Umm...not to play a spoilt sport but I have run the latest KDE / GNOME and they are no where near the responsiveness, intuitiveness, userfriendliness that XP's (or M$) GUI offer. I see the GNOME community
I guess you're right if you consider someone moving from windows to linux. For someone who's not used a computer before, KDE and Gnome are really quite nice. Ofcourse, the Microsoft "Start" button is the best feature they have since a first timer will know where to "start".
time ago. See its the little things that matter. I can see that GNOME has come a long way, its now faster, more optimized but it still lacks a good "control panel" (infact AFAIK it doesnt have one). KDE is far
It does have a "Gnome Control Center". It's not directly accessible though. OTOH it has a separate menu that lets you access all the options of the control center, which I believe is not the most "novice friendly" way. But even then, if a novice wants to configure something he usually takes someone elses help. And novices do constitute the overwhelming majority of the computer users.
far ahead of GNOME in this case. But KDE is bloatware, I agree. I still
Well you argue that KDE has all the necessary features and then you go on to call it bloatware because it has those features. Barring the slightly unintuitive "Start button", it is a very good desktop environment. It has everything anyone would want (regardless of whether you want it or not). If you want less then you have gnome, even less you have xfce. The minimalist would fall in love with fluxbox/blackbox. As an additional note, the gnome/kde menu is (atleast in my opinion) the best menu layout you can have. Anoone who knows how to read can easily get through the menus and get his/her work done.
Just to disillusion you, Microsoft has no threat from Linux's DEs. None of them match upto the potential of their UI. However, they have to fear linux on the server end.
I recently coaxed my mother and sister (both very regular windows users since the last 4-5 years) to move to linux. I set up the system for them and showed them where the apps they wanted were (openoffice, firefox, ). They soon found out about the other stuff (home directory, xmms, kaffeine, ark, etc.) all by themselves. And they absolutely LOVE the eye-candy of KDE. They've been using the system for 5 months now without any hassles whatsoever. They haven't complained even once so far about missing features or anything of that sort. there is the odd confusion at times due to differences in OOo and MS Office, but thats a given. (Novice users don't RTFM ;) )
Agreed. But as I said none of the DEs are a threat to M$. Linux, is a very stable core but you need a good shell to compete with them. Besides, you forget that very few vendors have opened up their hardware specs so that the OSS community can build drivers for Linux. Major vendors still havent extended their support... So, while you hack at your machine to get something working, Windows guys are just gonna pop in that driver CD, install that driver, reboot and enjoy their hardware :/
True, this is one genuine problem, though the scenario is getting better as time goes on. All we need is one manufacturer to come out with an ad saying "comes pre-installed with the most robust OS" or something like that. But that will impact the international scenario to a certain extent, not us much. For home users in India, the PC assembly freelancers need to take the initiative. Siddhesh -- http://siddhesh.tk -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
