Gimlé

A couple of interesting user-interface articles have appeared on the net. One argues for sane defaults and simplicity while the other argues for user-configurability and massive user control. I won’t argue for one side over the other. Just ask yourself, what was the easiest and least painful Operating System user-interface you tried?

And how configurable was that?

These articles are interesting for other reasons as well. Havoc used to be the chair of the board on the Gnome Foundation and is still considered to be a bit of an authority in the project. Mosfet used to be heavily involved in KDE development but after numerous disagreements he decided to pull out of KDE development and focus on his own apps (most of which happen to be KDE based). Both are good programmers.

Neither position is new in the Free Software User Interface debate. Emacs is still the supreme king of configurability while the GNUstep project used to have a vehement anti-theme stance. Rightfully so, IMO, themes mean that the User Interface designer is trying to shoot at a constantly moving target, turns the concept of consistency into a joke.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I just unmerged KDE, the Gentoo GNU/Linux equivalent of uninstalling the whole thing.

For those who don’t know, KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and it is, as advertised, a desktop environment.

A desktop environment, on the otherwise graphically barren free unices, involves creating some sort of easy to use graphical user interface for the computer system that enables the user to manage the system, launch applications and manage his or her tasks.

Basic things that we take for granted on all the other operating systems.

The reason why I uninstalled KDE, and this is why I intentionally stated the obvious above regarding the purpose of a DE, is that it did too much, and it did it slowly.

And the interface was and is a clone of the Windows interface (itself a flawed clone of the mildly flawed Macintosh System 6-7).

Free Software tends to be flexible, so the interface isn’t much of a problem. It even offers you the ability to run KDE applications with a macintosh-like external menubar. Although does miss the point of the mac interface entirely by omitting an Apple-menu clone in one corner and an Applications menu in the other.

But all of that has nothing to do with the reason why I uninstalled it.

It’s not as if I’m not used to it. I always try it on every new release (this time starting with the sixth release candidate of version 3.1) and I always give up on it after about six weeks, give or take.

It does too much. It tries to be a whole system, not just a desktop environment. It has countless utilities and applications to do pretty much anything from configuring your basic settings to word-processing to walking your dog and kicking the cat.

And a truckload of stupid little productivity wasters masquerading as games.

I shouldn’t have to think about the desktop environment. It should just give me an interface for me to manage my files and applications.

I don’t have the option of merely installing the libraries and the basic desktop environment without installing the media framework, the so-bad-it’s-almost-unusable-on-ppc arts sound server, printing framework and all the related dependancies (can be quite substantial).

I’m sure that this is merely a matter of testing and packaging, and not really a problem with KDE itself.

Most of these problems will be solved, for sure. The development speed of KDE is so fast it’s almost alarming.

But there is another problem.The dealbreaker.

Speed and memory use. Using KDE instead of a simple window manager (like OpenBox or WindowMaker) is like being able to halve your CPU speed and pull out one of your computers’ RAM chips using software only. All while doubling the power-drain and halving the battery-life.

This isn’t exactly a problem with KDE but a general problem that involves the memory use of C++ programs on the Free Software OSes on one hand and some fundamental speed problems with Xfree86 (the graphical windowing system).

That’s the official excuse at least.

But it can’t quite be true since OpenBox, the window manager I’m currently using, is much faster, results in a much more responsive system, and happens to be written in C++, running on Xfree86 with nice features such as font antialiasing.

Gnome, the other Desktop Environment for Xfree86, felt a little bit more responsive the last time I tried it (version 2.0) but didn’t feel quite as mature as KDE.

I’ll emerge version 2.2 tomorrow.

I’d do a thorough review of KDE but until I replace my main machine with some sort of speed monster, any such review would be clouded by frustration, annoyance and anger.

Although those happen to be the very emotions that accompany any full-time use of KDE on this machine.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Dorothea Salo has just found out that sometimes an ugly application with a badly designed user interface will do the job better than the pricey proprietry competitor.

There is one thing I like about GNU/linux and FreeBSD, something I have come to rely on, and that is the fact that if it has something to do with system maintainance or automation, then free software has something rock-solid to sort you out.

This is actually the one area where Mac OS X lags behind its freer counterparts. The Apple tools are, and have always been, horribly inadequate. Norton Disk Doctor or Diskwarrior (most often both, if you want to be really safe) are de facto required purchases for any new Mac user.