Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Dec 2003 07:07 UTC
The latest beta of KDE's 3.2, beta 2, was released a few days ago. I installed the provided Fedora RPMs and had a look in this early pre-release version of the popular X11 desktop environment. Six screenshots are included. We look at both the strengths and the weaknesses of the DE.
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It's interesting how a few years ago KDE and Gnome were like night and day, but now they seem to be moving toward each other on a lot of issues, particularly pertaining to usability and general look & feel. I am not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but we'll surely find out soon.
You make some good points about KDE in general. I think the points you raised about things being "cluttered" is what turned me off to KDE a long time ago. It seems the KDE philosophy is lots of icons, lots of toolbars, lots of menus, lots and lots of GUI. Gnome, on the other hand, was sort of minimalistic, especially in 1.x. I liked Gnome better for that.
Now Gnome has more menus and more icons and more toolbars, but still not quite as many as KDE. I think both DEs could take some hints from Apple's sense of usability here. Oftentimes in UI design, less is more, way more. A toolbar (like the ones in MS' Office XP and Kspread both) with hundreds of buttons loses its purpose because it is too difficult to find any one icon when you need it. A toolbar with few icons (think Apple Keynote) with the truly most-accessed features gets much more use and increases productivity. More specific features should just be within file menus as at least there categorization breaks down the search for a function.
But I do like the progress being made... that's for sure.