Torvalds Says 'Use KDE' 1469
An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.""
Heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:1, Insightful)
Ah, the age-old battle (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you a geek, who wants a productive interface? KDE is the way to go - actually, I prefer Windowmaker myself.
OTOH, are you an end user who wants a simplified UI? Gnome is the way to go.
Linus, obviously, is a geek and chooses the former. However, that does not make the choice universal.
That's the best part about Linux and Open Source in general, isn't it? The freedom to choose and use what suits you the best?
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:4, Insightful)
Linus is increasingly 'out there' in his hyperbolic statements. First the BitKeeper fiasco, now the start of a new Gnome/KDE flamewar. Ever read his daily postings on kernel trap? They are obnoxious. I am surprised the kernel effort holds together as well as it does. I personally take his statements on Gnome as anti-advice. He is becoming a most unsafe guardian. Can anyone imagine who would lead the kernel effort if Linus was shoved aside?
Good reason to use GNOME, then (Score:4, Insightful)
A large part of gimmicks and interface nazism in today interfaces aims at the average or lower-than-average user. As a long time kde user switched to apple, I quickly realized that most of the use-cases I was used to were difficult to obtain with the OSX interface.
Is that a real problem? Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces. Give a dumb interface to a smart guy, and you obtain the Torvalds situation. Give a smart interface to a dumb guy and all you'll obtain is whining about its complexity.
Linus doesn't deal with the same level of users (Score:3, Insightful)
My personal experience using Gnome and KDE... (Score:3, Insightful)
Torvalds no longer represents Linux as a whole. (Score:5, Insightful)
it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Everybody is entitled to his or her opinion, but Linux has grown beyond the scope of "just" Linus Torvalds. The freedom of choice that we enjoy as users of the operating system is among its finest attributes.
Is it possible that Gnome and KDE are simply designed for different audiences? Newbies and other users may enjoy the more straightforward approach that the Gnome developers strive for. Slightly more advanced users such as Linus may prefer a different UI. (I kid, I kid!)
Inevitable (Score:2, Insightful)
Once again: Linus is not God! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, this is the same guy that got upset at the Samba guy for reversing bitkeeper.
I'm not arguing with his statement, btw. I've always liked KDE better than gnome. What I am saying is let the poor man have his opinion without starting a flame war.
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:2, Insightful)
On an interesting note, I have read that the development of Linux compares more to the development of Gnome than KDE so this is suprising.
Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Aboslutely. With Linus heading the Linux community and many people view him like a 'god' how big is his head these days?
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:4, Insightful)
I've used KDE and GNOME and presently use GNOME at home and at work because it meets my modest needs. Perhaps KDE has improved drastically since I used it in the SUSE 8 days; then it was so unstable I could cause it to crash by staring at the screen too hard. GNOME is more bloated than I'd like, and occasionally wonky if you are the type that wants to hole up in a dark closet, under a blanket and "play with yourself", reconfiguring your desktop repeatedly because you don't have any real work to do. If I leave the config alone, it is stable and doesn't give me any grief.
Perhaps I'll take the plunge and switch to KDE when the next Ubuntu rolls. But it would be a shock for my wife, who I have finally gotten broken in to GNOME. She operates in both the Windows and GNOME desktop environments, and doesn't have to (and doesn't WANT to) drop to the command line in either.
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh. You mean one will 'win' in the end, and we will get "one desktop to rule them all, one desktop to find them"? No thanks. Give me choice. I, for one, use neither KDE nor Gnome.
Not really a cogent argument (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE is too keen to put every single bloody option whether advanced or not straight in your face, rendering it a pain to find the simple settings. Not only that but the defaults are horrible including the single-click-to-launch paradigm. I spent a good while looking to change that behaviour, foolishly thinking it might set be somewhere desktop prefs which it isn't - it's in the mouse settings. On top of that, you only have to look at Konq or KMail and you'll see six or seven menu items in a row starting with Configure.
The one thing you can hand to KDE is that it is consistent, but it sorely needs to be streamlined. It's not hard to see why enterprise versions of Linux use GNOME - it's so much simpler and cleaner. I truly expect that supporting 100 KDE users would be significantly more work work than 100 GNOME users.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
However, people respect Torvalds and respect his opinion. He's not your average person.
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, well, he didn't make an announcment or a press release you know... He voiced his opinion on a mailing list - and I think Linus is pretty good at that :)
Incidentally, I had exactly the same experience. I migrate users to free software, and we offer two choices: FreeBSD backend, Kubuntu desktop. Why? The same reasons he cites. In the past two years, we heard a lot of "usability" noise from GNOME devs, and imho they are all bogus. Why? Because people throw around words like "usability" too easily, leading to circular or unsubstantial arguments, while real usability studies are not conducted at all. I haven't read a serious usability study for a long time. (maybe this will change with openusability and all). And no, I don't consider a study conducted with people who are absolute computer illiterate (not knowing that the right mouse button is good for something) representative. They are a very specific subset of users, they are NOT the majority, and making design decisions based on experiments conducted on this very small subset of the userbase is WRONG. That is Linus' point. Is he politically correct? Of course not (" This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.")
My girlfriend is absolutely computer illiterate: she thinks (well, thought) that Office is the OS that runs on his laptop. Being lazy and all she often sits down to my computer (instead of opening her laptop) to browse the net. Sometimes she doesn't even notice that instead of firefox, she is using konqueror. There is a small set of functionality that users expect at specific areas of your screen: first buttons should be back and forward, they expect an input field for URLs at the top, maybe a google search bar... and that's it. If they are there, they are not really "confused" because there are additional buttons (kget, print, even cervisia) to the right side. They don't even notice it. It is the same with the file dialog: were users really bothered by the input field? I very much doubt that - and just like Linus, I was not aware of ctrl + L until someone told me here on ./. And in the past years, I hear one bogus "usability" claim from these so called "usability experts" after another (spatial nautilus anyone?) No evidence, no empirical study, just "we say so as usability experts" with some outlandish theory to back it up... so yeah, I think he is right on spot (and yeah, yeah, we know, diplomacy is not his forte).
It's about time? (Score:1, Insightful)
Imagine if the Windows Start button looked different on all distributions of Windows since 95? [The XP changes don't count, much]. Consmers need a "look" that says, "This is a linux computer and I like that". They don't need to be looking at a computer and wondering, "Is this Guhnome, or KDE... I want a doughnut."
Re:Ah, the age-old battle (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are a geek who wants a simplified user interface use Gnome.
If you are a user who wants a more productive Interface use KDE.
----
My opinion, I find Gnome limiting in what I can do, I enjoy the KDE experience more. BUT as KDE has many more features some of them need to be refined/finished. On both more documentation would be nice.
In spite of those KDE is still my choice.
Re:Ah, the age-old battle (Score:5, Insightful)
See, I disagree. As a bit of a power user - or at least not your average end user - most of what I do beyond normal desktop applications, surfing, and word processing involves a terminal window.
I suffer from mild OCD, and to me simplicity means calm, it means an enhanced ability to concentrate, and it means a better experience overall. KDE, to me, seems so incredibly cluttered and overreaching/overbearing that I shy away from it at every possible moment.
So again, this goes back to simply a matter of preference. Some like KDE, some like Gnome, some like E, but here's my problem. For Linus to get involved in this is just wrong. He can say he uses KDE, that's fine, but to put down Gnome as detrimental to society is base, ill-informed, and callus. If people don't like Gnome, fine, let them be. But this "disease" of which he speaks affects my mom and grandparents, and yeah, they sure as hell can find their way around a Gnome base installation better and faster than they can around KDE base installation.
So instead of Linus putting down Gnome, he should have simply stated what he used and left it at that. He practically started the entire "choice" movement, and to not encourage such choice is just not right... IMO of course.
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:1, Insightful)
Extremely smart people tend to be multitalented. At the very least, you have no reason to say "You are an expert in operating system kernels. Please keep to what you do best."
You may either:
1. Refute Linus' rationale concerning Gnome vs. KDE;
2. Refute Linus' qualifications to discuss desktop interfaces (which you have NOT);
3. Keep silent and appear rational; or
4. Affirm your statement and appear to be an irrational sophist.
To use your logic, you are an expert in demonstrably ugly and confusing flowcharts. Please keep to what you do "best."
Re:Havoc's Response (Score:5, Insightful)
*There might be an option to turn this off in the system registry but it also turns off other features. For example a window now turns into a wireframe when you drag it.
Re:In defense of Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dude, FVWM (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be happy if all of the 'framework' crap just went away and developers would just use standard communication methods between programs. XDnD and XDS are plenty for me, and don't require a friggin' background process.
Re:Bye bye, freedom of choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
OSX is proof they are flexible. (Score:1, Insightful)
I would say OSX is the culmination of power and simplicity both rolled into one OS right now. If you feel it is too simple, you can open it right up, or dumb it down completely if you feel there is too much exposed. It's really a point i'd like to see all *nix based OS's to arrive at some day.
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, Linus expressed an opinion on the GNOME list. Linus writes in on both GNOME and KDE. There are 2 types of people that post to BOTH lists;
Finally, that Linus posted to GNOME in a discussion. He was not teaching. He was holding a discussion with other developers. His postings almost certainly have been taken out of context here on
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In defense of Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
For many people, the choice of whether to use KDE or Gnome will be automatically dictated by the distribution that they happen to choose. After all, most people aren't particularly concerned with pseudo-religious debates concerning Gtk v Qt or C v C++, especially since we seem to have so many zealots in the real world these days.
Re:Ah, the age-old battle (Score:2, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd also like to see the Starterbar gDesklet handle KDE's quicklauncher. But dreams are dreams. I'll have to code the damn thing myself.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the only thing that has changed is how people perceive Linus. He used to be just another guy; nowadays, he's a celebrity of sorts, and he's going through all the same phases that all celebrities go through: first, there is a horde of fanboys who religiously follow everything he says, but at a certain point, it becomes en vogue to religiously bash him and everything he says instead. This is the transition you're observing (and, for that matter, that you seem to be part of), but it's important to realise that it has nothing to with Linus or his opinions as such. (I predict that later on, things will slowly return to normal after bashing him is not the "hot new thing" anymore; and then, he will be idolised again, until the whole cycle repeats itself.)
If you actually read what Linus says - not just on this topic, but in general -, you'll notice one thing: he himself doesn't care. What he *does* care about is technical superiority and the like, but not politics; as such, he never has been afraid to speak his opinion, and he isn't right now, either, and - maybe most important! - he doesn't expect people to take it as anything except for the opinion of one guy.
You should do the same thing. If Gnome works for you and your wife - fine! More power to you. And if Gnome does not work for Linus - fine! More power to him! It's OK to have a discussion about the technical merits (and if you read what Linus said, you'll find that he actually bases his opinions on technical merit pretty much all the time, and certainly in this issue, too), but the kind of celebrity-bashing you're exhibiting here is just as bad as the celebrity-adoring that you mourn in others. Make up your own mind based on what you need; and discuss technical merits, but leave it at that, and respect the fact that others don't agree with you.
I use KDE, but GTK is a very important toolkit (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes to the Linux kernel, I am a firm believer in open source. Hardware should have open interfaces. This isn't idealism. The kernel needs to be STABLE, and the best way to ensure that is to have drivers open source. This makes the kernel portable and upgradable.
But when it comes to userland, where the kernel is able to isolate a process so that it can't damage anything else, there's less need to be so concerned. Plus, one of the things that's going to bring more open source software to Linux is the adoption of Linux by companies that produce closed-source applications. Oracle for Linux is important because more people will use Linux.
The issue with KDE is the Qt license. It's pure GPL. That means you can't write a Qt-based application without your entire application having to be under GPL. That isn't always favorable. So the wxWidgets people, wanting to be somewhat looser with their licensing, chose GTK, because it uses the LGPL license.
Re:Check out Jeff Waugh's reply (Score:5, Insightful)
He had an opinion on the subject-matter, and he stated it. You are free to disagree with his opinion, but does that mean that he shouldn't voice his opinion? And I don't really see what the fuzz is about. There are quite a few people around the net who are irritated by the removal of features in Gnome. Apparently Linus is one of them. There are also lots of people who prefer KDE, and apparently Linus is one of them.
Aside from being an moral-booster for the KDE-guys, I fail to see the drama in this case. Linus doesn't like GNOME. And he told why he doesn't like GNOME, and his reasons are valid. He's not ordering people to use KDE. He simply said that he recommends KDE over GNOME, and he stated his reasons for doing so. Does this mean that the GNOME-guys are going to pack their bags and start using KDE instead? No. GNOME doesn't need Linus's endorsement to survive.
Like I said, I fail to see the drama here. Is Linus being "self-centered" when he said that "I prefer KDE over GNOME"? That's his personal opinion, and they are all in a way "self-centered", and there's nothing wrong with that. Surely he's entitled to his opinion?
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
What on earth has he done that would make people respect his opinion on GUIs? That's like respecting Stephen Hawking's ideas on interior decorating because he's such a great physicist.
Gnome wins (Score:4, Insightful)
People don't want you to give them lots of features that get in their way.
They want you to give them something intuitive that does the basic things they need done first.
I've used Gnome. It's a very satisfactory system. It'll sell, if you let it. Anything that makes the user think, won't. Because it's just the user-interface model. It's not what they want to think about. They want it to disappear, like a steering wheel or an automatic door.
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:2, Insightful)
Linus is a programmer, a very good one. He has simply pointed out the corner that gnome has painted themselves into by not utilizing true OO principles and modern design patterns. This a fact, not an opinion and is evident to any modern programmer. Gnome needs a paradigm shift to survive the long term. The KDE developers have put great effort into the KDE framework and it has paid off big time. Unfortunately, this meant the have ignored usability concerns. But usability is far easier to correct than poor frameworks and the lack of truely reusable code.
I use gnome on my desktop at home and KDE at work. But its common sense as to which platform has the better implementation.
Re:Perl? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know and use many programming languages, but Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
Hey, you love your language, I'll love mine.
The truth is that I don't care if they know Perl or something else. I'm not asking professional-level programming here. I'm asking them to Get Shit Done with Unix. Read files, write files, multiply a column of numbers by something else, plot something. It's the sort of stuff I used to do in C back when I was in grad school, but is easier to do in Perl. Perl is a great language for Getting Shit Done for many of us, even if it doesn't satisfy somebody's anal-retentive definition of Proper.
-Rob
Re:In defense of Gnome (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, things are definately broke now, so I figured it was a good time to play.
So I installed Breezy Badger. It's my first look at Ubuntu and what has become of Gnome these days.
I spent the first half hour figuring out how to get something other 640x480 resolution, then about 10 minutes or so looking for how to turn off windows animations, which it turns out you can't do without going under the hood. Something about their "philosophy."
And this is the award winning, "User Friendly" distro? Treating your users like idiots, but making them have "guru" skills just to play an mp3 is "friendly"? Good thing the average user only plays vorbis files, eh?
Fuck their "philosophy." Gnome not only does not do what I want it to do but appears to go out of its way to set up roadblocks to keep me from doing it.
But at least it runs "go out for coffee" slow, so I've got that going for me.
I think I'll try Slack and Ratpoison next. You can at least get things done that way.
KFG
Gnomes biggest Sin? Win-Registry style design (Score:2, Insightful)
#1 All applications store their configuration data together in one place
#2 Configuration data is not human readable or editable.
#3 Configuration data is not designed to be easily read and manipulated by other UNIX tools (All Data is an XML markup format and can only be manipulated by tools which are schema aware and schema compliant)
This duplicates all of the worst design characteristics of the Windows Registry system.
The gnome design approach is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
The biggest problem with gnome is its design "decision" to copy the
Windows Registry paradigm. "decision" is in quotes because I am guessing that the Gnome designers just automatically used that type of design after being exposed to windows.
Every Gnome app is broken. Why:
Because every Gnome app must register all of its configuration and
setting information in the gnome "registration system" which is primarily
a functional copy of the worst design decision Microsoft ever made.
(Or their best one since it forces many home users to buy a new computer
every three years, cause "this one is slowing down too much")
The Windows registry system forces all application thru the same choke
point containing a data set the grows rapidly and continuously over time.
As the data set (Registry info) becomes larger and larger the speed of
access to the registry gets slower and slower, finally dragging the system to
its knees.
At this point, unless the user has professional help advising them to reformat
and re-install everything, a task which most fear deeply and reasonably
avoid, many users will go out and buy a new Windows
PC and start the same cycle all over again.
What has this to do with Gnome?
Simple. Gnome has the same problem and they got there by ignoring the
most basic design principles of UNIX put forth by the creators of UNIX in
1978 in the July/August edition of the Bell System Technical Journal.
These design principles can be summarized by one statement:
Keep It Simple Stupid.
Every book or article published about the UNIX design philosophy all say
the same thing and yet, GNOME broke those rules.
How to fix it:
Decentralize config info collections
use human readable/editable text in config files
make sure that the config data can be manipulated by traditional Unix tools
when used as filters.
Until these changes are made Gnome is a more a Windows system than a *NIX
tool.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccchhhhhhhhhhh.
Think of the poor students! (Score:3, Insightful)
My major complaint with the new gnome file dialog (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there a better way?
Re:Gnome wins (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't want you to give them lots of features that get in their way.
They want you to give them something intuitive that does the basic things they need done first.
As a lead developer of Audacity, I have to disagree. Yes, users want a simplified interface that doesn't get in their way. They want the most basic things to be as easy as possible. But once they've done those basic things, they want to do something else. They want more functionality. For any given user, that added functionality is pretty simple - but every user is different. There's not a single feature in Audacity that we could remove that wouldn't upset thousands of users - and not just power users - ordinary users who really just need that one feature!
Making an interface simple is good. Removing functionality isn't.
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Torvalds is right. Avoid GNOME use KDE! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just use C++ - and have strict code conventions. No arrays except for optimized internal loops - only safe vectors. No unmanaged "new"s - only refcounted or auto_ptrs for heap objects. With auto_ptrs, no pointers - only weak references. Pick a common C++ library to use for common problems that aren't in the standard library (eg. XML serialization).
Then you can take advantage of OSS and do platform-specific compiles and get optimal speeds, but also get the safety and ease provided by VMs.
Then, pick a standard scripting platform. Think lightweight - monsters like Python and even worse Mono/.NET have too much overhead. Something more like TCL or Lua. Use that platform for scripted interactions, serialization, and quick config tools. Sure, it would be slower than C#, but if you need speed you should be coding natively anyways.
Switching to a VM means you always have a bloated VM running, and that keeps your platform off of lighter hardware when there's no reason to be. Except for introspection, C++ has most of the tools available to these VM-langauges at a fraction of the speed/memory cost. VMs fill a space between native apps and scripting languages that generally isn't necessary for desktop apps.
The only real advantage I see to standardising on
Re:Linus, Thank You for Sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
But i do agree his post seems be completely taken out of context.
Ps. not beating up on linus, just using him as an example....
Re:He Should Have Said.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interfaces should target dummies by default (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideally these "dumb users" after using a given environment will expand their knowledge and no longer fit the mold of the "dumb user". Sadly, without an environment that can grow with them, they are stuck.
Solution? First, don't take a lowest-common-denominator perspective. Build a system that empowers those with the skills to expand and enhance the system by providing a rich API. Second, encourage an initial, simplified experience that allows neophytes to be productive quickly but strategicly place those advance features in such a way that the user can slowly learn and become more productive with the system.
Thats why I think KDE is a better overall system. It provides enough familiarity with desktop environment concepts people already learned to be productive quickly but also provides features to help users become more and more productive with their system (attaching scripts to the right-click menu, dcop, ioslaves, development enviornments, pykde, etc..).
I agree, but (Score:3, Insightful)
It intimidates ordinary people and drives them away. It also irritates power users who do not use those options all of the time, but who have to step around them when they put in an "all of the time location".
For example, I love the KDE, but I never saw why it was necessary to have the option to add a device on my context menu for my mouse. That is something I do once in a blue moon. The context menu is for things people do all of the time.
Is there a happy medium? Can power user options be exposed and easy, while at the same time keeping them out of everyone's face on a day to day level?
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha ha-- mod parent into -5 oblivion for being too funny for words, please.
I respect Torvalds' opinion because
But to be balanced about it, I don't think much of Torvalds taste in automobiles and my GF thinks he chooses dorky clothes. Yet despite these criticisms, I do think that I will now favor KDE over Gnome. Because Linus is my hero and he is a champion of FOSS and all that's holy in the binary realms.
Re:Inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps, but his point is dead-on. He says the same thing as Joel's Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth [joelonsoftware.com].
Re:Good reason to use GNOME, then (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good reason to use GNOME, then (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not about "smart vs dumb", it is about convenience and wanting/not wanting to deal with a task someone doesn't find interesting.
Linus was making the point that he wanted his task to be convenient, not that he was intellectually incapable of doing it. In that regard he is like almost every other user out there. The question becomes whose convenience interface people program for.
Re:"Dumbed down interfaces" (Score:2, Insightful)
Intuitive.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that over the years Hawking has become proficient in the use of rooms, which is sufficient experience to come to an informed opinion of what's good or bad about their style.
2. I'm pretty sure that Torvalds knows how to think through the long term implications of design philosophies, such as whether to put rubber blades on the swiss army knife so users won't cut themselves;
I'm pretty sure Hawking knows how to think through the long term implications of decorating philosophies, such as whether to put lighter tones around recessed lighting so that shadows are balanced.
3. I'm quite certain that somewhere along the way, Torvalds has learned to avoid stirring up unnecessary controversies since he seems to limit himself to only one or two a year;
Hawking also has stirred up very little controversy, given his advanced take on physics. I don't understand what that has to do with his competency in interior decorating.
4. Yet despite that last point, he said this not only once, but twice, in a forum where it really counts.
(because all the world leaders are reading the "desktop architects" mailing list). Wow. Must be important that we all switch to KDE.
Were you trying to refute the parent post? The poster has a valid point - Linus Torvalds is not a usablilty expert any more than Steven Hawking is an interior designer.
Linus Torvalds is a brilliant man, but he has also been known to be opinionated, and to occasionally say things that stir people up. See the legendary Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds thread. (Please don't say Linus was correct in that exchange - it's really irrelevant. I mention it only as an example of Linus showing his opinionated engineer self.) However, Linus has learned over the years when to shut up, which is why you will noticed he only sent a few messages to that thread and then you stop seeing messages from him.
I really don't know why people try to cannonize Linus. He's just a guy.
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Only about 1 in 1000 people who start martial arts earn a black belt that's 0.1% and since most people don't even try martial arts it having a black belt far more "elite" than a 4 year degree right? Wow, I didn't relealize how l33t I really was!
Re:My Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perl? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a myth- a retroactive redefinition of the origin. Perl's design was taken as a union of the styles of sh, C, and awk. The only way to base it less on human speech would be to mix some Lisp in there.
The fact that Perl programs can whimsically shift between so many different approaches to describing a program is part of the reason it's risky to suggest to low-intensity developers.
rather than by a Math geek modelled after a strict theoretical model
That much is true. A language based even roughly on math principles will have some coherency to it. Perl's willingness to combine all varieties of syntax (including, as you point out, some created solely for perverse amusement) can easily be seen as more of a flaw than a charming advantage.
Re:Ah, the age-old battle (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. Everyone has an opinion, for us to put more weight on his opinion than anyone elses--that's wrong.
He's just human, well, except for the pissing lightning thing, but that doesn't make his opinion any better--just his aim.
Re:Sod Gnome & KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, the Gnome menu's not hard to edit unless you're afraid of a text editor.
Re:Torvalds is 'out there' (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, right.
A person who wasn't interested in politics, and who was merely speaking his opinion and expecting nothing but that it will be taken merely as one guy's opinion, would not say "Please, just tell people to use KDE."
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it interesting that others on this board will use a nearly exact opposite of that argument in the form of "If you don't use it, it's bloat!"
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Linus's qualifications as a UI designer shouldn't actually be under dispute- his ability as a UI critic is more important. It's easier to judge than to build. You don't have to be a director to tell if a film scene was good or bad.
Did Linus design a PUI, or even attempt to contribute to one? No. He simply pointed out that GNOME is much worse than KDE, Windows, or Mac.
One does very little to inform the other.
UI design and kernel design are both functional creative skills, which means they are at least 10,000 times more similar than astrophysics (an investigative science) and interior decorating (an artistic expression of taste).
Re:Havoc's Response (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
When user interfaces means that something CANNOT BE DONE, it's not about
"usable design" any more. At that point, it's about UNusable design.
Any Gnome people who argue that it's about "usability" have their heads up
their asses so far that it's not funny. I've argued with them about this
before, and I know others have too, and mostly given up.
"Usability" is an issue only if you can do something at all. But if you
can't do the thing at all, it's pointless to talk about usability: the
thing is BY DEFINITION not usable if it cannot be used for a specific
task.
Then a person that claims that it's usable for something else is a FUCKING
IDIOT.
And in that FUCKING IDIOT vein:
> The majority of end-users want a simple printer dialog.
This is a great example of being a F.I.
There is no such thing as a "majority of end users" in general. For
example, maybe _I_ am in what you _claim_ to be a majority, in that I
want a simple printer dialog - because I have a simple printer, and
even simpler printer needs.
So a simple printer dialog doesn't bother me, and as such you can count me
in your "majority".
But I can guarantee you one thing: the _vast_ majority of people are part
of a specific minority when it comes to something. This is somethign that
the F.I. "interface designers" in the Gnome sense seems to continually
overlook.
For example, maybe I don't care about printers. But I _do_ care about my
mouse. If I can't control the left/middle/right button actions, I get
really upset. Again, the "majority" of people may not care, so by your
majority argument, the mouse setup should be so simple that the majority
of people can never get confused. But I _do_ care.
In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It
can be true for any particular feature, but it's simply not true in
general.
To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is
the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest
minorities is the universal set".
It's a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two
majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact,
because these things are absolutely not correlated.
And the technical term for somebody who claims to do user interface design
and not understand this fact is a "FUCKING IDIOT".
And this has _nothing_ to do with "technical users". Even totally
non-technical users care about something. In fact, it might be their
printer, and having a way to set the paper type and resolution by hand.
Another way of saying this: we're _all_ "special" some way. We're damn
quirky, even the nontechnical among us.
But hey, just continue to remove all that confusing functionality from
Gnome. I don't care. I voted with my feet.
Linus
Re:KDE has superior apps, more energetic users &am (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Right but wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
gimp is the gtk app i use the most. i immediately noticed changed open/save window. it seemed pretty nice overall, but lack of address bar was driving me nuts.
then somebody mentioned that typing "/" would allow to enter path directly. this was pretty nice, but there are two things that make this dialogue so irritating i prefer clicking instead of writing.
first, if i start typing with ~, this doesn't work.
second, if autocomplete kicks in, it works _completely different from any other app_ and BLOODY AWKWARDS.
i have screamed at my monitor how much i hate it.
let's say, i have a directory "/mnt/net" i want to get to by typing it. what i get is "/mnt/net/t/net". wtf ?
turns out, if autocomplete kicks in and it has only one suggestion, my further typing _is not_ replacing the suggestion, it is appended to it. if this is not a bug, somebody has seriously screwed up.
basically, if i type a path in, i type it pretty fast. current implementation basically forces me to pause after each bloody character to see wether i will be able to continue my writing or something has been autocompleted.
this implementation has so many problems i am surprised it was pushed in this state, especially given all these usability zealots
see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-Dec
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Timelines were roughly:
KDE 1.0/E pre
Gnome 1.2 1999
KDE 3.0 2002
Gnome 2.x 2004
Gnome 2 KILLED me. Really awful and stunted, when it came out. I hadn't looked at KDE in about 3 years, and was very surprised at what was done - especially KIO slaves, etc. I ran my app/pen platform on OpenBSD and Debian w/ KDE 3.x, including betas.
Now, I work for the 'other side'. I have limited time to check out X front ends, but when I fire up Ubuntu, I can see where Gnome was heading when it went 2. The teams UI guidelines are minimalistic. In the early stages this meant 'crippled.'
In rough terms, I think Gnome is aiming to be the OSX to KDEs Windows. Windows is striving to be OSX, now!
Fat Chance.
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that for MANY windows users (who actually know how to use Windows), this paradigm is *useless*. They need a useful and configurable GUI that actually exposes all the options, and would be able to FIGURE IT OUT. (while "dropping to the shell and poking at config files" would probably still baffle them)
Re:Think of the poor students! (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl is one of the last ones I'd foist on someone else who's not a programming professional.
Physicists are programming professionals. They deal with data sets, analysis problems, and hardware configurations that are way beyond the cutting edge. They build their own supercomputing clusters, write their own grid processing systems [web.cern.ch], build advanced data [root.cern.ch] analysis [freehep.org] frameworks [66.102.7.104], and fork their own Linux distros [scientificlinux.org]. At the physics lab where I worked for 15 years, if a physics grad student was incapable of learning a little Perl (and C, C++, Fortran, Java, TeX, and a couple of shells, and maybe some Python and Ruby) they didn't get their degree.
When launching a new physics project, it was a very serious concern which programming languages you chose to do your software development in. If you were conservative and went with a legacy language like Fortran because of all the pre-existing analysis software available, you had trouble attracting grad students to the project, because they wanted more marketable languages on their resumes. The reason is because if they decided to get out of physics one day, their strongest job prospects are in computing and data analysis.
Re:"Dumbed down interfaces" (Score:4, Insightful)
But hey, if you don't like it, do what Linus says!
Re:Humans linguists should stick to human language (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but not in the way that you are thinking. It was a success, not because it is easier or harder to learn, but because I can be more expressive in Perl than in other languages.
One of the great things that I love about Perl is that you can rearrange statements. I can say:
if($x) {
blahblahblah()
}
or I can say
blahblahblah() if $x;
In the former, I am emphasizing (to myself and other programmers after me) that the condition is more important, while in the latter I am emphasizing the action as having the importance.
Likewise, moving often-used idioms into the core language is a feature of human languages that he imported into Perl. While most programming languages would opt for several features of Perl to be libraries (like RegEx), Perl has it as a part of the syntax of the language itself. Importing the core idioms of a population into a language is something that real languages do.
Having both "if" and "unless" is a very human-language thing to do, and it makes it more obvious what you are trying to do in your program than a bunch of "if(! )"s.
The beauty of Perl is that programming in Perl is much more expressive than programming in other languages. The point is not to be "easier for noobs", but for the meaning in the program to be better conveyed to other programmers who are fluent in the language.
Having a pronoun is also very linguistic.
A more specific list of human-language features of Perl is here:
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguisti
Re:KDE vs. Gnome. Ready...FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason is that most of the world lives in abject poverty where education, if it exists at all, is extremely limited. So it should come as no surprise that only 1% of the population has such a degree, given that 80% of the population never makes it past the equivalent of 4th grade.
But then you're not competing with those guys, you're competing with the other 25% who have a degree like yours.
Re:Inevitable (Score:2, Insightful)
It does make me wonder what the
He is not the Messiah (Score:3, Insightful)
The only statements Linus make that I listen to or really care about is ones concerning the kernel.[1] Everything else I temper with the knowledge that Linus like all of us have personal preferences. His prefereces are not mine. So while I might read about them I certainly don?t waste sleep over them. But thats not to say we shouldn?t question them. The Gnome Vs KDE debate has raged ever since KDE has used Qt. And for good reason. If we frame the debate slightly differently say wrt to freedom. You can see there is always going to be a clash between software having the latest functionality, usability and niceness with restrictions and the freedom of doing anything you want without restrictions. The error of choice Linus makes (his own to make) is that he wants the pragmatic solution to a problem. This is his strength in developing the kernel. It is also his weakness. If taken at a personal level there is nothing wrong with it. When you get the followers picking up their thongs and shouting in agreement and aping their leader this a problem. So say after me kiddies, You are all different! Make your own choose when it comes to desktops. Dont listen to Linus, Choose your own.
Reference
[0] Wikiquote, `Monty Python Life of Brian quotes:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Lif
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[1] The Linux Kernel Archives, `Kernel HQ the origin of everything wrt the Linux Kernel. Where it is dicussed, disseminated to death. Where Linus really is the the Messiah sometimes & a naughty boy most of the times.`:
http://www.kernel.org [kernel.org]
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[2] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[3] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
[4] Wikiquote, Life of Brian, Ibid.
[Accessed Wednesday, 14 December 2005]
Good for him... (Score:3, Insightful)
He's right about this, and it's good to see that at least one person (and it just happens to be the man at the top) understands that UI simplicity to the point of feature removal is function following form.
It's also nice to see someone dogging the majority user argument. The only argument I regularly encounter that is more idiotic than the majority user argument is the 90% of users argument when discussing features (a factitious variant of the majority user argument). Unless that fabricated 10% is the same 10% every time the other 90% is made up, you'll end up with every user having a problem.
...the best example, GTK (Score:3, Insightful)
(and of course, Open Location crashes regularly in Linux, and 100% of the time in Windows)
Good job, Gnome!
Re:KDE has superior apps, more energetic users &am (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
*WHY*? Because it's more in keeping with popular anti-Western, anti-intellectual, BACK-TO-ROUSSEAU'S-MAN-OMG bullshit?
A 4-year degree certifies that you have learned how to think about a subject in a certain kind of considered manner. It is DEFINITELY worth something.
And who the hell knows how to "build a car from scratch" without an engineering degree? What the hell does "scratch" even mean in this context? Iron ore? Rubber trees? Petroleum?
bullshit alert (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so elite (Score:3, Insightful)
> world's population has a four year degree. That impressed me. I
> realized that I was becoming part of an elite.
Lesson #1: don't be so easily impressed.
Lesson #2: always question the raw numbers behind statistics.
Getting a four-year degree is dead common in the US - about a third [ericdigests.org] of people aged 25-29 in the US have finished a four-year degree (scroll down to "College Completion").
Apropos to the subject, though, just because someone can learn to use a complex piece of software doesn't mean they want to. For plenty of people, a computer is no more than a tool; they want it to perform a few functions without giving them a lot of hassle, and they couldn't give a damn why or how it does that.
And that's fine.
Most of you don't understand the cars you drive in anything more than an abstract sense, or the planes you fly in, or the processes required to get you the food you eat, or the shoes you wear, or the chemistry involved in your antiperspirant, or any of a million other things that we simply don't have the time or mental energy to learn the detailed working of due to the specialized nature of modern society. Most of those things are just black-box tools---they just work.
And computers are one of those black-box tools for most people.
Accept that fact, or not - I don't care, and neither do they. But pointing out that most people have more important things to spend their time and energy on than computers is hardly "trolling". It's a necessary consideration if you want to make computers that most people will have any interest in using.
Re:Gnome wins (Score:3, Insightful)
Sheesh.
Call it "MP3 Export Options".
Please.