OSNews

I agree with a lot of the stuff in there, particularly about the Adept front-end and the awful ever present root password dialogue, but not others. It just looks as if some space needed to be filled in:

And that is what I miss when using KDE. It has more of a "each project for itself" mentality, which are then bolted together before release date to form the K Desktop Environment.

I get the exact opposite impression more than any other Unix desktop environment I've ever used. You can see that a KDE application is built on top of kdebase, kdelibs etc. You can see from the UI layout, the settings, the way Kopete works with Kontact and everything about it that there is a common base being inherited from. In something like Gnome you always feel that applications, particular like GAIM, are pushed to you as Gnome applications when it's pretty clear that they are not when you use them. Integration is bunged on as an afterthought through some 'bindings' that end up barely working.

It does not feel as if it is part of a greater whole; whereas Gaim integrates much better with the rest of GNOME

Hmmmm. Kopete and Kontact integration? GAIM tries to integrate with the rest of what is called Gnome, but it falls pretty short. Pretty bad example I think. The problem is something like Gnome has no real infrastructure for making this happen in a universal and predictable way, in the way KDE apps use DCOP and now DBUS for communication, and it shows. The underlying framework is something users never see directly, but it does come out.

The climax of this is Amarok; it even has its own live CD.

Hmmmm. We're talking about the coherency of Amarok as an application within KDE, not that there is an Amarok live cd you can try out.

KDE's root password dialog needs some love.

It's always looked pretty awful.

KDE features a very confusing and incomprehensible power management configuration screen (klaptop).

The laptop modules were an absolute disaster. You got modules in there even if you weren't running a particular kind of laptop, and the UIs were awful. It does seem that the penny has dropped with this and something will be done about it.

Kubuntu's front-end to apt, adept, is another one of those graphical disasters.

Indeed it is. I first started using the Adept front-end a few weeks ago, and even though I am presented with awful UIs almost daily I had to ask myself the question "What do I do here and where on Earth do I start" about ten times before I could work out how to even remotely use it.

It's damn awful, but it really didn't need to be. A bit of UI thought is the easy bit. They could even have just lifted YaST's front end, or even ported YaST to Kubuntu. Not that YaST is great from a UI point of view, but it's much better than that.

Last but not least: get a decent naming scheme. Seriously. K this, K that; just... Don't. Really. I suggest a global renaming of KDE applications into normal, k-less names.

Yer, I mean who'd get anywhere with a naming scheme like that? iChat, iTunes, iPhoto.... I mean, OS X should be called iOS or iX shouldn't it? And what does that 'i' stand for anyway? And Evolution. Is that a Gnome application, or is it some application for teaching Darwin's theory?