OSNews

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. :-)

This leads me to a question: Has KDM a function to rename a user (should affect /etc/passwd and /etc/group)?

KUser should be close.

Something like this?

Well, not quite, but probably the closest thing of how that dream could end