OSNews

What Thom dislikes, I like. What he likes, I dislike.
I think the title bar is just horrible, especially the minimize, restore and close buttons. I like the scrollbar a little bit, at least the colors of the scrollbar. I think the bold fonts are important where they are, they make things stand out. I couldn't imagine normal fonts instead. However I don't like them being Bitstream Vera Sans, I would prefer Luxi Sans or Dejavu Sans. Regarding openSUSE's kickoff, I really love it, it's easy to use, it's organized and has many options, not sure why Thom dislikes it, really. I dislike widgets, they are really thick (input boxes, submit buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, grippies, resizers, etc...). The widgets should be pixel-precise, for instance input boxes should have one-pixel borders instead of blurry borders. The black taskbar is huge, it should be a lot smaller. To sum up, everything is thick, big, not refined. The KDE team should use graphic designers instead of coders to create their GUI, there has been many suggestions and offers in the mailing lists, and no one has listened.

Actually, they have good icon designers but the theme is really a mess..

KDE has a very good and dedicated, but slightly overworked team of graphical designers. They've been doing a great job, even though there indeed is still a lot to be improved.

But saying it has been designed by coders is simply wrong. The applications are written by coders, and they probably didn't spend enough time yet on using every widget properly, aligning and stuff - but that's not the artists fault.

Typos fixed, thanks guys.

Erm...

http://www.osnews.com/img/19159/shot.jpg

And none of those can be altered in KDE 4.0.0 (or in 3.x for that matter). Obnoxious.

Edited 2008-01-13 21:45 UTC

Oh yeah, completely didn't notice. Probably because they're mostly in configuration dialogs that I really don't make a habit of looking at very often. I agree that the configure dialog page titles really don't need to be bolded. Nothing to get furious about, but different strokes I guess..

Bllaah...

The screenshot isn't bad. The text in bold is supposed to be in bold. The issue of font-size is a different thing though.

But of course, what would you know about typography.

The menu IS fixed size, though the size is configurable. For people who have gotten used to a menu that expands to fit the contents the use of a scrollbar is awkward. Perhaps studies have shown it to be better, but it makes it inconsistent with all previous experience for users and with application menus.

The menu style and transitions are a matter of taste, not science. Studies may have shown that this menu is better. I will not argue the veracity of the conclusions in either direction. The fact is that for many the new menu is far from an optimal user experience. Spatial browsing was also found to be more efficient yet met with much resistance when Gnome introduced it as you may recall.

Well, partly. The style may be partly taste, but the value of fluid transitions has been quite extensively studied. A transition done right is always easier to understand than a sudden change (which can induce change blindness).

It's not the transition I have issues with, it's the sliding concept in itself. I have a 22" 1680x1050 screen, why the need to cram all the menus into one tiny sliding box? It hides the menu path from view, and makes it unnecessarily complex to travel backwards.

Edited 2008-01-13 22:13 UTC

Yeah I think it would be better if the whole menu actually expanded sideways when you entered categories.. Like the columns view in Dolphin or Finder.

Mostly I just use KRunner anyway, so the design of the menu is mostly irrelevant. In KDE 3.5 i just removed it entirely. It's always faster to type.

Well, what bothered me about the new menu is how some things you can just roll over (the five tabs at the bottom) while some things you have to click on (the 'back' button, the scrollbar).

It doesn't feel very consistent to me.

You can disable the activate-on-mouseover thing somewhere, but since my Ubuntu machine is powered down, I can't check exactly where it was. Probably right-click the Kickoff button.

Aha! Yes, that's it.

I'm just not used to configuring KDE any more. :-) I set it and leave it...

...and it never really became popular. Ubuntu at least has made the good old browser mode default and not without a reason. Actually, I forced myself for some time to use spatial mode as everyone hyped it as the next big thing being sooo much more usable. However I never really felt comfortable with windows that offer not even an address bar, so when I saw that Ubuntu defaulted to browsing mode it came as a relief.

Quite possible the new menu replacement may suffer a similar fate, being ignored or replaced by distributors.

am I the only one, or is the original kickoff in OpenSuSE 10.3 really so much more usable than the derivate found in KDE 4? Actually, when testing OpenSUSE I was surprised to find that I actually liked SuSE's kickoff, basically because how it integrates the type ahead search.

I tend to agree with Thom's criticism of the Kickoff menu. This is the first thing I disable every time I install OpenSUSE. The last time I really did try and almost got accustomed to it. But I was still struggling to hit the right tab and to find the right program category. Scrolling sideways in a menu seems to be some very intricate way of torture. It was such a relief going back to something sane (Tastymenu) that I won't probably touch Kickoff again anytime soon. Let's just hope that the alternatives are ready before 4.1 ships.

Thanks to your post, I just discovered tastymenu and it is a thing of beauty. I can't understand for the life of me why that is not the default menu in every kde installation.

I am hoping that this is just due to a lack of visibility of the project. Does the project have a web site?

If any of its developers are around, I hope that they provide an implementation for KDE4. I really like where kde4 is going, but I also dislike Kickoff.

http://www.notmart.org/tastymenu/

..there you are, sir!

They do not have KDE4 version ATM, apparently the code needs some cleanup. They are going to use Kickoff's code as a base for it.

"but on my desktop at work it flies (Geforce 7900 so nothing special). Works so much better than Compiz ever did."

I have a Geforce 6600 GT.I compared Kwin to Compiz, Compiz(I installed compiz plugins only) is obviously faster, take tab swithing on Konqueror for example, it takes 0.5 sec to respond to the mouse click.

"I used it a lot in 3.5, but in 4.0 its just too buggy."

I agree, selection of all the text in a <textarea> from buttom up is annoying.

Edited 2008-01-14 03:14 UTC

Hmm, I don't see this here (debian packages in experimental)



Another thing that I don't see here. The default system settings window is ~650 pixels high here.



Alt+Drag anywhere on the window



Sounds like your packages are messed up.



Works here.



It really sounds like your packages are seriously broken. There are a lot of things wrong with KDE 4.0, but the list you have shouldn't be among them.



Yeah, desktop icons are seriously broken. I just turned them off and actually like the clean look. Probably won't bother turning them back on, even when they get fixed.



The "text editor" is probably gedit from gnome. I actually like the Open With feature, but I agree it should probably be in a submenu. Konqueror is broken in lots of different and more serious ways in 4.0 though.



Well I've installed KDE 4.0 on 3 machines so far and haven't seen most of your issues, so I suspect your packages are a little messed up.

I agree with you on most points. However for the system menu you can resize the window by doing an [alt] [right mouse button] drag. I have the same problem from time to time on my X60s and X30. It is far worse on the eeePC though. Heck you can't even get through installation of Kubuntu on the eee unless you know [alt] [right drag].

Thanks for the tip. But unfortunately the windows are still unresizable vertically. I can make them narrower but not shorter.

There was an update to the packages today... but no change in KDE4 behavior.

The window manager does not seem to understand that the panel is taking up space on the screen and opens windows with the lower part of them under the panel. Worse than that, the system settings windows come up at a size that puts the "Cancel, Apply, OK" buttons under the panel and the windows are not resizable. Since the window will not move past the edge of the screen, and there is no way to resize or hide the panel, the only way to hit apply is to try to visualize where the buttons must be, guess how many times to hit tab, hit "Enter" and see if it worked. And I'm running at 1280x768 resolution.

That really does sound like a big no-no to me :O It wouldn't have taken long for them to make the windows resizable and make them adjust the window size to the screen.. It really doesn't take that many lines of code, I have done it myself too.. I know this is the first release but since that is still quite a big issue and so easy to fix I can't understand why have no one fixed it before release?

All the other things I can quite understand as KDE4 is still under very heavy development.

I agree with you on the quality of the release, it feels very first beta release at the moment. They desperately need some graphic and usability designers on the team. Word to KDE devs, bigger doesn't mean better! Yet everything is too big and it makes everything feel cluttered.

Why does every desktop icon have a a black box surrounding them, pretty much taking all the screen real estate even though I only have 5 icons on my desktop.

I agree with Thom about Kwin, its extremely buggy and has crashed on me several times, I get visual artifacts on the screen everytime I open or move a window. Compiz may be buggy to some, but I have never had major issues with it, even going as far back as the compizquinn version for Ubuntu, at least not issues with the type of artifacts and general slowness I'm seeing with Kwin.

The drag drop thing for Dolphin was something i pointed out quite a while back in one of these KDE4 posts. Its been an issue for a while, heck before you couldn't even drop links in that area, so the fact that they have that working is good I suppose, but they should have taken it a step further.

There are a whole bunch of bad usability and just plain stupid design choices throughout the DE, which doesn't bode well for the future, imo, if they haven't figured out what they want as of yet. Like Thom said the status bar on Konqueror and Dolphin are almost as big as the menubars. The file menus are still cluttered, though it looks cleaner than its ever been. Contrast is a huge issue with the default theme, imo.

The panel is damn near unusable, it doesn't do anything and definitely doesn't have feature parity with the kicker panel. That wouldn't be an issue if you could drag things to it or or move things around. Right now everything is static. Kick-off is the worst thing i have ever used. Its cluttered, its unbearably ugly and I find just plain useless. The regular old app launcher would have looked better in the end and is far more usable.

The systems settings thing isn't all that bad. I personally would love to see KDE adopt instant apply on their desktop. I find it more user friendly and I hate having to hit apply all the time and with the control panel that is more obvious since anytime you move to another section it will always prompt you to apply changes and that is freaking annoying. I think it would work wonders in certain areas, such as the wallpaper panel, being able to see your wallpaper changing instantly without hitting apply would be great. I also think the wallpaper panel needs to change, it feels old and constrained and they should take a page from gnome, Vista, and OSX which have larger, more spacious wallpaper panels with huge thumbnails and options. For the widgets I think they should just take a look at Vista. The widget window is a simple transparent window that lets the user drag and drop widgets on to the desktop. Right now the one they have feels to cluttered and redundant.

these are just my first thoughts after using KDE4 since the first beta. I had hoped that some of these issues would get resolved, but apparently not. Stability is still a major issue and for KDE I think that is a shame, because I've always found their releases to be rock solid and this is the first time I've been disappointed in that area. I think they are on to something though, and if they were to get better designers, which they definitely could get since they had tried to get artists to participate in the process for plasma (though they didn't seem to use any of the ideas proposed by very enthusiastic artists) and try to translate that into a proper workable HIG that stresses usability over the kitchen sink syndrome, then I we will see something really special.

They have some.. Apparently you don't like their designs, but others do.



That complaint made no sense. The status bar plus the filter bar is as big as the toolbars, but the status bar alone is fine.



Correct. No one ever said it would.

The poor quality and general QA problems, embarrassing as they may be, will eventually get resolved. But after all the talk about their finally bringing their UI quality up to snuff... it appears that little to no actual progress has been made in all this time, and that there is actually little interest within the project in doing so. It was all just talk.

It appears that after the dust settles, it will just be the same jumbled, haphazard, catch as catch can UI on top of fancier libraries.

Perhaps that is the most disappointing thing of all.

Edited 2008-01-13 23:48 UTC

Up to snuff with what? There is no UI out there that was clearly better than the old KDE 3 series (your personal biases aside). Not to say that there aren't some aspects of other UIs that have advantages over KDE, but overall it is comparable to anything else out there.



Hmm.. Dolphin, Plasma, Okular, all the games and educational software, Gwenview, system settings... All those are nothing? Honestly I don't really know what you were expecting, but there are lots of changes in KDE 4.0, and a lot of those have made the UI simpler than in KDE 3.5.

"This is like alcoholism. If you cannot admit that you might have a problem, you'll never get anywhere." - Linus Torvalds on LKML

Edited 2008-01-14 00:11 UTC

but there are lots of changes in KDE 4.0, and a lot of those have made the UI simpler than in KDE 3.5.

That is something I find quite funny For years the KDE camp has been complaining about how GNOME sucks because they have removed quite a lot of unnecessary clutter and features and now that KDE4 is aiming for similar thing it is seen as a positive thing Irony ^^

It's weird for me to see so many complaints about KWin, as it works fine here, while compiz is barely usable and crashes all the time... I do know KDE pushes the envelope here quite a bit, and that's in many cases the reason things don't work properly. Unless the underlying stuff (X, drivers, Qt) get fixed, things won't improve. By bringing KDE 4.0.0 out, these issues are exposed and can be fixed. A good thing, imho.

I stopped reading after encountering the following errors in the first few paragraphs

Continued reading didn't get any better...this was poor even by web standards. I am sure that Thom had something to say, I just couldn't focus through the lack of editing. This would be a fine first draft....

Which brings me to my point. It is pretty comical as it is basically a rant criticizing the lack of attention to detail in KDE...

Is it intentional farce?

Ah yes, a few typos slip through, and suddenly, the article is invalid. Great way to divert attention from the real issues at hand.

May I remind you that English is not my first language.

+1

What a stupid comment...

It's not just a few typos, in and of themselves.

You trash KDE 4.0 here for being careless in design and/or execution, but you didn't even spend the extra 15-20 minutes to proofread this properly. When the pot is called out as black, you retreat with diversionary tactics, and adopt a "high road" posture.

Article? It reads like a blog post. I love the stuff on things like Menuet, Haiku, or the Nintendo OS; but there is just no end to UI nitpicking. Maybe it's time for introspection:

http://jmoiron.net/media/legacy/images/ss/the%20future%20of...

Err...



And:



The KDE project claims 4.0.0 is a stable release, while clearly, it is not - many experiences to the contrary prove this. We specifically mention that the site themes we have here are NOT final, and under heavy development. The only complete theme is the standard theme, and that one works just fine, because WE were not afraid to postpone and postpone the release of v4 until all the bugs we could find in the beta phase were fixed. We do not promote alpha quality software as being stable.

That is the difference.

Edited 2008-01-14 13:22 UTC

Man, what a crock. If you can't get over a few typos, and just read the damn article, don't bother posting. Thom isn't a native english speaker, and sometimes mistakes happen. I've seen typos in books, magazines, the web, you name it, nobody is perfect, except maybe you.

Yes.

Weird thing about kickoff is that many indeed like it, and find it much more usable (as the studies indicate). I personally agree with you, I don't like it - but then again, I don't care, I always use alt-f2 anyway.

One thing that I have noticed is that some people seem to think of software as being like Darwinian evolution, evolving from simple to better and complex. Of course, that is a distortion of the concept of evolution, which favors organisms which are well adapted to their environment. There are actually many orders of magnitude more simple organisms than complex ones. That's true whether you measure by number *or* by overall mass.

With regards to software, I often hear people complain that it has stagnated. That we've been using the WIMP model for years, and that it is time for our desktops to evolve.

I would argue that WIMP is still supreme because it is better adapted to its environment than its challengers.

And, getting to the actual topic, I would argue that the traditional cascading menus are simple, functional, and do a damned good job fulfilling their function. Do we really need a whiz-bang replacement?

Yes. I've used both the SLAB menu and the spin-off Kickoff menu, and they are both utterly bloody awful.

I like KickOff as well. It's one of the reasons I use openSUSE despite its slow package manager.

Maybe Thom should join the KDE usability team instead of just bitching.

They can't - not if the result is to be art.