OSNews

I don't want to configure much and I'd prefer it just worked without changing any settings

I'm saying this with no offensive intent, please try to take it as being so. What I feel fairly frequently, when people start to talk about configurability and customisability differences between Gnome and KDE, that the people who say I-don't-want-to-spend- my-life-configuring-things have to come from some other planet, or maybe from another galaxy.

What I mean by this is that why on earth should anyone spend any amount of time configuring his x desktop, apart from an initial setup and maybe once or twice a year when personal preferences might change considerably for a reason. Do these people install linuxes so often that this becomes an issue ? Then, if they install so much, why do they say they don't have time to spend on configuring the desktop ? Or they don't know how to save their settings ?

All in all, my opinion is, that after some time spent for customizing one's desktop (Gnome or KDE or whatever else), the later relatively minor configuration changes should be easy to do and giving as much free hand in doing so as humanly possible. Considering this, I always found KDE more easy to manage and always becoming easier, while when doing similar minor changes in Gnome often resulted in hairs being pulled out, faces getting deep scratches and mothers' being mentioned in not so polite contexts.

What I've always wanted to have in Gnome is a master switch to change into some uber user mode where I'd have the flexibility and modularity of kde behaving like gnome. Yeah, tell me about bad dreams

You have a point, but even if your desktop is only configured once, the remnants of the configuration tools lie all over the place and there are more preferences windows to go through when you want to change something small. Ever see the old GAIM preferences window?

Mind you, with GNOME I never changed anything except wallpaper and the panel applets, but with KDE i spent an awful lot of my time changing things. I don't even know why, maybe it was because I could, or because GNOME's defaults and behaviour is more 'sane' for me.

The issue doesn't always lie with configuration; it's more a general design problem. Do you include a feature that's used by infrequently by only 1/1000th of the users? Particularly when it's unimportant or the other way requires a second click or a command at the terminal.

But even so, you do config things a lot more than just once, there is usually more than one computer involved in your life. I have my laptop, my desktop, girlfriend's computer, work computer, school computer.

Corporate computers sometimes have default settings and no config options, and if the defaults of a particular system aren't sane, you cannot change them. I really think that even if you are going to allow lots of configurable, more focus should be put into the defaults and most used configuration settings. In GNOME you can use the gconf-editor or terminal to change a lot of lesser used settings which didn't deserve a place in the UI for whatever reason.

OS X doesn't have any action for double clicking the title bar here... and I got used to that.. well really i just stopped maximizing windows since I found it wasn't really all that useful. I think that the design philosophies tend to believe that if the system is good enough 'configuration' won't be necessary. Only things like desktop preferences, wallpaper, screensaver, etc.

And, just out of interest, GNOME discussed a master uber-user switch and found that it was bad design .. ah here it is: http://live.gnome.org/ScratchPad/Configuration

Edited 2007-02-17 20:42

Well, configurability is a double enged sword.
It gives more ways to fix things but it also makes it much easier to break stuff. Options rarely are completly otrthogonal and increasing their number increases the number of their broken combinations exponentially and thus makes getting the usefull one more complex.
It's not only about visual clutter but also about polluting the functionall face of an application with technicall concepts that aren't really relevant to getting your work done.
The more options are there that you don't understand the longer the user would crawl in darkness, distracted from his/hers primary focus. Sometimes it's even worth bending over some app's limitation, especially when it was introduced by a usability savvy designer.
Worst, configurability gives devs a convenient excuse for not fixing architectural flaws, giving alternative between broken with this or broken with that.
Look how radical and disrupting the turn towards hal have been. And what for? Just to free user from modyfyying one damn line in /etc/fstab. If you'd do a survey back then before all of this was implemented most dev's whould say the effort was not worth the perceived benefit. The fact that is was initiated by Gnome people and deployed there much quicker that inside KDE tells a thing or two.

"Do these people install linuxes so often that this becomes an issue ?"

Surely, there are some who think that if something does not work (meaning, they don't know how to make it work), the whole system has to be reinstalled. Or maybe they got spoiled by the concept of reinstalling the OS all three months which is very popular with some MICROS~1 products, at least here in Germany. :-)

"Or they don't know how to save their settings ?"

Same here: It's possible! My uncle uses KDE for a week now. He created a user, configured everything, then he wanted to change the user name, so he deleted user "foo" and created a new user "bar". Can you imagine how surprised he was when all his settings were gone? "How can I undo this?" he asked panically... sorry I could not help him. This leads me to a question: Has KDM a function to rename a user (should affect /etc/passwd and /etc/group)?

"Considering this, I always found KDE more easy to manage and always becoming easier, while when doing similar minor changes in Gnome often resulted in hairs being pulled out, faces getting deep scratches and mothers' being mentioned in not so polite contexts."

While I personally had the need to change the look & feel of KDE (colors, window decorations, mouse focus etc.), which was very easy using the KDE control center, I did not notice the tendency to do this in GNOME. I like the concept of manually maintainable configuration files (text files) in GNOME which allows me to do remote changes with only a SSH session available, but I have to admit that I like the KDE control center because it makes configuration very easy. The content is structured well so you can find very quickly the aspects you want to change. But I'm not sure I could to this via CLI.

"What I've always wanted to have in Gnome is a master switch to change into some uber user mode where I'd have the flexibility and modularity of kde behaving like gnome. Yeah, tell me about bad dreams "

Something like this?

% su -
Password:
# setenv DISPLAY :0.0
# _

Das Uberbefehl! Here you go. :-)

How hard would it be to make GNOME for people who like configurability without complicating the UI.

Simple.

You go into GCONF, tick the option for advanced GUI preference option, and there you go. Even if you untick this, the changes you want can remain.

Please GNOME developers do this.

Why don't the advanced user people just use gconf to configure the interface?
I think it would be a nightmare to have every configuration dialog have a simple and advanced mode that is displayed on checking a setting in gconf. It would be better to just have the settings in gconf -- most are there anyway.

Is this a current option? If so, where do I find it?

Unless his comments are being taken out of context I don't understand why he's continually placing so much energy flaming Gnome developers. I started off with KDE and eventually switched over to Gnome for at least one good reason and that is simplistic design which is user friendly. Over time KDE seemed to get more bloated with unnecessary configuration options which most end users especially in a work environment would not need. For Linux distributions to have a larger market share there needs to be a design model which realizes most consumers are not Geeks that want to spend hours tweaking their systems. If Gnome wasn't a viable solution then why would most businesses running medium to large Enterprises choose Gnome over KDE? Maybe Linus's attitude is due to KDE losing more support each year from distribution developers such as Novell, Red Hat, etc. Anyway, while I respect his contributions to the Linux community for an individual who helped start the Linux movement which is in part about freedom of choice he shouldn't be taking sides.

The problem is not the simplistic design.

The problem is removal of functionality in order to get a simple design, rather than designing a logical ordered design.

It's not logical that Average Joe can switch between ESD, ALSA and OSS in Sound Preferences, but have to use GConf in order to switch on wireframes for windows (even hidden as a variable with a very weird name).

The problem with the options in KDE is not the many options, but the cluttered design. The GUI layout is horrible in KDE's Control Center - and that's the problem. And not the configuration options.

I've been a GNOME user for the past 3-4 years (since GNOME 2.6). I chose GNOME for similar reasons, i.e. I like simple and intuitive interfaces. At the time, KDE looked like it was designed and maintained by children. I know this isn't the case, but the results were similar.

This was the time when commercial vendors started getting serious about Linux. They had to make their decisions on desktop environments, and I'm not at all surprised that Red Hat, Ximian (later Novell), and eventually Ubuntu went the GNOME route. The ones that went KDE mostly withered. Mandrake almost went under, SUSE was acquired by a GNOME vendor, Corel is out of the Linux business, and Caldera became SCO.

But I object to your assertion that KDE has gotten more "bloated" over time. As I watch from the sidelines (as a GNOME user), KDE has been getting sleeker and more consistent. GNOME is just about done abandoning its componentized application framework, Bonobo, while KDE's KParts is emerging as the most powerful weapon of integration I've seen since the web browser. Trolltech is doing an amazing job with Qt4, bringing a truly state-of-the-art GUI toolkit to the free software desktop, whereas GTK+2 simply doesn't come close.

The philosophical difference I observe between the GNOME and KDE development communities is that while the GNOME team solves usability problems through simplification, the KDE team does so through innovative technologies. It's no surprise that GNOME's philosophy resulted in a more usable desktop much quicker than did KDE's. But it should also come as no surprise that KDE's philosophy would result in a more usable desktop in the long-run.

It may seem that the dust has settled on the desktop environment landscape. The big players took their sides long ago, picking GNOME. Maybe the pressure from these vendors has taken its toll on the project's ability to innovate? Maybe the realization of being passed-up by the big guys has been a call-to-arms for the KDE project? Regardless, the short-term is over, and the long-run is almost here. The second or third release of KDE4 will leave GNOME in the dust, initiating a new round of DE selection by the big vendors. I don't think it will turn out it GNOME's favor once again.

"Unless his comments are being taken out of context..."

His comments on this are almost ever getting taken out of context. The changes he request aren't stuff like "can i get this icon in cornflower blue?" it is always something sensible. See the printer dialog discussion for an example.

"If Gnome wasn't a viable solution then why would most businesses running medium to large Enterprises choose Gnome over KDE?"

Because off license issues. At least that is why it has become the SUN default desktop. LGPL is just very convienient for them.
But noone said that it was unusable as a corporate desktop, you must have dreamed that.

"For Linux distributions to have a larger market share there needs to be a design model which realizes most consumers are not Geeks that want to spend hours tweaking their systems."

So if someone gives you an parachute you are forced to jump from high places? No, obviously not.
And having sensible printing possebilitys doesn't mean you have to use them either.
You can even hide options from incompetent users.

I gave up on Gnome when i had an distribution in which by default the loggoff dialog did not have the option "shutdown". I agree that not every possebility, like different hibernation modes, have to be in there but "turn the dang thing off" is something i just will not accept missing. Instead, you could only get back to GDM and shut down from there.

Sure, i could have spent some time crawling through gconf (which is as good to have as windows registry) trying to fix it, but why would i when KDE is just an apt-get away.

Now, you ask why Linus doesn't just ignores this. But the thing is, people who try Linux will not judge its quality on basis of technologic analysis... they will judge it by "oh, linux doesn't even have basic printer capabilitys... i guess i stick with windows then" and i can see why this disturbs him.

I fully agree with you. I've been a KDE user previously, but switched to Gnome about a year ago. I was simply tired of having to do hours of re-configuring everything until it worked as I liked. This doesn't mean KDE is bad, it did just not behave the way I like it - but Gnome does. When I re-install a Gnome distro, there's only very little things I have to re-configure. Gnome simply works the way I like it, and it has everything I need. It just works. But still I'm not telling people that KDE sucks, because KDE definitely does not suck, it's simply not what *I* wanted.

I was simply tired of having to do hours of re-configuring everything until it worked as I liked. How can you say you spent hours configuring KDE, but Gnome just works? That statement is asinine. I spend 10 minuets configuring KDE to the way I like it, that includes downloading extra packages to get the themes and 'confusing' options I want.
I have no idea if I can configure Gnome to the way I like my windows displayed, I have not used it in years, but I assume it is not as easy as KDE. I like the close window 'X' on the left of the menu, and the rest of the buttons on the right.

i agree, i like gnome the way it is.

i hate using kde. and windows.

if linus hates gnome so much, he should go write his own ui, or he should go use KDE.

Why is he so BENT on making gnome like kde? An unusable ui nightmare?

He is not bent on making Gnome like KDE. Not even close. I'd hate that to happen.

But some morons cannot or will not understand, there is a difference between options with a sensible layout, no options at all, and a lot of options with no sensible layout.

Linus is opting for the first one, we have at the moment at solution closer to the second one, and KDE is the third one.

I agree with Linus as a Gnome Power User since Gnome 1.0.