A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Frans Englich]

On Monday 20 February 2006 17:54, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:
> You might have seen already (or maybe not):
>
> http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/
>
> Anyway, here are my comments:
>
> I'm VERY impressed! 

Yes, me too. I think the GNOME people are great engineers and designers.

What impresses me -- be it in music, writing, engineering or anything else -- 
is the ability to change. The Apple and GNOME people have somekind of 
development culture where radical UI ideas doesn't get shot down or hindered 
by conservative forces... the ideas get deployed.

That's something which many misses when they find a specific GNOME idea which 
they think is completely hopeless(and they can be right, of course). That 
feature may be completely hopeless, but in the broad picture they /try 
different ideas/, they /research/, and the next idea(or the next one..) turns 
out great.

I applaud you for pointing at something other than KDE and saying it is great. 
I think that's missing a lot in KDE's development community, more moderate 
views which says "we really need to get better at this" and "those got it 
right, and perhaps we can learn", and so forth. In some cases it feels like 
people percept looking in another direction or critism as negative, as 
something that harms KDE. It is quite the contrary, of course.

[...]
> KDE has a lot of work ahead of it. A lot. I'm really looking forward to
> KDE4, and I really, really hope that it delivers on this front. I would
> guess that UI-changes like this are relatively easy to do, but for some
> reason I feel that changes like these are the ones that would face the most
> opposition... 

Yupp, me too.

I would find it interesting to read an anthropological study of what is valued 
in the KDE community(yes yes, ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar discusses 
such things). It wouldn't surprise me if an application is judged primarily 
by the amount of features it has, the more technical the better.

I think KDE's largest critism is in usability, that interfaces are too 
cluttered(if not that what else? Integration? Nope. Features? Nope.), so it 
can perhaps be used as a statistical indication to that there lies a truth.

It's all about demand. I's the broad "public opinion" that steers how KDE 
looks, not one or two developers. If the public opinion is convinced that 
that being able to configure how their browser allocates memory(they use the 
words "Freedom", "Powerfulness", "look at MS Windows", etc), it's perhaps 
that freedom one gets, on the cost of how the UI looks.

However, I think there have been very big improvements on the usability front 
the last year, especially how the development community /works/ with 
usability issues. I also think the new module layout(workspace, etc) affects 
usability substantially in the end. I think there is hope in the long 
perspective.

What I do wish is that we wouldn't have a camp of usability-geeks, and a camp 
of hardcore tech-geeks. I would like tech-geeks who are tech-geeks for 
solving (usability) problems, not who are tech-geeks because... I don't know 
why :)


Cheers,

		Frans