Last December I blogged about the uproar Linux creator Linus Torvalds had caused by posting on the gnome.org Usability list his extreme dislike for the direction the Gnome developers had taken with the UI. For those of you who may have missed his original post the high point follows: 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. As the thread went on Linus became even more colorful in his criticism, calling the Gnome developers “interface Nazis” and citing examples of how Gnome’s UI makes it take longer to do things. At the time I agreed with the eminent Mr. Torvalds wholeheartedly. "No. I've talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user". That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse users". The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly not the exception, but the rule. Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we need developer manpower", I'd have understood. THAT is what open source projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not look nice". If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times. And only ever from Gnome. The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one. And when I tell people that, they tend to nod, and have some story of their own why they had a feature they used to use, but it was removed because it might have been confusing. Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection thing, never mind that it's a million times slower." Linus Story continued here
In some ways I agree with him. Not only does KDE look better, smoother and sleeker, its far more functional.
I have to say that I took an instant dislike to Gnome. KDE seems, somehow, much nicer. I cannot put my finger on it as I do not pretend to be linux know-it-all, but there is definitly something there which makes KDE much more apealing and fun to use....
Same here. I tried others, like Sawmill, but when you weren't raised on a Unix background, I had no clue where the hell anything was. A few of them I couldn't even figure out how to log out of...and I suck at consoling. Thus, I went with KDE.
