On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 11:14, Chris Hedemark wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Thursday, February 27, 2003, at 10:36 AM, Brent Fox wrote: > > > Actually, there is very little dependence on Gnome. With GTK2, most of > > the useful widgets were moved out of the Gnome libs and into GTK > > itself. > > And your average non-programmer KDE user will ask "what is the > difference?" (note that I am not quite asking that, but the lines are > blurry)
The "non-programmer" does not care what the difference between GTK2 and Gnome is. However, they will wonder why the buttons in KMail look different than the buttons in redhat-config-network. To them, the buttons look different for no conceivable reason. What good does that difference achieve? > And I like the language used... "very little dependence" (which is > still dependence... it's like being "a little pregnant"... this is a > boolean switch) I said "very little" because I'm not quite sure. I *believe* that you can get the redhat-config-* tools with a KDE only install without installing all of Gnome. You will need libgnomecanvas and a few other non-gnome gtk packages, but not all of Gnome itself. I may be wrong. For what it's worth, KDE has the same problems. Try installing KMail without getting KDE. It's part of kdenetwork, which pulls in kdelibs and kdebase, which pulls in qt, and on and on. > > This is only my opinion and I don't mean to flame anyone, but it seems > > to me that to argue against unifying the look of Gnome and KDE is to > > argue against the concept of consistency. > > No, it is to argue for personal choice. I don't like Gnome. I don't > like how it looks. I don't like how it behaves. I don't want it. If > you want to use it, go ahead, but don't taint my wm of choice in the > name of bland consistency. If you don't want Gnome or GTK on your system, then that's your personal choice. Nobody's restricting that. However, part of that choice means that you can't use the config tools because they require GTK. The same way that not installing QT means that I can't use KMail. What would you prefer the config tools to be written with QT? If we did that, then all the Gnome users would have to install QT in order to use them. We'd be in the exact same situation. We had to pick a toolkit and GTK is what we chose. We did what we thought was best. Is it right for everyone? Maybe not. It doesn't mean we have anything against any other toolkit or that we're trying to force GTK on people. It's just a toolkit. > If you believe in consistency, why aren't you using Windows? Over 90% > of computer users in this country are. To argue against using Windows > is to argue against the concept of consistency. I'm trying to make it easier for the that 90% of computer users to migrate to Linux. If that means that Linux loses some of it's quirkiness and user-unfriendliness, then so be it. I want my Mom to be able to use it. > > Consistency is a good thing. > > *choke* > > If the founders of Gnome and KDE really believed that, they would still > be using CDE & Motif. If not that, then MS Windows. I don't know what the founders of Gnome and KDE believed. What I do know is that Apple was able to create Aqua for MacOS X in less time than KDE and Gnome have existed. As far as I can tell, Aqua is generally regarded as superior to just about all other desktops in terms of consistency, usability, and look and feel. The Linux desktop efforts are just beginning to understand things about UI design that Apple has known for years. Consistency *is* a good thing. As Joel Spolsky writes, "The cardinal axion of all user interface design: A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html) Which is basically a rewording of the "Principle of Least Surprise." Just about every book ever written on user interface design reinforces this over and over. Having two sets of desktops, applications, and graphics toolkits that look and behave differently violates this. > Linux as a whole, and Red Hat in particular, are not consistent with > UNIX. There doesn't seem to be a push to make it consistent with UNIX. > There are of course good & bad aspects to it, but the simple fact of > the matter is that RH's actions are inconsistent with this statement > about consistency. :) As Josep said, the UNIX world isn't consistent among it's many variants. This partially explains why the rest of the world adopted Windows instead of UNIX. UNIX fragmentation was a Bad Thing (TM). As far as Red Hat is concerned, do we produce perfect UIs? Are we always consistent? Absolutely not! There are dozens of UI things that we do that are bad. We're trying to correct them, but it takes time and we have a lot to learn. I fully acknowledge that we are not perfect. > > We had to make some changes to achieve that consistency, but that is > > not > > adulteration. > > I respectfully (and strongly) disagree about the latter point. > > > In all honesty, we made just as many changes (if not, more) to Gnome > > for > > 8.0 as we did to KDE. We get bashed for not giving KDE enough > > attention, then we get bashed for making too many improvements. > > Honestly, did RH customers *ask* for unification of KDE & Gnome? Did > the KDE project ask for it? Back in the 7.x series we did some usability studies (some TriLUGers participated, I think). We had one group of newbies and one group of experienced users. We found that the experienced users had very little problems using Red Hat Linux. However, we found that many new users had lots of problems. Many didn't know what Gnome, GTK, KDE, QT, etc. were, nor did they care. But they do wonder why some apps don't look and behave the same way as others. Mozilla uses it's own UI toolkit. So does OpenOffice.org. So does KDE and all it's apps. Same with Gnome and it's apps. Not to mention older apps that still use tk and such. So it's not that users asked specifically for KDE and Gnome to be unified (since they didn't know what KDE and GNOME were), but it was clear that big improvements in consistency and usability were needed. 8.0 was our first attempt to unify all these different looks into something that "feels" like a polished OS instead of just a big collection of Free Software. 8.0 was a big success and we're continuing in that direction. Obviously, it didn't please everybody. In my opinion, such changes are necessary for Linux to appeal to a wider audience than it currently has. Even if every UNIX user in the world migrated to Linux, that's still less than 5% of the desktop market. Why should the community be satisfied with only 5%? So Linux needs to appeal to Windows users and we still need major usability improvements to achieve that. Cheers, Brent _______________________________________________ TriLUG mailing list http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ: http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html
