Because it's easy to forget that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Uh-huh. I am talking about the whole.
> superior anti-aliasing because files have been tweaked,
*eyes the message he's writing* Looks Anti-aliased to me.
> careful choice of desktop theme
Er, this is personal preference, plain and simple, and quite frankly a non-issue. Though I will say that I have found nothing wrong with either the Gnome or KDE base themes.
careful work on menus
Menus are fine.
> choice of fonts
Personal preference though I find the defaults fine.
> window borders
Personal preference though currently I am using the basic KDE borders just fine.
colour schemes
Personal preference though currently I am using one of those provided with KDE.
wallpaper
Personal preference though currently I am using one provided with KDE.
> automatic placement of icons for networking and devices,
*eyes the desktop* Uh, not even Windows does that. That's a Macism, isn' it? Again, personal preference and quite frankly one I'm glad they didn't turn on.
automatic mounting of windows partitions in fstab,
Wouldn't know on this one given that I blew Windows away to do this install. Don't recall for my last install (dual-boot on my game machine to test Transgaming) though I don't believe it does. Question is, where do ya put it? For which UID? Those are personal preference, again.
> dma for ide disks already enabled,
I think this is the one valid point so far. Though I dunno if DMA is enabled. Isn't automatic DMA something done now in the Kernel and not through hdparem?
> a centralised help system that fires off one icon,
You mean like the one I removed from the task bar?
Some distros do all this and some, like Debian, don't.
So far you've rattled off a ton of personal preference items and one, maybe two, valid technical points. If that's the only problem that's a marked improvement and far from "lack of polish" since those same issues, barring the two technical ones, could be equally applied to Windows or MacOS.
> These things all come under "look and feel" and are easy to > underestimate, but they do have a marked impact on the user even if > it's largely unconscious.
And yet I, and many others, find the defaults perfectly servicable. That is the best you can ask for, servicable. Because anything more than that is great for one person, downright ugly for another. As an example I really don't like this trend for everyone to emulate MacOS's latest look. I don't like it when I fire up my Mac laptop, why would I want it as a default on my Linux game machine or my Linux laptop? Obviously other people think it's the kitty's teets and want it everywhere. That's grand, but let's not pretend that somehow it is better or worse when large portions of it are personal preference.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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