My OperaDesktop for Dummies
Sunday, October 28, 2007 12:12:29 AM
GNOME users are idiots. Not my words... not words of anyone in particular, but resemble (and are based on) Linus Torvalds's words in THE flamewar of GNOME vs. KDE.
For those not knowing I left behind the GNOME environment for a much better KDE, and in the process I found that there has been a bit heated debate about GNOME's flexibility (the reason I left it). I just read the WHOLE thing! and it was quite amazing... really can't believe I did that (^o^) . Anyway, the point is that Linus advocates for a more customizable desktop environment, which he compares to a game: each time should be more challenging; and the challenge, in this context, is to be able to change the desktop so I can do what I want to do, and not what other might think I would like to do because he/she feels is better at something just by studying one of those undetermined fields of design... The GNOME designers and developers, think that the average user they are aiming at are those who start up things by reading the "... For Dummies" series, then (may be) followed by some fast Wikipedia search and then, done. KDE users, on the other hand, like to explore things around, but also have tools to mimic the behaviour of other desktops, and by those things, KDE targets a lot more users, in the sense that, if you like simplicity, you can just start using KDE with the default configurations, but if you want more complex customization, you can still use KDE to modify a lot of stuff, all at once, or one by one.
It is, however, worrying that some people inside GNOME, do think ``users are idiots'':
[quote Rodney Dawes from bugzilla 408898]
Comment #13 from Rodney Dawes (developer, points: 20)
2007-02-18 17:45 UTC
A Novice/Expert setting has been tried before in Nautilus, and it failed.
Everyone is just going to set the setting to Expert anyway, because people like
to make themselves feel like they are better at something than they actually
are.
[/quote]
It shows how people seem to love taking decisions for other people they do not even know. Things like this made me drop Windows altogether, and really, really, keep me a little bit away from MacOS (It is annoying to use the stupid mouse all the time and with no way to use the keyboard whenever I want it)
The question is, then, does your desktop enables you to change things about it? No... let's put it more general: Does your software enables you to customize it the way you want? Opera does... and that is one more reason to love it!
For those not knowing I left behind the GNOME environment for a much better KDE, and in the process I found that there has been a bit heated debate about GNOME's flexibility (the reason I left it). I just read the WHOLE thing! and it was quite amazing... really can't believe I did that (^o^) . Anyway, the point is that Linus advocates for a more customizable desktop environment, which he compares to a game: each time should be more challenging; and the challenge, in this context, is to be able to change the desktop so I can do what I want to do, and not what other might think I would like to do because he/she feels is better at something just by studying one of those undetermined fields of design... The GNOME designers and developers, think that the average user they are aiming at are those who start up things by reading the "... For Dummies" series, then (may be) followed by some fast Wikipedia search and then, done. KDE users, on the other hand, like to explore things around, but also have tools to mimic the behaviour of other desktops, and by those things, KDE targets a lot more users, in the sense that, if you like simplicity, you can just start using KDE with the default configurations, but if you want more complex customization, you can still use KDE to modify a lot of stuff, all at once, or one by one.
It is, however, worrying that some people inside GNOME, do think ``users are idiots'':
[quote Rodney Dawes from bugzilla 408898]
Comment #13 from Rodney Dawes (developer, points: 20)
2007-02-18 17:45 UTC
A Novice/Expert setting has been tried before in Nautilus, and it failed.
Everyone is just going to set the setting to Expert anyway, because people like
to make themselves feel like they are better at something than they actually
are.
[/quote]
It shows how people seem to love taking decisions for other people they do not even know. Things like this made me drop Windows altogether, and really, really, keep me a little bit away from MacOS (It is annoying to use the stupid mouse all the time and with no way to use the keyboard whenever I want it)
The question is, then, does your desktop enables you to change things about it? No... let's put it more general: Does your software enables you to customize it the way you want? Opera does... and that is one more reason to love it!
(13%)
