Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[Shawn Gordon]

Let me take a moment to comment from my rather different 
perspective.  first, there is no KDE distribution per se, every distro 
changes it and includes different things.  So what is the goal 
exactly?  Gnome is in a slightly different position by having Ximian 
producing sort of an "official" version and an entity to negotiate with, 
that is why Sun and HP went with Gnome.  So what is the goal?  Do you 
create an "official" KDE with preconfigured apps and request that the 
distro use it?  Probably wouldn't work.  I've been encouraged by Lycoris 
<sp> and Elx and their approach.  I'm afraid SuSE and Mandrake take the 
shotgun approach and just dump everything in, last time I installed SuSE it 
took 2 gig, but at least it was relatively intelligent about where it put 
stuff, Mandrake just does a big lump drop.

I would say that KDE is rather too configurable and most users don't care 
to configure to that extent, and as was noted, they don't need 5 different 
CD players and editors, etc., but who is going to make the decision of what 
goes in?  The big advantage to having everything there is when you go and 
buy SuSE or something, the apps are precompiled and installed.  Having had 
to deal with compiling apps for every combination of KDE and distro 
version, I can tell you it is a nightmare.  End users aren't going to want 
to go to apps.kde.com and download source and compile it.  As a short 
example, I installed Elx on my 70 year old mother in laws underpowered 
laptop.  I configured everything she needed for what she had to do and that 
was it, but if something comes up and she needs software, I'm going to have 
to do it.  When she ran Windows, she could do it.  Which of course goes 
back to the old installer issue, which is also impossible to accurately do 
because of all the libraries and versions and cpu types, etc.

I know I didn't answer anything here, but rather raised more questions, 
which have likely been considered, but my opinion is that the goals for KDE 
3.1 and beyond need to be thought out a bit more.

Shawn

At 11:15 AM 4/21/2002, you wrote:
>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.
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>Ralf Nolden
>nolden at kde.org
>
>The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
>http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org


Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
949-713-3276