Ode to Skulpture
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Jan 2013 18:19 UTC
KDE I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner - Apple's Platinum and QNX' PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture.
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May be I could try KDE4 now
by hyper on Tue 1st Jan 2013 19:18 UTC
hyper
Member since:
2005-06-29

KDE always alienated me because of ugly looking themes and icon spacing. That's what I expected when clicking on the screenshot link int the article. But I was slightly surprised: it actually looks tolerable ;)

I will now try to see if KDE4 could become my Gnome2 replacement when doing stuff in *nixes.

Thanks Thom!

Reply Score: 2

RE: May be I could try KDE4 now
by ndrw on Tue 1st Jan 2013 22:28 in reply to "May be I could try KDE4 now"
ndrw Member since:
2009-06-30

The UI theme/style can't change the way applications are written. KDE applications (more than pure Qt ones) come with loads of GUI widgets. All these MDIs, nested tabs, movable docks and toolbars look as if the authors felt obliged to demonstrate all the bells and whistles Qt and kdelibs come with.

As for the styles, I found the basic Qt styles (cleanlooks, polyester) the most pleasant and usable. Plasma is a different story, let me know if you see anything of matching quality.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Re:
by kurkosdr on Wed 2nd Jan 2013 00:22 in reply to "RE: May be I could try KDE4 now"
kurkosdr Member since:
2011-04-11

Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made.


Most consistent? Probably. As you said, CDE will never do things byitself. Best? Probably not, if you take intuitiveness into account.

We had a couple of Blade 1500's and Ultra 25's in the lab (before switching to Debian PCs) and I could never find out how to restore an iconified window when a maximized window was on the foreground. I did several silly things, like drag the maximized window a bit to the right, or iconify everything. I guess there must be some keyboard combination that shows a list of all windows, but it's not something you can guess (intuitive = easy to guess). In an intuitive GUI, you can guess where things go when you minimize them, and how to restore them.
Other unintuitive things in CDE include having to double click on the dash to close the window (how can you guess that?), the fact you can have some "pre-iconified" windows that are there from the beginning of the session, thus resembling icons, but dissapear if you open and close them (thus not acting like icons), and a lack of obvious way to customize the dock.


Worst GUIs in my opinion: CDE, Gnome 3 and Unity
Best window manager: Windows 7
Best app launcher: Gnome 2 (everything is arranged in 3 menus, which can contain submenus. Neat).

Edited 2013-01-02 00:23 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 4

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thesunnyk Member since:
2010-05-21

"... looks tolerable" - hyper


I can see them making up the posters now.

Reply Parent Score: 4