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Examining the Usability of Gnome, Unity and KDE
gbjbaanb writes "TechRadar has gathered a few users and subjected the 3 main Linux desktops to some usability testing for both experienced users and some new to the whole concept." I'm glad to see such ongoing comparisons; they encourage cross-pollination of the best ideas. On the other hand, it's a little bit like trying to determine the "best" dessert; even the most elaborate attempts to find statistical consensus won't answer the question of what's best for any particular user.
There's nothing wrong with ignoring the needs of individual users to tailor a generally good experience, _so long as power-users are still given the ability to pick the option best for them as individuals_. That last part is the important part that Apple has forgotten of late.
You know what's best for everyone? Configurability. When the developers can't decide how something should work, when they have two what seem like equally good or equally bad ideas, why should they force one particular decision on the user? Why not just put an option on a big scary controll panel somewhere made just for that? Of course, for usabilitiy's sake, there'd be the normal slick and easy to read control panel, but Gnome used to have GConf (does Gnome 3 have it? I don't know). You could use GConf to configure ANY aspect of the interface, anything at all. It was a very powerful tool if you knew what you were doing with it. So set the defaults to the lowest common denominator, to the grandma standard, but at least leave the powertools where we can reach them! Put up a warning that it may break the interface, sour the milk or bring the rapture to scare off the grandma users, and only those who really know what they're doing need concern themselves with it.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Techradar wants to talk and judge usability of the all-time favourite linux desktops, and yet their own website looks like THIS: http://i.imgur.com/IOyKu.png
I know other browsers render it centered, but that's not the (only) point, it's that their web looks awful: about 1/4 is margins, which is OK, and of those 3/4 1/4 is the content, which is split into 7 tiny sections (just give me the whole article and don't make me page every 3 paragraphs, it's almost 2012, for christ sakes!), tiny text, tiny images, and 3/4 of crap (related content, ads, menus, more related content, more related content).
It's not like they can't provide a very valid examination of linux desktops, but their site does not inspire very much credibility when they themselves get it so wrong, IMHO.
Where's the "usability testing"? The linked article is just typical blogger blithering, spread over multiple pages for maximum ad insertion. They write "Since usability is a personal experience, we invited a bunch of people, from newbies to power users, to share their experiences with 3.2.". Which probably means "we asked for comments on a blog".
Real usability testing is not market research. It's measuring how well people did on tasks, not what they said they liked.
Statements in the article reveal it was written, or at least researched, 2 months ago.
There has been a lot of churn since then, including in the Gnome 2 fork MATE and the variety of Gnome shell extensions making Gnome 3 more usable.
...how do I get in on these scientific experiments to determine the best dessert?
KDE and Gnome obviously yes, but Unity is one of the top 3? Just because most recent Ubuntus foist this on users (and most feedback I've seen has been negative) - is there any data to show that Unity has even 10% of Linux desktops? While Ubuntu is popular, that just means it's bigger than any other. My totally unsubstantiated guess would be that Ubuntu is less than 30% of all desktop Linuxes installed and of that, not all are 11.x gen and many of those users have installed another desktop. So...
I would be SHOCKED if Unity is running on 5% of Linux desktops - does anyone have any hard evidence to counter this?
I wouldn't be surprised if Enlightenment or Fluxbox had bigger install base.
(I can't believe no one else has pointed this out)
You can talk about many shortcomings of Windows, but they pretty much have usability figured out, right?
No, no they do not. And to talk to any typical Windows user, Windows is confusing to many users.
I can't wait for a fully-enabled Metro desktop to be unleashed by Microsoft. It caters to the absolute lowest common denominator of user. The rage it induces in power users is hilarious.
Why does Linux live in a separate world?
Because imitating the Windows UI is stupid and possibly lawsuit-bait. And I didn't go to Linux to just move to a cheap version of Windows.
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BMO
Resizes automatically to fit my screen? No.
Has everything on one neat page? No.
Allows you to click on the small pictures to get a higher resolution picture? No.
Is uncluttered by random links and pictures not relating to the article? No.
Is completely free of annoying social networking buttons that track pages you view? No.
Verdict
The article is annoying and not very usable.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Contrast it with me having problems (on SuSe) mounting a drive last week. Yes - it recognized the drive, but "unable to mount". Yes - eventually I got it to work. But if the solution required opening a shell, calling mount command, figuring out where in command line to say "ntfs" and guessing which /dev/sd? matches the actual flash drive, then I say Linux lost already!
Oh, right. Because Windows will just oh so happily mount an ext4-formatted USB drive?
No-one who cares about interoperability would use a proprietary filesystem like NTFS on a USB drive. Or, at least, they wouldn't go whining about how no other computer can read it.
KDE still feels overly complicated whenever I go to configure things.
If there is anything that's hard to configure, it's GNOME. GNOME has lots of options -- most of them hidden somewhere in GConf. It's hard to get more complicated than that. ;-)
As for "KDE"... you're both wrong and right. What you described is the KDE3 attitude. In the 4.x series many config options have been cleaned up. See Dophin (compared to Konqueror 3.x), Gwenview, or Okular. In fact, I'd argue that new applications and components written for the 4.x series are among the most clean and usable applications available for Linux -- including Plasma Desktop itself.
However, there are a few black sheep: Usually applications simply ported over from 3.x like KMail whose GUI barely changed over the years because the developers were busy with back-end renovation.
That said, that article is about the desktop environments themselves, not applications usually used together with them.