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KDE's UI To Bend Toward Simplicity
sfcrazy (1542989) writes "KDE Software is often criticized for being too complicated for an average user to use. Try setting up Kmail and you would know what I mean. The KDE developers are aware of it and now they are working on making KDE UI simpler. KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer Thomas prefers a layered feature exposure so that users can enjoy certain advanced features at a later stage after they get accustomed to the basic functionality of the application. He quotes the earlier (pre-Plasma era) vision of KDE 4 – "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion."
Isn't this Gnome, but ten years ago?
Simplification: the act of removing features that are deemed unnecessary, redundant, irrelevant.
Simplification (UI design): the act of removing or transforming discoverable, one-step, procedures in opaque, 3-step-after-reconfiguration procedures. See Gnome, Windows, OSX. Hopefully not KDE.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
This YouTube video offers some pretty good KDE criticism as well. I personally am mostly frustrated with the clunky and cluttered notifications system.
So far that's been KDE - - since Gnome, Unity, Android, IOS, Windows, and others have all charged off the "dumb it down for the LCD!" cliff.
KDE had been marvelously resistant to that, and directly exposes a whole host of poweruser settings and configuration options, even settable on a per-app basis if you want, all through the GUI. If it's going to head off the cliff... what's left? Nothing. There are your ultralight envs like LXDE and XFCE but they don't compare to a full featured desktop like KDE.
Let's hope this doesn't end badly :-/.
ArcadeMan, if you are even really a man (do you even have a beard?), you have immediately jumped to the most negative conclusion. Many, perhaps lesser, men would have interpreted that as the advanced features are available to the unfamiliar user immediately, behind such an advanced settings button, but that those features are not thrown in their simple faces like a bucket of acid, scarring them.
Would you like an octopus?
KDE's UI To Bend Toward Simplicity
"Bend toward simplicity"? Couldn't you have just said "to be simplified"? That seems... simpler.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"KDE Software is often criticized for being too complicated for an average user to use. "
By whom? Since when?
Me. If I think it is, then no doubt many people think it is. It;s why I stopped with KDE and just stuck with Gnome.
"The KDE developers are aware of it and now they are working on making KDE UI simpler. "
Thinking of GNOME, which was once somewhat useful and useable before the developers started talking like this, a shiver runs down my spine.
I would say that is a fair reaction, if you are thinking about Gnome. The more we compare, the more we sometimes drive things that way. We bash gnome now, defenders come out and defend it, and now we've really got a war on our hands. This happens often life.
"KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer Thomas prefers a layered feature exposure so that users can enjoy certain advanced features at a later stage after they get accustomed to the basic functionality of the application. He quotes the earlier (pre-Plasma era) vision of KDE 4 â" "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion."
Ugh. *Minute user settings* are actually very important to many non-technical users. This does sound like GNOME, unfortunately.
Sounds more like Windows to me. And that actually, may be a good thing. Seriously, Windows got a lock on the desktop because people liked it, and by people, I mean everyday joe blow secretary or the executive that can't even type his own emails or use a spreadsheet, in short the greater pool or end users.
People use what they like, the like what they can dive into, and later on pull back the curtain. Having tools to get into the guts is a great idea. And you know what, it was cool, at first, that I could pull up a terminal and look under the hood quickly when I used Ubuntu from the very get go years ago. That novelty quickly wore off when I ended up having to do these things. I like the ability, but clutter and a dozen options get in the way of getting basic things done.
I once read a great take on organization. If you have more than ten of something, you probably need another level for ease of use, be it files in a folder, icons in a start menu, etc. I took the time to redesign my start menu in windows, and boy I and anyone else could find right where any program was, quickly.
Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman should come together, and make a short video clip. And they should be screaming, "Designers! Designers! Designers!"
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Do you really have to rip all of the features out of KMail for this?
How about you make your own mail client, hell, even use the KMail source. Then you will see how much the KDE userbase will love your 'retarded-people-interface' that is only an improvement for people who don't need advanced features like deleting an email. I'm not kidding, look at the mockup in the article.
I really don't get how you can see Metro and Gnome fail completely trying to force a more 'simple' user interface on people, and then want to make the same mistake.
That's not true regarding frightening. The ones who get frightened can't find and don't use the advanced tab. There are two problems though with those tabs:
a) People tend to over estimate their level of knowledge and turn on these features too early. This can be avoided by making the advanced menus more intimidating (for example using technical terms).
b) Different user bases demand opposite goals. The contention can be quite hard to deal with and often the application either disadvantages one of the groups or effectively forks into multiple applications. In which case why not just have multiple applications?
Who said I was happy with Gnome? I would rather use KDE, just too complicated. See this video for examples.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
II always recommend KDE to new users, but it needs be simplified (Baloo/Nepomuk off, Akonadi off, Kwallet off, Activities off) and its ME who has to do it, because I know how to do it, and they don't. See where the problem is?
If you, KDE UI designers, can make it as simple as possible for the novice users, I will be very pleased that it is *me*, not them, who has to spend some time to fit the environment to his taste (as long as you don't touch *my* KDE!).
The problem is that in order to show off a new fancy feature that may give KDE an edge (cf. Baloo, etc), the authors seem to think that they have to turn them on by default. That is why KDE is unusable for novices. Maybe just let the people decide whether they are so great, and they will gladly opt in if they are, as I do with some of them, not all.
Go ahead and simplify the default settings, and put some layers in. It will be great! (Did I say I will cut you if you dare touch *my* KDE?)
Disclaimer: I haven't used KMail for years, yet I use Thunderbird and Firefox every day. I just want to point out a few things that the KDE team has gotten right, as opposed to the Mozilla team.
Things that I like about KMail and its settings:
- The UI doesn't change every 6 months in an attempt to ape their closest competitor.
- If a settings can be configured, there's a button for it in the settings. I don't have to download a plugin that might get updated at any moment with spyware, or to muck about in the configuration editor. Do you remember that, in order to show http in URLs, you have to change the setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs in about:config? For some reason, I have to look it up in Google every single time I set up a Firefox. If there was a button for it, I would probably remember where it is.
- They are not so utterly reliant on ad money that they set the default tracking setting to "Do not tell sites about my tracking preferences", which is a lame cop-out. Maybe they could cut some of the compensations they are giving to their executives instead.
With all that said, it is true that the settings in KDE and KMail in particular can be confusing to new users. Maybe they could have a "show settings: simple/all" radio button in the corner of their preferences windows, like VLC?
Simplifying does NOT mean "show what I think are the 4 most important controls and hide the other 47 behind a menu icon."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
On every platform, this idea has led to horrible design decisions. We have things like Metro and Unity which have decided that a never-ending list of every installed application is better for a new user - when it outright requires that user to know what they're doing to get any work done. We have this issue where people are so afraid of complexity that we're oversimplifying things to the point of breaking them.
But the inescapable truth is that we live in a complex world, and do complex actions. Many of those actions cannot be simplified to the degree that "end user" is going to be able to effectively do them, because the entire idea that "end user without a working knowledge" should be able to do complex tasks is pure fallacy.
Computers aren't getting simpler because we're streamlining the user interfaces, the tasks users must accomplish aren't getting simpler because we're streamlining the user interfaces. We're screwing everyone by trying to simplify a complex world beyond reason.
As it stands, KDE might be the gold standard of desktop environments, and I feel that's because they haven't been afraid of the inherent complexity involved in the system. If they manage to appropriately refactor the user experience while not crippling the environment, they might be on to something.
Chances are, we're about to lose the value of KDE, much like we lost the value of so many other projects over the years.
There were (and are) people who like MSWind. Agreed.
MSWind became dominant because the people who made the purchasing decisions trusted IBM. Not because people who used the computers liked it. Most of them didn't. Now most of them do, because they've become habituated, and the thought of putting in that much effort again terrifies them.
If you want to pick a company that became dominant because people liked it, pick Apple. I, personally, don't use or want to use Apple, but those who do use it like it. (When I used it, I liked it...but they made a change in the EULA that I found unacceptable. Now I no longer know it, though I don't actively dislike it the way I do MSWind.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Describing gconf as "convenient" is a wild exaggeration.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.