KDE (vs GNOME)

[Paulo Moura Guedes]

Hi,

I was just reading the news about Novell and noticed some people are having an 
identity crisis about KDE.
I think the KDE desktop has an history and a way to do things and that it 
would be a petty to lose the users that just love the things they do with KDE 
and can't be done with any other desktop environment.
Though, this doesn't mean we can't target to other kinds of users.
It is said a lot that KDE applications are bloated with actions and 
configuration options. My instant idea was to label the actions with several 
levels related to the user skill: basic, medium and advanced. Same could be 
done with the configuration options, especially with KConfigXT. The user 
could choose his skill level globally, on Control Center, and per application 
individually, which would overide the global option, as expected.
Another criterions could be used in conjuction like having the desktop more or 
less verbose, which would deal with questions like having copy/paste buttons 
on the toolbars, which are not advanced actions, but maybe too much obvious.
The actions could also be sub-categorized regarding their behavior on the 
menu, toolbar and context menu.

This would not solve all the problems but would be a start.
It seems to me that if we could abstract the way users access the desktop 
having different and clear levels of configuration, it would allow to, almost 
without effort, have a desktop for all tastes.
It would add an extra work to the developer, no doubt, but not too much if 
done in the right way.

Paulo