Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[Ralf Nolden]

Hi folks,

I just returned from Eva and Matze and haven't read the mails on the 
application duplication thread since yesterday. I just noticed there was a 
lot of response. I will do that later tonight or tomorrow morning, but what I 
would like to contribute to fundament my position here for that KDE gets too 
complicated, I would like to point on the current slashdot.org article about 
Havoc's views about GNOME's UI design here:

http://slashdot.org/developers/02/04/21/051228.shtml?tid=131

There's many posts that refer to KDE, therefore I would like to recommend 
giving those a good read. The common voice is (as far as I understand it) 
that KDE is good and nice and the best desktop, but it is getting too 
complicated, especially the K menu and KControl, because it offers too many 
options at once or too many alternatives for applications. 

BTW: Who thinks users are too stupid to install an app from apps.kde.com, 
please be serious :)  KDE can't (and shouldn't) cover all and every possible 
task that you can do with a computer with applications. KDE's goal is to 
bring Unix to the Desktop, which means providing a desktop environment and a 
development platform to write applications for it. The desktop environment 
should offer one good possibility for the most common tasks that you want to 
do (like a browser, mailclient, filemanager, media/cd player) and integrate 
all parts nicely to each other so the default setup doesn't confuse the user. 
All alternatives to the applications for those tasks that are covered by apps 
that ship with KDE directly shouldn't be shipped by KDE. I always thought 
that I came to this view just by using common sense. Ok, I don't want to 
insult those people who think different but sometimes those arguments like 
"hey, users want choice" are good and all, but we should be obliged to enable 
the user to do his work first. He gets the choice by alternative applications 
written for KDE (or using other toolkits) by downloading them from 
apps.kde.com, freshmeat etc. or purchasing them from a company.

Now, happy flaming, I've just begged for that by a very undiplomatic statement 
:)

Ralf

-- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
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Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org