kde 3.1 -- make Keramik default?

[Neil Stevens]

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On Thursday May 30, 2002 02:26, Roberto H. Alsina wrote:
> On Thu, May 30 2002 at 02:20:13pm -0700, Neil Stevens wrote:
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> > On Thursday May 30, 2002 02:19, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> > > KDE should follow fashion for default and provide the classic look
> > > for those used to it as an option. My two cents.
> >
> > Well-put.
> >
> > So now I ask this: Is fashion more important than consistency,
> > usability, and efficiency?
>
> a) Consistence doesn't exist in abstraction. Consistence with what
> exactly are you talking about?

Consistency in interface.  One way KDE makes Unix OSes more usable, since 
its founding, is that the parts of the desktop look and act the same way.  
Changing al. the widgets and the icons is a step away from that 
consistency, and so shouldn't be done without proper consideration.

> b) Is current style more usable than Keramik? How? Why?

The default is a known good quantity.  If the default were no good, then 
sometime between 2.0 and 3.0.1 there would have been criticisms made.  
This is hard, observable evidence.  Only now is the default being 
criticized for being out of fashion, stodgy, non-modern, or just plain 
old.

Keramik and Crystal, on the other hand, is new.  A new icon style, a new 
widget pixmap engine, a new way for buttons and other widgets to look and 
act.  We have no evidence that it's any good at all.

> c) Is current style more efficient? How and why? Efficient for who? When
>    he does what?

The current style is drawn using C++ code, rather than shuffling pixmaps to 
and from the X server.  The current style uses simpler drawings, so it 
simply takes less time to draw.  This makes the current style more 
efficient for anyone using it.

An easy way to drastically see differences in efficiency is to simply 
switch desktops, and watch the full redraw.  Simple styles "feel" snapper, 
because they draw faster.

> Now, after you know the answer to those questions, you see if they are
> more important than fashion. Because a lot of fashion is more important
> than a very very small bit of efficiency, yes.

Small for whom?  KDE has gotten repeated praise worldwide for being 
runnable on older workstatoins that rich countries have abandoned.

Are use cases like this less important than some whim of fashion?  I don't 
think so.

- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil at qualityassistant.com
"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding
because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they
have not a single political argument left." - Margaret Thatcher
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