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Is It Windows 7, Or KDE 4?
An anonymous reader writes "Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. The results are surprising." Or maybe they're not surprising at all.
We did in fact not learn all that much from their little street intreviews. Apart from that people feel uncomfortable with Vista (what did that lady say -- "hard to get user-friendly with"?) we learnt that they seem to like the default looks of KDE 4. That's interesting, but not all that surprising.
Still a nice little laugh, that video.
Anyone staging a demo can find a number of people to say oooh ahhhh.
Seriously. This is the problems with computers today. The perception of "usability" is not actual "usability."
We all know, at the end of the day, "usability" is how easy it is to accomplish one or more tasks, to a certain degree the ease at which you learn how to do these tasks, and lastly the predictability and reliability of accomplishing your tasks.
So, if something is easy to do, easy to learn, and rewards careful execution with consistent outcome, the thing is easy to use.
Now, where does flashy eye candy come in to that picture? It doesn't. That's why military vehicles are all drab colors. The criteria is utility not beauty.
Sure, I do *like* the way KDE 4 looks, but it is less usable than KDE 3.
Someone who just needs to run a browser and word processor probably can't tell Windows 7 from KDE. Someone who needs to configure and administrate systems for an organisation certainly will.
True.
I actually had a long argument with my SO about Linux vs. Windows issue. My main point was this: whenever she experiences any trouble she still complains to me, and for me it is much easier to deal with Linux. So she gave it a try and it all went OK to her own surprise, she had no troubles using FF, Gimp and Pidgin.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
At the end, they should have said:
"Have you ever heard of Linux?"
"What have you heard?"
"What you say if I told you this was Linux and not MS-Windows?"
My favorite piece of eye candy was the "static" when opening the photo.
When the hell is somebody going to fix that, and whos fault is it?
X? WM? Graphics Driver?
it's getting old.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I set up my wife on my PC on another virtual terminal - (ctl-alt-F8), it automatically logs her in on boot-up, and whenever she needs "her" stuff, it's all there for her. With all her own passwords. Plus, my "stuff" remains untouched - so whether I'm downloading torrents, or in the middle of composing an email, wp, graphic, presentation...it's all still there when she's done (ctl-alt-F7, back to me)
Simple.
cheers,
It seems to me that the solution to that would have been to call "4.0" "4-alpha". I'm not a big KDE user myself (I'm mostly forced to use Windows machines for my day to day workstations, and as often as not I just SSH into the servers to admin them), so I don't know what the issues are/were beyond what I've seen on /. comments, but it sure seem like they released a ".0" release without really finishing it. Which is what everyone screams at Microsoft for doing all the time. this little comment war breaks out every so often, and it always come back to "Well they/we admitted it was crap when they/we released it!". So why release it? Release the alpha as an alpha and release what is now 4.2 as the 4.0 release.
Not being either a developer or a (significant) user of the project I don't really have a horse in the race, but it sure seems like if a commercial product had done this kind of thing it would have been held up by the community as an example of why FOSS is better. Granted I don't usually pay $unspecified_large_amount_of_money to use KDE, so I guess that's something, but shouldn't a flag ship FOSS project hold itself to the same standards that it expects from its competitors?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The question is: Is KDE 4.2 better than 3.5.x?
I've found that 4.2
* looks nice,
* is slow to draw things on the screen,
* still has fewer things working than its 3.5.x predecessor.
Although I found that I could alleviate most of the slow screen painting using desktop effects with KWin's composition manager. However, like all the other broken composition managers out there, you get a nice desktop that can't run 3D applications.
Lure them in with spinning cubes and wobbly windows and then break their hearts by telling them that all 4 of the 3D games that exist on Linux won't fucking work until they figure out a way to launch the game with the bling disabled.
If you can live on candy alone KDE 4.2 is for you. If you want something more nutritional, KDE 3.5, or Gnome (How ya doing Linus?).
It's been joked that 4.5 will be good again and then they'll start over. We'll see. Hopefully their "revolutionary" architecture changes allow for smaller incremental changes in the future. Unlike 3.5 which apparently had to be completely scrapped and rewritten from the ground up.
I want this account deleted.
My wife does digital scrapbooking. She was using a cheapo scrapbooking app, but started to find it too limiting. She started to insist on a purchase of Photoshop, which I resisted. So she got the free trial version, played with it for 30 days and loved it. I asked her to give gimp the same 30 days, and she did. We never did make that Photoshop purchase - she has managed to find gimp tutorials online and even a dead-tree book that has all sorts of hints, tips, and ideas for gimp. Now she does all her scrapbooking in gimp. Maybe I'll be able to sneak a switch over to Gentoo from XP on her box now. :-)
She's no techie, she's artistic. (NOT AUtistic, ARtistic.) Took a bit to get over the learning curve to the point where she was productive, but it wasn't terribly worse than the learning curve for Photoshop.
Same experience here with The Gimp. As long as SO hasn't become entrenched in using a particular non-free application, she grasps new free apps easily. I hadn't expected her to get used to the gimp (as every gimp article on /. might have you think) as quickly as she did. Perhaps not being English helps in this case :)
Getting her switched from Microsoft Office however is a different story. Having used it for years, she was wary about OOo and balked about not being able to find various options easily.
It goes to show that moving users from what they are comfortable with is a difficult process. If the new app doesn't have a clear win (Firefox + AdBlock for instance) users won't switch easily. But if the user is new to the domain, they will try it with an open mind and learn quickly.
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Actually, this is a point of contention between me and my wife... Ocassionally, when Im on the computer she wants to check her hotmail email or stuff, and becomes angry when I tell her she cannot login into Pidgin unless she does it from her own user account.
"But MSN in Windows allows you to sign out and sign in again with a different username!" She says
"Yeah, but UNIX has a different philosophy, every user should have its own desktop and its own settings!"
"Why? You and all your Linux friends are a bunch of paranoid idiots! What's the point of so many passwords? Who do you think is going to try to hack you?"
"[sigh] You can then reboot into windows when I'm done with this..."
No sig for the moment.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mojave_Experiment#Reception
"Participants weren't asked to work with peripheral devices (such as printers or scanners), nor were they asked about compatibility with older software or hardware.[4] Participants did not have an opportunity to try the software themselves[2], but were only demonstrated certain features by a salesman."
So while calling it Mojave prevented the bad hype from geeks, they still showed it to people in a very limited capacity that didn't actually show any of the things that were being criticized. Mojave proved very little, and this video is sort of analogous to that.
With as much certainty as the Mojave Experiment provided us with, this video demonstrates that Linux and KDE are indeed desktop ready and 100% compatible With windows. It's only when you tell users that it's not Windows that they start believing the M£ propaganda and claim that all of a sudden they can't run GTA4.