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Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much?
jammag writes "The Linux desktop has seen major innovation of late, with KDE 4 launching new features, GNOME announcing a new desktop, and Ubuntu embarking on a redesign campaign. But Linux pundit Bruce Byfield asks, do average users really want any of these things? He points to instances of user backlash, and concludes 'Free software is still driven by developers working on what interests or concerns them. The problem is, the days when users of free software were also its developers are long gone, but the habits of those days remain. The result is that developers function far too much in isolation from their user base.' Byfield suggests that the answer could be more user testing."
Bad features die, good ones remain. The alternative is to shove crap into end users throats.
And when they don't like it continue shoving the way Microsoft did with MS Bob aka Clippy
from MS Office. The big difference here is innovation does not occur without failiure. Open
source can afford to make mistakes. Closed source companies have to add useless and failed
features to their products, otherwise the time spend has been wasted and investors may sue the company.
That's probably because only geeks care about the extra desktop-real estate gained by reducing the size of window-decorations... Most people use programs at near full-screen size anyway. (Probably partly because of the excessive bloat in window-decoration and toolbars almost requires it to be usable at "normal" resolutions these days. Trying BeOS a few years ago, gave me the feeling of almost doubling the resolution of my laptop, so effective/minimalistic were the windows. And that was compared to "classic" in XP!)
This is very true. Having worked at a large software company writing developer tools, we had HIE (Human Interface Engineering) people evaluate everything with a GUI that was shipped to customers. Mind you, this was software written by and for developers so the rules were a bit relaxed but, I have never been so close to committing homicide as I was when I would get e-mails like this in my inbox:
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be 1 pixel closer to widget foo.
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be color #111111 instead of #000000
- The splitpane between widgets foo and bar should default to 437 pixels wide and not 450 pixels wide
- The vertical scrollbar should scroll 5% slower
- The hotkey for menu item foo should be Ctrl-baz and not Ctrl-bar
Etc, etc, etc.
It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.
To summarize: Developers shouldn't be in charge of GUIs. Even if those GUIs are only intended for other developers.
Just out of curiosity did you notice that the product was lacking some polish before you made the changes?
No, the product seemed pleasant looking and very usable from my standpoint. After implementing the changes HIE suggested I was blown away at how great the shipping product was. In fact, that single experience probably changed the way I write GUI applications and, 10 years later, I think if I were to write a GUI application for the same company, HIE would be sending me far fewer e-mails about mundane details.
"Human Interface Engineer" sounds like a bullshit title but, if you get one that actually knows what they are talking about and you listen to them, it can drastically improve the quality of your software. I think the point of the GP was that open source software often doesn't have the level of strictness where a non-programmer can say, "No, it's not polished enough to ship". When you know that the final judge of whether your software will ship or not comes from someone that cares more about presentation/interface/usability than the technology behind it, you write your software differently.
I'll dive right in because this story popped right after I've reinstalled my main console, and I had to reinstall exactly because of my desktop getting "innovated" so much it was crippled. Maybe all these complaints of mine have already been covered elsewhere. But Linux GUI desktop developers had better get their stuff together and start thinking about how to make the GUI desktop quickly navigable for the full range of everyday work. (Not just for simple tasks, and not the new interface idea the GUI developers invent each month after a round of 'shrooms.) Between the Gnome Project's obsession with castrating its core programs' options, and KDE's obsession with making a new KDE app for every single type of application yet not being able to get its desktop and window decorations to be intuitive, I'm looking back at svgalib days with fondness. Or maybe Windows 3.1 days. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I used to have more time for this kind of involuntary "adventure" than I do now. Right-clicks and resizing task bars should not have to be treated as uncharted waters for a user at this point.
On my main console machine, I've had Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months, "upgraded" from 7.04. It was clear that 8.10 had damaged the configs unsalvagably - it still refused to mount USB drives so that the normal user could read them. I always had to remount manually on the command line. Yesterday I just wiped the whole OS off my machine (except for moving my old home directory out of the way) and installed Kubuntu 9.04 clean. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't behave like something other than a damaged system within the next couple weeks, I'm switching to Xubuntu or something - at least it resizes and moves almost anything when you click on the edge, instead of having windows do one thing, tool bars do another, the "desktop" box another. I switched away from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because I couldn't stand Gnome apps censoring any option that didn't fit an 8-year-old kid's reading level. (Fortunately Gimp and Pidgin ignored the the rules. They were hard to learn for their own reasons anyway, so what did they care? At least they could be learned though - Pidgin only played moving-target once when it switched from Gaim.) Now I'm thinking of dumping Kubuntu because there are hundreds of options somewhere, but I can't find them. Xubuntu (what little I've used it) seems to behave very politely on my dual-boot laptop.
Kubuntu 8.10 should never have happened. KDE 4.0 should never have happened. KDE 4.1 shouldn't have even happened. Plasma (KDE's new desktop interface) is too clever by half. It is extremely non-intuitive. I've dealt with Apple II Plus system monitor prompts through ProDOS with AppleWorks, through years of custom BBS menus in ANSI, then Windows 3.1 through 95, 2000, XP, and Vista, with a liberal helping full-screen DOS apps, OS/2, and old X display managers whose menus only appear when you hold down Ctrl or Alt. Yet I still can't figure out how to get the KDE 4 taskbar to form 2 rows of tasks instead of just growing enormous icons for no reason when I change the size.
Anything non-KDE inside KDE is, of course, not quite equal. Firefox has "nice" rounded GUI element emulation in Kubuntu 8.10 but hides things like window tabs under other things (like the web page) when I launch it directly from the menus - but has simpler buttons and works fine when I run it from a shell prompt inside Konsole! How come Firefox has a different skin from Konsole than directly from the KDE menus?!
P.S. while I'm ranting: Why does the KDE "Utilities" menu have an icon that looks like a console prompt, then Konsole isn't in that menu?! Konsole is hiding in System, among the control panels. And how come KDE 4 sometimes does the same thing with right click as left click? If I right-click, it's because I didn't like what the left click did and I'm looking for some other option! Argh!
Honestly, I think that is part of the problem.
Bear with me for a moment: where do elephants pack their cloths when they go on vacation? In their trunks, of course. Now, this is a joke that you or I get right away. There is a pun involved, i.e. the two meanings of the word "trunk," and the ambiguity of the context provided by the elephants. Now, tell this joke to the average 7 or 8 year old, and watch them as they repeat it to other children. It is quite likely that they will tell it incorrectly, leading to a joke that doesn't make sense (i.e. they might replace "trunk" with "suitcase," or forget that elephants are involved). They understand that the joke is supposed to be funny (people laughed when it was told, so it must be funny), but they don't really understand why it is funny, because they don't really get the pun.
I think that they same might be true of many developers. They see UI elements in software like Mac OS X, Vista, MS Office, or other programs, and understand that these elements must be important. However, they don't really get why they are important, so when they clone them into their own projects, they come out misshapen and not quite right. They clearly understand that the element is useful, and that people want it, but without understanding why it is useful, or why people want it, they end up with something that doesn't make sense.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The graphics subsystem in Windows is a frame buffer graphics library poorly retrofitted for asynchronous calls. X was designed from the start for asynchronous client/server communications and operation in a separate "window server". X got it right 20 years ago. After two decades and several rewrites, both Microsoft and Apple have finally arrived at an X-like architecture.
...what? Microsoft put their networking on top of the display, not beneath it. Windows' display layer doesn't operate with a client/server framework as far as I understand... it's just simpler between the graphics card and display, where it really matters for desktop machines.
In fact, when has X ever surpassed Windows or Mac in the ability to actually draw windows and graphics... especially in the case of rich graphics? There's a good reason Flash will always run faster on Windows and Java FX came out on Windows and Mac long before anything X-based. Why, with the way modern X works with the DRI/Mesa GLX framework, they can never have a full GL stack because the DRM's way of handling graphics memory is flawed. They would have to rewrite the server to do what is and has been fairly simple in Windows, Mac, or BeOS in terms of direct graphics access.
I am not sure what you're talking about when you say X is "superior", but I am talking about desktop use... read: GRAPHICS. Not being a client/server/unixy mess. The average desktop user needs a fast, accurate, and consistent interface to their graphics card, not endless possibilities of socket magic that they can vomit all over the network... it's just not practical or accessible to regular users on desktop systems.