDEs Windows. Windows is striving to be OSX, now!
Fat Chance.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
If you oversimply the GUI interface, then you are limiting yourself to basically two user groups: "grandma" and "the ubergeek who can drop to the shell and do it all there"
The problem is that for MANY windows users (who actually know how to use Windows), this paradigm is *useless*. They need a useful and configurable GUI that actually exposes all the options, and would be able to FIGURE IT OUT. (while "dropping to the shell and poking at config files" would probably still baffle them)
"Do you think that the "modelling after human languages" thing was a success?"
c s.html
Yes, but not in the way that you are thinking. It was a success, not because it is easier or harder to learn, but because I can be more expressive in Perl than in other languages.
One of the great things that I love about Perl is that you can rearrange statements. I can say:
if($x) {
blahblahblah()
}
or I can say
blahblahblah() if $x;
In the former, I am emphasizing (to myself and other programmers after me) that the condition is more important, while in the latter I am emphasizing the action as having the importance.
Likewise, moving often-used idioms into the core language is a feature of human languages that he imported into Perl. While most programming languages would opt for several features of Perl to be libraries (like RegEx), Perl has it as a part of the syntax of the language itself. Importing the core idioms of a population into a language is something that real languages do.
Having both "if" and "unless" is a very human-language thing to do, and it makes it more obvious what you are trying to do in your program than a bunch of "if(! )"s.
The beauty of Perl is that programming in Perl is much more expressive than programming in other languages. The point is not to be "easier for noobs", but for the meaning in the program to be better conveyed to other programmers who are fluent in the language.
Having a pronoun is also very linguistic.
A more specific list of human-language features of Perl is here:
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguisti
Engineering and the Ultimate
Yes but 25% of Americans have such a degree, and something like 5% have a masters level degree.
The reason is that most of the world lives in abject poverty where education, if it exists at all, is extremely limited. So it should come as no surprise that only 1% of the population has such a degree, given that 80% of the population never makes it past the equivalent of 4th grade.
But then you're not competing with those guys, you're competing with the other 25% who have a degree like yours.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I have a BA in Hunting/Gathering you insensitive clod!
The only statements Linus make that I listen to or really care about is ones concerning the kernel.[1] Everything else I temper with the knowledge that Linus like all of us have personal preferences. His prefereces are not mine. So while I might read about them I certainly don?t waste sleep over them. But thats not to say we shouldn?t question them. The Gnome Vs KDE debate has raged ever since KDE has used Qt. And for good reason. If we frame the debate slightly differently say wrt to freedom. You can see there is always going to be a clash between software having the latest functionality, usability and niceness with restrictions and the freedom of doing anything you want without restrictions. The error of choice Linus makes (his own to make) is that he wants the pragmatic solution to a problem. This is his strength in developing the kernel. It is also his weakness. If taken at a personal level there is nothing wrong with it. When you get the followers picking up their thongs and shouting in agreement and aping their leader this a problem. So say after me kiddies, You are all different! Make your own choose when it comes to desktops. Dont listen to Linus, Choose your own.
Reference
[0] Wikiquote, `Monty Python Life of Brian quotes:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Lif
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[1] The Linux Kernel Archives, `Kernel HQ the origin of everything wrt the Linux Kernel. Where it is dicussed, disseminated to death. Where Linus really is the the Messiah sometimes & a naughty boy most of the times.`:
http://www.kernel.org
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[2] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[3] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[4] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
My respect for Linus just went up significantly.
He's right about this, and it's good to see that at least one person (and it just happens to be the man at the top) understands that UI simplicity to the point of feature removal is function following form.
It's also nice to see someone dogging the majority user argument. The only argument I regularly encounter that is more idiotic than the majority user argument is the 90% of users argument when discussing features (a factitious variant of the majority user argument). Unless that fabricated 10% is the same 10% every time the other 90% is made up, you'll end up with every user having a problem.
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.'"
And the best example, GTK 2 file dialog. It's been turned into a crippled piece of un-usable garbage, that no longer accepts keyboard input (unless you know the secret shortcut key that they don't tell anyone), and they actually had to add seperate "Open Location" functions (which hardly work) to the Gnome software, because even if you do use the special super secret shortcut key, you can't type in a URL anymore.
(and of course, Open Location crashes regularly in Linux, and 100% of the time in Windows)
Good job, Gnome!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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.
Bill? Is that you?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
Hunting and gathering on the savannah is more elite than knowing how to communicate, and more elite than being a good programmer?
*WHY*? Because it's more in keeping with popular anti-Western, anti-intellectual, BACK-TO-ROUSSEAU'S-MAN-OMG bullshit?
A 4-year degree certifies that you have learned how to think about a subject in a certain kind of considered manner. It is DEFINITELY worth something.
And who the hell knows how to "build a car from scratch" without an engineering degree? What the hell does "scratch" even mean in this context? Iron ore? Rubber trees? Petroleum?
+++ATH0
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.
I do most everything from terminal windows. However, I usualy keep Gnome Terminal's "translucent" backgrounds on so I can see my desktop wallpaper and pretend I'm actualy getting my money's worth out of my expensive monitors.
... Nevermind. Grand Theft is pretty much all I've been playing recently. ...
In college I had the following conversation with some guy on the same floor as me :
Dude: Hey man, what's that game I always see you playing?
Me: Grand Theft Auto?
Dude: No man, on the computer.
Me: Actualy,
Dude: No, that other game. Every time I walk past your room you're always playing it.
Me:
Dude: That game with all the words and shit.
I can drive a car but I don't have a black belt. Does that mean my driver's ed course sucked, or that I chould have kept practicing left turns until I can do a proper high kick?
those are great made up statistics, without a source they may as well be made up.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
> world's population has a four year degree. That impressed me. I
> realized that I was becoming part of an elite.
Lesson #1: don't be so easily impressed.
Lesson #2: always question the raw numbers behind statistics.
Getting a four-year degree is dead common in the US - about a third of people aged 25-29 in the US have finished a four-year degree (scroll down to "College Completion").
Apropos to the subject, though, just because someone can learn to use a complex piece of software doesn't mean they want to. For plenty of people, a computer is no more than a tool; they want it to perform a few functions without giving them a lot of hassle, and they couldn't give a damn why or how it does that.
And that's fine.
Most of you don't understand the cars you drive in anything more than an abstract sense, or the planes you fly in, or the processes required to get you the food you eat, or the shoes you wear, or the chemistry involved in your antiperspirant, or any of a million other things that we simply don't have the time or mental energy to learn the detailed working of due to the specialized nature of modern society. Most of those things are just black-box tools---they just work.
And computers are one of those black-box tools for most people.
Accept that fact, or not - I don't care, and neither do they. But pointing out that most people have more important things to spend their time and energy on than computers is hardly "trolling". It's a necessary consideration if you want to make computers that most people will have any interest in using.
Well, you never did tell me what game it was.