Having used Gnome for at least two years nearly exclusively, I decided to burn a Fedora 9 x86_64 KDE Live spin to a cd and boot from it. After all, this is major step in the development of a great free software *n*x desktop environment. I'd like to ask all users, especially those that fanatically cling to Gnome, to try this (or any other suitable) KDE 4 live cd and let us know what you think. What sucks, what rules.
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Member since:
2005-11-10
I've tried the KDE 4 edition of both Fedora and Kubuntu and got the feeling that KDE 4 is still in a "developer's preview" state. I know that is not a bad thing, because I still remember how dreadful GNOME 2.0 was. Nowadays, GNOME 2.x is marvelous. So, as a GNOME user, I am still waiting for a complete, polished, KDE 4 environment, so that I can compare it properly.
KDE 4.0 isn't really much better than KDE 3.x, usability wise. The must-die "apply" button on the preferences is still there, the "ok" and "cancel" buttons that do basically same thing are there too, the Dolphin file manager is not much simpler than Konqueror, Konqueror doesn't know how to do a direct search on Google and the new "Start Menu" is a complete, ugly, complicated mess.
I really like the underlying technology on KDE 4, but what keeps me on GNOME is the much simpler look & feel. Not that GNOME doesn't have it's share of usability problems, of course, but KDE is just plain worse.
Member since:2005-07-15
I am not trying to defend KDE.
But as a software developer, my experience is if someone mention usability without proper testing, usually just means preference. We are talking about the whole DE. So usability wise, it is not that easy to judge. Unless you mean your personal preference.
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2006-08-09
I sense a Gnome user.
But might the absense of "instant apply" be a conscious decision on the part of the KDE folks, or is "instant apply", in the consensus of UI gurus, something a desktop environment simply should do?
BTW in certain cases I like to have a "restore default" option.
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Member since:2005-11-10
Of course, GNOME is the best!
Instant apply is good usability, because the user gets to see immediately the results of his action. It is also good because you can get rid of a couple of buttons that have ambiguous meaning.
Very true. In my opinion, one usability rule that is sometimes forgotten is "forgive users for their mistakes". It is comprehensible that the user wants to go back on his decision and it's also comprehensible that he doesn't really recall what option we had selected before. We could add an "undo" button, for example. Mind you, this also applies to non "instant apply" settings.
