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Weak and Powerless

Posts tagged with "gnome"

Desktop for Dummies

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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'':

Originally posted by 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.



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!

GNOME is getting on my nerves

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It all started when I downloaded a new Linux distribution to install in my PC. It was all perfect at the begining. At least it was quite a lot of stuff new to learn, but... to be honest, GNOME, a very popular desktop environment in linux, quite disappointed me.

To everyone else not using linux, a Desktop Environment is the most complicated concept you can fit in your brain when you hear that in linux there are a lot of ways of representing and manage the windows in a graphical way... In other OSes, namely MacOS and Windows, there is only one graphical way to talk to the user, the former a lot better than the latter one. Linux is somewhat in the middle (kind of). As a part of the you-are-free-to-do-with-your-pc-whatever-you-want philosophy, not found in neither the Mac or Win worlds, a lot of people decided that the existing options of graphical outputs in Linux were not acceptable to their needs, and so, the window managers and desktop environments appeared. Both form the perfect complement to the so-called window server and thus, offer the most flexible and customizable OS in the market.

One of those couples (window manager + desktop environment) is GNOME, the one I am throwing flames today. Hehe. Although it shares some of the ideas of the Macintosh User (Usabilitiy) Guidelines, it is not a clone of it, neither it has the power the mac UI has. Yes, as one of the guidelines says, Usability is essential, and yes, it is simple to use and understand. So simple, that is is impossible to do many things with it. Note that I left out the word "advanced". Ordering the windows can become a problem if you don't install some extra software. Yes. I know that customizing the window behaviour is not a DM's work, but the doctor told me not to use the mouse that much! I need keyboard shorcuts to move the windows around, to open applications, to handle devices. If it is about usability, seems that the concept could have multiple definitions, if you consider the experience and capabilities of the user, and not the designer whishes.

Look at this wonderful Web Browser called Opera and make an example from it. It has what every user needs in a quite simple interface. if you want to use the mouse, you have the gestures, but if you want to use the keyboard your have a whole miriad of shorcuts so powerful that would make mac and windows users blush in shame. That's what I am asking for in my GNOME and I find that for every new capability it would need to download more software.

I used GNOME Bittorrent client for a while. And yes, for quite basic stuff is just perfect, but then I found that in one particular torrent I had to do some hash checking (mathematical comparision of data) and... guess what! There is no checking in that software! Propietary and boring OS (hehe mac and win) are out of question here; you must download / buy extra software to do... well.. anything, but why does GNOME have this kind of inconsistencies being an open source project? Could be that taking that usability goal to the extreme is counterproductive?

I do not know. GNOME is nice, visually (OpenOffice looks more than great!) but its simplicity seems to be a drawback, more than an advantage. I think I am heading back to KDE, as it is not my ideal to complicate more my computing life using simplier or smaller Window Managers that are difficult to understand.
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December 2009
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