So many operating systems and so many graphical desktop environments… This article is a comparison of the UI and usability of several Desktop Environments (DEs), that have been widely used, admired and reviled: Windows XP Luna, BeOS 6 (Dano/Zeta), Mac OS X Aqua and Unix’s KDE and Gnome. Read on which one got our best score on our long term test and usage.
First of all, please let me apologize in advance for not including QNX’s Photon, OS/2’s WPS, Amiga Workbench, Solaris’ CDE, IRIX’s 4Dwm or other X11 desktop environments in our comparison. While I have used all the above during the last two years, I don’t have them readily available on my machines anymore (for example the SPARC and Octane & Fuel review boxes we received last year were returned to Sun and SGI respectively), so I decided to include in this test only operating systems that I can reboot at any time and test them more thoroughly when and if I need to.
Also note that this is a quick overview. We can’t possibly cover these environments in-depth, as that would take not five pages, but probably one hundred and five. I am sure that our readers will agree on some points while they will disagree on others. This is fine and normal, so please keep the discussion in our commenting area intelligent and calm. What we are comparing here is the overall user experience generated by these desktop environments and their underlying OSes.
I include the BeOS in this comparison not because I consider it an OS with a bright future but because it was very highly regarded in
its heyday and it still good (in other words, even after 2,5 years of the last update by Be, at least in the desktop area, not many OSes have managed to surpass it yet).
Third note: what we are testing here is not just how things look. The “eye candy” factor is just one of the many factors that makes a DE great or… sucky. Some other factors are when a DE is easier to use or more “delicate” or more speedy than another, or more consistent or more integrated. But let’s start with the looks, as it is the first thing someone will notice when first loading a graphical DE.
The Look and Feel
I recognize that this part is kind of subjective. Some like small fonts, some like bigger fonts, some like funky buttons, others like….
Nevertheless, no matter the different tastes, there is always a threshold line where the majority of people will define as “good”, while under that line would define as “bad” all in one voice. Speaking for myself, I like clear as crystal widgets, with big window manager buttons that no one can miss, and as the perfectionist I am on this subject, I want the UI I am using to be pixel-perfect.
Starting with Windows XP’s Luna interface is not the most pretty one. But it is the most logically designed one. Its widgets are well defined, while special care have been taken to the way things work in a way most people expect or are accustomed to. It is clear to me that the Windows interface is pretty mature and most issues have been ironed out since 1995. However, this all-blue default color on XP is kind of 60’s psychedelic, it gets on my eyes soon enough. On the bright side, the fonts are great, the font shadow on the desktop and window manager is great looking too, making them easier to read. By default the Windows XP interface doesn’t enable antialias on its fonts, but Windows is making use of some very high quality fonts so they don’t look bad at all, even without antialiasing. With XP, the Windows graphics interface is now more skinnable than ever, however the majority of the users that use Windows stay with the defaults.
MacOS X has probably the most in-your-face eye candy of all the DEs compared here. Some don’t like this ‘lickable’ interface while others simply love it. My opinion is that the Aqua interface has seen a clean up with the release of OSX Jaguar 10.2. The button quality is much better now, for example. I am quite happy with the way Aqua looks even if it is not skinnable without the use of some scary hacks. The metal interface seen on some Cocoa apps is an interesting idea, but it is not as easy to read text written on top of the metal surface (for example Safari’s new tabs in the latest unreleased beta are pretty much unreadable without wearing glasses). It is also great to see brand new widgets into the play, like the drawer or the animated alert window attached to the master window. All in all, an innovative and fresh look when it was introduced 3 years ago.
KDE is compared here with its new default theme, Keramik. Personally, I dislike Keramik (for the most part). I find it clunky, extremely loose on details and too much in-your-face. The Qt toolkit actually doesn’t seem to have much of a good support for what Keramik is trying to do. For example, I get Qt or KDE applications not supporting the background gradient Keramik is trying to impose on the back of toolbars, and so we get some apps having some toolbars with the intended color or gradient, and some other toolbars on the same app don’t (and that’s ugly). That might be an app bug, but it is so common (even on KDE’s KOffice) that it reflects badly on the whole experience. It doesn’t matter whose bug it is. The point is that it is there. The buttons are so overwhelming that sometimes their text goes unnoticed (at least they should either bold or shadow the text on these kinds of buttons to expose their importance). I also don’t like its window manager buttons, I find them clunky. Its tabs are so not part of the tab view, they feel alien to it. I do like other widgets offered by Keramik, but the most important widgets are either overwhelming or they lack care on their details. Have a look here for more info on my gripes on that theme (discussed on the kde-usability list a few months ago). Thankfully, KDE is fully themeable. The icons are nice on KDE and their alternatives, like the Noia icons, are great looking too. But Keramik is not.
Gnome is compared here with both its default GTK+ theme and Red Hat’s BlueCurve (Red Hat is the best selling ‘Gnome reseller’ so most of the Gnome users will be using BlueCurve, essentially making that theme virtually a “second default” for Gnome). So, Gnome is not going to get any praises on having a great looking widget theme, but overall it ain’t ugly either. Its widget set is very plain (both BlueCurve and especially the default GTK+) but it doesn’t try to be ‘something else’. The window manager looks of BlueCurve is nice and clean. Its buttons are big and easy to reach and this is a plus. The Gnome/Red Hat icons are not as good as MacOSX’s, XP’s or KDE’s though, but are definitely better than BeOS’ (the default BeOS icons were great in their time, but they have been surpassed now).
As for BeOS [6/Dano/Zeta]’s looks, it was an improvement and a step backwards compared to BeOS 5, at the same time. Today, the BeOS legacy is continued by YellowTAB‘s Zeta product, while there are still a large number of active users of the BeOS 5. Fonts are way better on the Dano/Zeta version of BeOS than before, the Interface Kit is now more themeable (but not fully), and it now supports non-rectangular windows. However, the widget set has seen great innovations and back-steps. For example the Z-Snake effect as seen in the screenshot is a great eye-candy effect (and pretty complex programming-wise), the radio buttons have this clever “switch” while combo boxes are also having animated effects and they also use the Z-Snake when enabled. On the down side, you will find terrible looking buttons, small default window manager buttons that need to be aimed with a gun and not with a mouse…
Rating: (out of 10) Windows XP 8.0, MacOSX 9.0, KDE 6.5, BeOS 7.0, Gnome 6.5.
Usability
The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system. The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it. There are tooltips everywhere, great keyboard navigation that will let you move everywhere in case your mouse has screwed up. It is just the ‘standard’, we like it or not. Can it be better? Possibly. But from usability/accessibility point of view, Luna is the best out there. However, it is not all sugar. The new “Start” menu found on XP is just too loaded with stuff. Programs need an extra click to get into them while it is the most common reason why would someone would click on “Start”. The Open/Save dialogs can be better as well by including a drop-down menu for recently-visited places. I hate it when I save something with Paint Shop Pro on the A directory and then I need to save something else on the B dir and I have to navigate manually each time between 5 and 8 clicks, while it can be done with only one.
On usability, MacOSX and BeOS are the second best, both at the same level I could say. They are consistent and OSX offers some new tricks on the play, like quick navigation with the help of Finder, excellent drag-n-drop support, speech recognition & hand writing recognition (not with great performance on these two features though). What Mac OS X lacks though is good keyboard navigation. For example, I get an alert window to save my text file and I can’t move fro a button to its next button with the cursor keys. Yikes! (Update: Apparently you can enable this via a pref panel, but it is not there by default) Another thing I recently realized deeply is that Macs are way more keyboard-oriented than the rest platforms, because of the lack of a second mouse button (however keyboard navigation is not as good as noted above). If it was not enough for the CNTRL and ALT buttons to do things like context menus, we also have the OPTION button… Not good for most mouse-oriented users, especially in a period where Apple is pushing their Switch campaign to Windows users. Also, I don’t like the fact that Finder doesn’t have more options on its context menus or elsewhere, like the “Open Terminal Here” option (hey, it’s a unix underneath).
BeOS has great usability. Everything is brainlessly easy on that operating system and it is one of the reasons people who have tried it, like it. The OS is extremely simplistic in its nature (even installing drivers is as easy as dropping a file on a directory – and you probably won’t need rebooting either) and its user interface is also simplistic on the way it works. Its context menus make sense and they add great functionality, like the Tracker add-ons (similar to Nautilus scripts), easy ways to copy/move/shortcut files with a single click and has even the easiest way to date on mounting other filesystems! The Deskbar is also easy to use and it does the job adequately. Drag-n-Drop works everywhere! Tracker, the integrated file manager, is awesome too. What I always needed from BeOS though was more context menu functionality when right clicking on some widgets. For example, when having an input box, a text view, or a selectable text item, I want to be able to right click on it and have a cut/copy/paste menu. I always missed that on BeOS, which I know that it never had that because of its Mac-oriented roots regarding its interface (BeOS ran first on PPCs before coming to x86). Also, having the CNTRL key as the default action key instead of ALT, wouldn’t hurt either (and I have heard of some big fights about this in the management/engineering departments at Be back in the day…)
KDE has a lot of new features and goodies with version 3.1, but Konqueror (the main KDE application) leaves a really sour taste. It tries to be everything for everyone, so we get functionality from file viewer, to image viewer, to CVS front-end etc., in addition to its two major uses as web browser and file manager. All that may sounds good, but the problem is that you get extremely long menus or context menus with options that have nothing to do with the KPart currently loaded. I find Konqueror abusing the otherwise great KPart technology; it adds extreme bloat to its interface when it is not truly needed, while configuring its toolbars is a pain in the rear (with bugs too). I have outlined my problems with KDE more detailed here, which was later discussed in the kde-usability list. Another problem with KDE is the extremely bloated default KMenu (which unfortunately many Linux distros keep), big icons for shortcut/launchers on Kicker (a default KDE screen doesn’t fit well on a 800×600 screen) which makes difficult to distinguish that the K is a menu and the other icons next to it are just shortcuts. Thankfully, work has been done on the context menus on the desktop, but when right clicking on the icons on the desktop we sometimes get options that shouldn’t be there (e.g. the Trash’s long menu, while it only needs 2-3 options – this has been fixed in the CVS from Waldo Bastian AFAIK). The main problem I have with KDE is its extreme bloat. Cut the fat and suddenly everything will be better. Second grade problems are the choices for the defaults, like the single-click action and the “hook on the other windows’ borders” of the window manager. I believe that KDE should leave-in the hook on the monitor’s border, but take out the application border hook as it creates a bad impression to the user thinking that “Xfree is slow because when I move my windows around, it is not smooth”, even if this has nothing to do with the reality. It is all about perception, UI is all about psychology, and KDE takes an F on that department.
Gnome is more simplistic than KDE in its choices. It goes straight to the point and the applications written for it tend to follow its Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). What I dislike though is the default Application menu bar on the top of the screen. It takes space for a no good reason in my opinion (not everyone adds icons to that bar all the way through the 1600th horizontal pixel, come on). I am more in agreement with Red Hat’s and Mandrake 9.1 defaults personally. Gnome also is not all that great when it comes to its Trash context menu, Nautilus is ok but I want a dialog box asking me for the root password when I am in need making a system copy/move. The functionality of the Red Hat’s Gnome taskbar is fine, but it feels a bit amateurish, icons in the notification area move by themselves and create unwanted space, the menu is ugly and looks like a potpourri. However, applications like FileRoller and Red Hat’s RPM installer application make the whole experience better. Gnome can easily become better than what it is today. Exactly because it is already simpler than KDE, the work required to clean up things, I think, would be less overall. However, I don’t understand what took the Gnome project (especially Red Hat) developers so long before they start working on the new GtkFileSelection. It is now scheduled for Gnome 2.4, which comes out at the end of the year. Also, why can’t I move the toolbars from Nautilus next to each other and save some real screen estate? Anyway, more here.
Rating: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 8.5, KDE 6.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.
Consistency
The best desktop environment regarding consistency is BeOS, hands down. Because of the (double-edged) sword of not having other toolkits ported to the BeOS and because the guidelines were quite clear on the way things should work under BeOS, you get a very consistent (and simple) environment all the way through. The only other real toolkit ever created for BeOS was LibLayout, which was always very BeOS-ish anyway (except the tab look). Preference panels and even applications share a common behavior, look and feel. They do what you expect them to do (the BeOS way).
As for Windows, It is great to be able to run old Windows software under Windows XP, but that doesn’t always mean that you will get same look and feel and even behavior throughout all applications (example: PaintShopPro 5’s old Save/Open dialog). Additionally, Microsoft has introduced different behaviors on their own products, notably with MS Office offerings, toolbars are more flexible on IE than on other apps, while the .NET apps have a dual look. However, control panels, dialogs, preference panels and all “default” tools found on Windows all follow the Microsoft HIG, so that is a plus.
MacOSX has three main toolkits to play with and while there are a few small differences between Carbon and Cocoa applications, all in all, OSX is very consistent with itself. However, not everything is roses here either. Apple has decided to go “wild” regarding the metal-looking applications like Safari, iMovie, iTunes etc which do create inconsistency to the whole experience. Mac OS X users have written down their complaints about this and other issues. A lot of people though still need to run special MacOS 9 applications who have the old look, so that doesn’t help the current consistency either…
Hmm… Gnome and KDE… Well, it is impossible to say that any of the X11 environments are consistent. By definition they are not. Maybe they are consistent with themselves, but not when counting the whole experience. Even for people who run KDE and don’t want to run GTK+ apps, there are so many other toolkits under X where every now and then you have to download and use an application that only exists under another toolkit (e.g. Motif or Tcl/Tk). Also, the brand new commercial ports of Moho, TextMaker and Pepper also are using… their own toolkits in order for their port to happen easier. The most important free applications under Linux today are also not consistent with the two main DEs: OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. All that adds up to the overall inconsistency of the X11 environment. And we haven’t even mentioned the original Athena widget set, neither the different looks and interface layouts we get from important applications that are still available only as Qt 2.x (e.g. Opera) or as GTK+ 1.x (e.g. AbiWord, Gnumeric, GNUcash and many more).
Additionally, we get Qt applications that have different open/save dialogs than KDE’s… We also get big Gnome applications that don’t follow the Gnome HIGs (e.g. BlueFish 0.9). Surely, badly designed applications can be found under any operating system, but the main applications for the other DEs are HIGified and usability-tested, something that doesn’t happen often for the main third party apps of any X11 environment.
Rating: Windows XP 8.5, MacOSX 7.5, KDE 5, BeOS 10, Gnome 5.
Integration
For me, integration is one of the most important aspects of a desktop environment. The reason I use a graphical desktop environment in the first place is to hide the complex aspects of the under-the-hood system and provide me with tools to configure the system, if and when this is required.
I found that the best DE on integration (see: the DE that requires you LESS to open a terminal window) is Windows, hands down. Everything can be configured with a GUI and when there is not a preference panel for something, there is always… the registry, even when you want to enable the most weird hacks on applications found or your system.
After XP should be MacOSX. A lot can be done via the GUI and via the NetInfo Manager or other utilities found on /Applications/Utilities. Great stuff.
BeOS is very good on abstracting the complexity as well, but it doesn’t offer too many tools (though there are third party tools for such operations and also is easy to add more, as BeOS is a solid and simple system as we reported above). There are times that you will need to open a terminal to do things, like checking the integrity of the BFS, the makebootable utility, lsindex etc. Overall, this doesn’t look bad for BeOS, just because working with that system is simple. But if BeOS was a Unix, the lack of more utilities would be more glaring.
Both KDE and Gnome include some preference panels to configure their own UI aspects, but none of these X11 environments are integrated to the underlying system. Maybe because X11 itself is not integrated, but runs “on top” of whatever Unix carries it. The good thing about it is that you can have choice of different DEs and that you can restart X when something becomes screwy, but in my opinion the bad stuff overwhelms the benefits: non-optimized X11, slow window manager architecture and more. Additionally, both Gnome and KDE don’t offer tools to change the native resolution of X (this will change soon though, but it should have been here years ago already), no tools to configure internet connections, startup OS items, a GUI to load/unload/install/uninstall drivers on the fly [or by rebooting], no GUI on configuring printers/scanners/other hardware. Gnome and KDE feel more like shells, and while this is what they really are if you clearly look at them, they don’t solve the given problem (even if they never meant to, it is irrelevant here, as the overall experience is what matters). Integration is the main key for an OS to feel mature and professional, but because of the multi-platform nature of these projects, it is not possible at this time. Most Linux distributions offer their own additional tools on whatever else is needed, but I don’t get these extra tools with Solaris and Gnome, or with IRIX and KDE, and certainly not with FreeBSD or AIX. You might think (and rightly so) that this is a job for the OS provider to add more tools, but the fact remains that Gnome and KDE are far from integrated to any OS they run on and that does have an impact in the experience.
Rating: Windows XP 10, MacOSX 9, KDE 4, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 4.
Flexibility
I think that Mac, BeOS and Windows have roughly the same amount of flexibility in their UI. They all follow the philosophy of “less is more” and the OS provider just tries to provide the best defaults. You can change a fair amount of things, like position and size of the taskbar, but overall, the experience remains similar to the default.
Gnome is also like the bunch above, but it is more flexible in the way you can play with the way your Gnome panels look and behave. On the other hand, Gnome does not have a proper menu editor and modifying or creating new desktop shortcuts is a pain, going through all those tabs in the dialog box for such a simple operation.
KDE is the most flexible of all. Literally, every modification you can think of is possible there (expect automatically resizing kicker when more apps are sitting on its taskbar and Kicker is aligned in the center of the monitor like OSX’s Dock). However, this flexibility comes at a cost. The Kontrol Center of KDE is just bloated, plain and simple. It is impossible to easily find the most common options which are under tones of other mostly insignificant or nit-picking options. There is a huge list of options on the left of the GUI application of KCenter, and on the right you get the selected KPart application with a number of tab views which each one has a number of options to explore. Some say that this is the very strength of KDE, but for me and others, this is a plague which results into confusion, usability and bloat headaches. I give KDE an 8 (and not a 9 or 10) because of these problems created by this flexibility, not because the flexibility is not there (it is).
Rating: Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5.
Speed
Ah, speed… Speed here is not (just) “raw speed” but also “UI responsiveness” (BeOS users will ‘get’ that term better). Who doesn’t like responsiveness and smoothness when using a desktop environment? Everyone does, and everyone complains when they get lags between clicking a menu, or a button, or loading an app…
I have used all these DEs on new and old machines. I used MacOSX on G3s and on dual G4s. I used BeOS from a AMD K6 300 Mhz up to 1.6 Ghz machine (which is already overkill for BeOS). I’ve tried Windows XP on a dual Celeron 533 and on faster machines. And KDE/Gnome on the AthlonXP 1.6 Ghz and on my dual Celeron 533 (multiple distributions, Linux or FreeBSD). I also used Gnome on a $3000 machine SPARC and KDE on a SGI $18,000 Fuel machine last year.
BeOS clearly wins on UI responsiveness because of its extreme multi-threaded nature and its fantastic kernel scheduler (which plays very well with the app_server). Everything is just snappy. I run BeOS on a 1.6 GHz machine and it is simply overkill. No matter what I do, there is always CPU left for other things. I primarily run BeOS on a dual Celeron 533 and it is also extremely snappy. You click a window and while this application might have another window doing something else, nothing gets paused to wait for the other window to finish what it’s doing. Everything is just readily available immediately. Make no mistake, BeOS is not a fast OS when it comes to server operations (except if you have installed the BONE networking stack), or when you do heavy compilations, and despite popular belief, its SMP scaling could be much better. But being a “multimedia OS”, the engineers over at Be had special-cased a lot of things, making latency and UI a snap. BeOS “feels” fast to the user perspective, even though some under-the-hood operations are not really as fast as Linux or Windows XP. Check out this very recent YellowTAB Zeta DivX video from CeBIT, showing what BeOS can do and how fast it can do it.
Windows XP would be my second best regarding UI responsiveness. It is already very responsive, a huge (and I mean HUGE) improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase, but it is not as good as in BeOS. The user can get a lot of freezing under some special cases until a window finishes what it’s doing, while when I want to save an attachment with Outlook Express and I navigate to the “Desktop” entry of the filesystem it takes up to 10 seconds to read the whole root dir and refresh that window. Or when I right click on the desktop and navigate to “New”, the submenu takes up to 3 seconds to open on the dual Celeron if it is not already in the cache. That’s slow but they seem to be special cases which can probably be optimized easily.
MacOSX is the slowest of all in my opinion. Even on the fastest dual G4, scrolling and resizing a window (or a web page on ANY browser) is jerky and imprecise. Also, when IE or some other app is doing something, the menu bar on top doesn’t respond and all I see is the spinning beach ball. There is no real responsiveness there. In fact, speed is my number one problem with the otherwise excellent OSX. As someone else said once “after you have used BeOS, anything else will never be the same and it would just seem slow” and that has proved true.
Gnome is a bit faster than KDE. While GTK+ 2.x is several times slower than GTK+ 1.x, it still manages to run adequately well (however Metacity is so slow when resizing an window it will redraw its button bitmaps in a really ugly fashion). KDE is plagued mostly of the fact that all its applications are slow to load. In fact, even the smallest Gnome application (e.g. calculator) is slower to load than the big and fat Blender because of the number of shared libraries is linked against! But KDE’s performance on loading its apps is worse. Overall, these Unix DEs are based a lot on how the kernel is configured (same goes for the other DEs too though) and I found that the default FreeBSD 4.x ran KDE much faster than a stock Linux 2.4.12 last year. I remember Gnome 2 running slowly on that brand new Sun SPARC workstation though. So, there is definitely some responsiveness to be gained depending on which platform you are running or how well optimized your X or kernel is, but on the stock Mandrake/SuSE/Red Hat distros these DEs ran from well to slow-ish. They could be better, but right now they are definitely usable.
Rating: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 6, KDE 7.5, BeOS 10, Gnome 8.
Stability and Bugs
I found Windows XP and MacOSX to be the most stable environments in this long term test usage. Sure, I have seen both Finder and Explorer crashes (which are the “desktop shells” for these DEs, as Nautilus is for Gnome and Tracker is for BeOS), but overall stability is good. I think XP has fewer bugs than MacOSX though (has anyone seen the OSX Font panel not showing the preview of the font selected? You need to manually drag that panel down..). I had a few bugs with XP’s taskbar in its first versions (it was freezing after a cold reboot for about 5-6 seconds) but they have all been ironed out now after the SP1. In fact, the most notable bugs I have to report about XP’s default apps is how sucky this Notepad application that I write this article right now is.
Gnome 2.2.0 is somewhere in the middle regarding stability (especially Nautilus which crashes easily). It has a number of bugs (especially Nautilus) but if the guys are able to iron out Nautilus more, Gnome is pretty solid overall. And the good thing is that if something is wrong, you just kill X and you reload. Update: Gnome 2.2.1 seem to have been a stability and bug fixing version mainly for Nautilus.
BeOS and KDE are the most unstable of the lot. BeOS Dano is a beta, but even on BeOS 5.x I could crash the app_server of Tracker easily (both part of the DE part of the OS). BeOS is pretty stable overall, but if you “overwork” it or do weird stuff on it can crash easily too (that doesn’t mean that the whole system will go down. If Tracker goes down is easy to reload it, but if the app_server goes down, you’ll need to reboot).
As for KDE, well, Konqueror is just not stable. Applications written or coming with KDE also tend to crash fairly easily (on a number of machines and different distros/OSes I ran it). However, the biggest problem with KDE is not stability, it is the bugs. Konqueror has more bugs than the whole BeOS does. I just can’t stand it being so inconsistent, bloated, buggy and crashy. Poof. It’s gone.
Rating: Windows XP 9.5, MacOSX 9, KDE 7, BeOS 7.5, Gnome 8.
Technology
Surely the back-ends of the DEs might or might not be part of the DEs themselves, but point is that some of the features found on the graphical servers can be used for user-visible effects and they might have an impact on speed, smoothness, features or quality of rendering. Therefore the technology used behind these DEs is an important factor on this comparison. In fact, this factor can be what allows a DE to do, or what locks a DE to not be able to do because the back-end functionality is not there or because architecture or legacy problems might prevent the creation of new cool stuff (and that’s bad for the future potential of any DE).
MacOSX takes the lead here regarding the technology used. Double buffering everywhere, non-flickered UI, vector icons (Update: someone emailed in to say that they are still bitmap icons used by OSX), good font rendering engine, “real” transparency support, PDF-based, QuartzExtreme for 3D assistance on the 2D space of the desktop and my personal favorite “smooth window dragging” (for lack of a better naming of a VSYNC’ed desktop).
BeOS Dano/Zeta is the only other desktop that supports the VSYNC’ed desktop. However, even if the Dano version of BeOS featured a newer font engine that did a better job than the BeOS 5 one, it still lacks on rendering quality. BeOS Dano also supported full double buffering and non-flicker, while regarding vector icons on the file manager and desktop is currently available via a third party patch over the Tracker codebase. However, Dano still doesn’t support bitmap icons with more than 256 colors (not sure if the YellowTAB guys fixed that for their Zeta though).
Windows and X11 don’t have many of these cool features, in fact X11 is the least powerful of all. While it is network transparent and everything, it lacks the speed and integration to the rest of the system. There is lack of proper overlay support (it just slows down everything), no true accelerated transparency or easy modification of cursors etc. In fact, up until recently many were discussing its limitations for not being able to render well fonts or the ability to not change real resolutions on the fly. These issues are slowly changing for the better with RandR and FontConfig, but X11 is still not up to speed and all that legacy code it carries might prove a stumbling block on adding more demanding features in the future. However, KDE and Gnome support vector icons, while GTK+ 2.x does a better job on non-flickering of applications than QT does (however not as good of a job that MacOSX does).
Rating: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
Programming Framework
The programming framework is an important part of any DE because it classifies them as “platforms” with a strong back-end that guarantees their power, flexibility and potential. My favorite here would be MacOSX and KDE. My worst would be Gnome. BeOS and Windows will be somewhere in the middle, for different reasons each.
I like the API of Cocoa on MacOSX and the API of Qt/kde_libs. They are powerful without being way too complex. Tools and documentation of Qt are excellent too.
For Windows, well, MFCs, .NET and Win32 are really powerful APIs which let you do the same thing in many different ways, but that is also what you might call bloat. I find the Windows API to have a steep learning curve, while the .NET API is certainly cleaner and easier to use overall, a step in the right direction.
BeOS has a very elegant API, really a pleasure to work with, but it is not as powerful than any of its competitors. Additionally, there are no good development tools for BeOS, no good visual GUI designers, no full-featured debuggers, no profilers… Also, under BeOS you constantly need to take care of multithreading issues and write your code around the fact that everything is so multithreaded on BeOS that could create deadlocks where you would least expect it. Writing small apps for the BeOS is a joy, writing anything more complex or serious though is a real pain.
As for Gnome, well, I dislike GTK+ and C. In my opinion, for a desktop environment is more suitable to use a real OO language and a more OO-oriented API. GTK– is there as a C++ wrapper to GTK+, but it ain’t elegant or easy to use. And CORBA is not that easy to deal with either.
Rating: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 9, KDE 8.5, BeOS 7, Gnome 6.
Conclusion
There are a lot of things we did not discuss in this article, but it would not be practical to write a real paper on these DEs. It would take me a month each and many-many pages. But I think this article summarizes well my view on how well these DEs they function and deliver what they are supposed to deliver to the user.
I acknowledge that there are good reasons for dealing with the negatives of Gnome and KDE, since there are other reasons for using Linux, and many people weigh the options and make that choice. However, today we live on times where everyone is pushing Linux on the desktop (or the corporate desktop by the mighty Red Hat) so including the main X11 offerings in this comparison article was appropriate.
Personally I much prefer overall the Windows XP experience with a close second the ones of MacOSX and BeOS. In fact, a DE that could have the best values found on these three operating systems, plus the power of Unix underneath, would make my utopian desktop environment. But there isn’t such a DE (in fact, there is no such thing as “the perfect desktop”, this is just a myth), so I usually reboot to them to enjoy their capabilities.
Here is the final rating, summed up from all the ratings above:
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
There are things it must inherit from 9x/2k that in my mind make it unable to be so close to OS X. Just about everything was spot on in this though. I suppose it comes down to personal tastes. A behavior I like may not be one someone else does.
What….Windows wins at OSNews? Shocking….
I know…i read that windows won and i nearly had milk come out of my nose!
On the contrary, this seems to be the least definite comparison I have ever read.
Take for example, the section on speed and UI performance. The writer does not take a particular machine as a reference for testing, and instead compares experiences on a wide variety of machines. Absurd claims arise from this, such as “even the smallest Gnome application (e.g. calculator) is slower to load than the big and fat Blender.” Gnome-calculator on a 533 Mhz Celeron might take longer to start than Blender on an SGI, but who cares?
It would take a very long comment to identify all of the absurd claims in this article. Overall, its entire basis of judging seems to be on the writer’s likes and dislikes (such as I don’t like C, thus Gnome has a bad programming framework).
I liked a lot of what Eugenia had to say in this article, but I feel it left out some important criticisms of Windows XP:
First, as mpt ( http://mpt.phrasewise.com/ ) so often points out, Windows XP (and prior versions) has a problem with dialog boxes. Simply put, most dialog boxes in Windows XP are poorly worded, long, have confusing or non-useful button labels, and have close buttons in the window title bar that are used as “Go Away You Stupid Alert” buttons. Comparing this behavior to the common alert behavior in OS X, I would have to say that Apple does much better in designing their dialog boxes. In addition, the Sheets concept introduced with OS X is quite useful and really a good improvement.
I also don’t think you did a good job explaining how amateurish the default Windows XP Luna theme looks. The first time I saw it, I thought that Microsoft had replaced all of their theme designers with a bad GTK+ theme designer! Newer betas of Longhorn take this to an extreme, making the entire user interface some shade of blue. Perhaps MS is hoping that their OS will become a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue.
While you rightly mention that BeOS’s font rendering is a little dated, Windows XP doesn’t provide many options. There isn’t a way to use font antialiasing at all without using subpixel AA, which doesn’t work very well for CRT users. Without ClearType, most UI elements are delivered non-antialaised!
I can assure you, the Blender/Calculator thing was on the same machine, running Red Hat. The reason for Gnome’s loading slowness was the number of libraries linked to (around 25 for any simple Gnome app and only 6 for Blender IIRC)!
Libraries used
galaxy@ulixys:/usr/local/bin > ldd gnome-calculator | wc -l
49
galaxy@ulixys:/usr/local/bin > ldd gcalctool | wc -l
49
galaxy@ulixys:/usr/local/bin >
I find this article to be ill-informed, anecdotal, and, well, pretty awful.
For example, Eugenia seems to find Konqueror extremely unstable, I use it about 12 hours a day, and I would be surprised if it has crashed 3 times on me in the last month.
I must say I have not noticed those toolbar bugs she mentions, but then again, I use Liquid.
She ventures guesses in areas she knows nothing about. “The Qt toolkit actually doesn’t seem to have much of a good support for what Keramik is trying to do.” is a telling sign of ignorance, for example.
In the usability review, she mentions Konqueror acts as a CVS frontend, and she feels overwhelmed by the functionality. Besides the obvious (If you don’t want a cvs frontend why did you install it?), I have not seen any bugs in toolbar configuration, and the link she gave is to a KDE 3.0 review.
The single-click action is, IMVHO, a usability plus. Whenever someone uses it, he is hooked. After all, double-click is a pretty antinatural action. But, hey, if you prefer it to be clunky like XP, you can have that, too.
Also, she sprays the catchall unspecific word “bloat”. I think any review using that word without giving any numbers or at least a rational description of the intended meaning belongs in the recycling bin.
In the “consistency/integration/flexibility” page, she simply doesn’t even mention integration between apps in GNOME and/or KDE, simply integratio with the underlying OS. Perhaps the page should be renamed. Also, she brings up the tired horse of X performance, again showing ignorance of even the most basic architecture of the system.
BTW: if you want KDE to offer you a way to change resolution,color depth, get X 4.3 with the RandR extension.
I could go on for another page or two, but why bother? nThe article gets an E.
Because as a teacher, I never give an F.
Next time, get an editor, and a technical reviewer.
BTW: look definite in http://www.webster.com, I am not sure that is the word you actually wanted.
Heh, no wonder it takes more time to load then than the much bigger Blender…
In MacOS X…
When you need to get access to different controls via the keyboard you can tab between selection and text fields by default.
If you want to be able to tab to all UI elements like in Windows, just go to the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Full Keyboard Access, and at the bottom of the window change the radio button from “Text boxes and lists only” to “Any control”
-Nathan
>I find this article to be ill-informed, anecdotal, and, well, pretty awful.
I wouldn’t expect anything better from you anyway.
>(If you don’t want a cvs frontend why did you install it?),
It came with the OS.
>and the link she gave is to a KDE 3.0 review.
That was just additional information which STILL applies for KDE 3.1. My current review was made with KDE 3.1.
<rant>
* UNETHICAL Windoze XP WARNING *
DRM INSIDE
To me ethics is also part of the choice for an OS (environment). and really XP s disqualified here.
(no this is not a troll)
</rant>
Appart this, I was surprised by the rating for BeOS
But now I’m sure we can get an even higher mark
not entirely, hmm…
I don’t know if I agree with the speed of XP. I use it on an Athlon XP PC, and it can feel quite sluggish. While OS X on my 600 MHz G3 iMac was sluggish also, they are about the same, and XP can be even less responive with mulitple apps running. I’d say both are more responsive than KDE, but I ‘ve found Gnome 2 to be the feel the fastest, and I haven’t used BeOS.
Eugenia said:
> I wouldn’t expect anything better from you anyway.
Well, my opinion is my opinion, and what I said is pretty easy to check, unlike most of this “definite review”. Too bad you don’t like it. I’m really sad about it NOT!
As for the CVS frontend coming with the OS… why did you instal the KDE SDK (that is where Cervisia comes)?. It is an optional package. Complaining about it being installed is, IMVHO, stupid.
It’s like complaining that XP has a MP3 player after you install winamp.
Giving that link as an addendum to a comment in toolbar bugs is disingenuous at least. Did you actually see these alleged toolbar bugs in KDE 3.1, or are you just remembering them from KDE 3.0?
The bug is still there on the three distros I tried with KDE 3.1 on them: the text size buttons in particular.
@Eugenia: hmm, can’t follow you, gcalctool starts for me almost immediately, while blender takes maybe half a second (Athlon XP 1700+/Gentoo)
Well I need to agree to Roberto here from the technical standpoint he is absolutely right. KDE has deserved some higher points than these given to it. I wonder why she didn’t made use of the explainations of the bottom layer things that I explained nearly in detail in various threads here. These should be a good point to have a look at. Personally I would have placed the Desktops that way
1) WindowsXP
2) MacOSX
Because they contain a whole OS and not just the DE
3) KDE
4) BeOS
No offense but I think BeOS is not as good as Desktop as KDE because KDE offers functionality that bombs out WindowsXP in various places.
5) GNOME
GNOME as last place is ok imo. It reflects the reality.
I think that using IE for OS X to judge anything (as the author did) is unfair. It’s like using AOL 2.0 to judge Windows XP (if pre-4.0 versions of AOL could even run on NT based machines). Mac OS X is responsive with applications that are properly coded. Mac OS X is simply experiencing the same growing pains that Windows 95 had and the next major revision of Windows will have (not Longhorn, but the next time that MS makes big changes).
>gcalctool starts for me almost immediately, while blender takes maybe half a second
On my Athlon XP 1600+ and Red Hat, is not the case.
Eugenia is one of the few reviewers that aren’t biased. Like many othres, I use Windows XP simply becuase it’s better than anything else I’ve used. All of you people whining about the evils of MS are simply being overzealous idiots.
I give the article an A+
>I think that using IE for OS X to judge anything (as the author did) is unfair.
Wrong! First of all, IE comes by DEFAULT with OSX. This makes it PART of the experience. Secondly, IE’s example of menu bar freezing is just an example. Other applications do that as well, including Safari.
I find that I am most productive when using Classic Mode under XP moreso than any DE under *nix. Great Fonts + slim window manager (if that is what you call explorer?) is awesome!
Eugenia is the only one here that will give credit where credit is due … Thank you Eugenia.
Wow. Couldn’t agree more, C. Evans. Don’t even know where to begin.
Gnome gets a 6.5 out of 10 for having poor icons??? And yet the guady play school / fisher price buttoned XP gets an 8?
And why are you complaining about Kicker not being able to resize like the Dock? It does do this, and I’ve been using this feature since 2.x, I believe.
In reality, though, one should use what one is most comfortable with. Complaining that KDE has so many features that the control center is bloated is downright silly. KDE is made by professionals and hobbyists, for professionals and hobbyists. People who have the time, patience, and desire to tinker with way too many settings.
And why BeOS is included is beyond me. A desktop that doesn’t run on modern hardware (and for that matter, didn’t even run on current hardware of the time) is not what I would call “still good”
But I’ll just be labeled a troll, and possibly filed away as someone else who just “doesn’t get it”.
Bill
If you want to be able to tab to all UI elements like in Windows, just go to the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Full Keyboard Access, and at the bottom of the window change the radio button from “Text boxes and lists only” to “Any control”
Perhaps the article should be updated to reflect this?
>Gnome gets a 6.5 out of 10 for having poor icons???
Of course not. But it ain’t Miss World either [overall].
>And why BeOS is included is beyond me. A desktop that doesn’t run on modern hardware
You are wrong. BeOS Max Edition runs *everywhere* and the few problems with compatibility are all straighten out with YellowTAB’s Zeta, which is the NEW BeOS coming out in a FEW weeks! BeOS is far from dead. Be, Inc’s BeOS is dead, but not Zeta. Also, I explain very well WHY BEOS is included. Read the first page again.
> And why are you complaining about Kicker not being able to resize like the Dock? It does do this, and I’ve been using this feature since 2.x, I believe.
Not what I am asking, no. The taskbar does NOT resize when more programs are get opened.
All phylosophical issues aside I find XP to be the best overall Desktop experience in term of usability and merely “getting stuff done”.
OSX is just slow IMO (I use it at work sometimes and I find it unresponsive and I don’t really care about how “pretty” it is).
KDE and Gnome are good environments but I think they suffer from the different ways apps behave, there is a general lack of consistency. If I install a new app I never know exactly how it will look and behave.
I never tried BeOS….
Once again I think these issues ares omewhat subjective and your mileage might vary but I found myself agreeing with most of Eugenia’s points.
Ok, let’s go over the bugs reported in that old article regarding toolbars:
Number 1 (the side by side toolbars) is not what you are referring to here, I suppose. I will admit I can’t do that.
Number 2 (the save dialog bookmark) is just that you don’t get what a save dialog bookmark is. Sure, it’s not an intuitive feature. Ignore it, and you get a less featuerful dialog, but surely less confusing to you. I don’t think any other OS gives you that feature anyway. Perhaps that should have been counted in the features page?
Niumber 3: Can’t reproduce it. Oh, did you add the buttons in the toolbar you removed them from, the khtml toolbar? Or you added them in the navigation toolbar, where they don’t work?
Number 4: personal perference, as you said.
5 and 6 are not toolbar related.
So, why is this link given as a detailed explanation of the problems with toolbars in KDE 3.1? I have no idea.
BTW: a clear inconsistency in the rating method: you discount points in KDE’s flexibility score for the problems it causes. But you also discount points for those problems in the consistency, bugs, and usability scores. That hardly looks like a reasonable scoring mechanism.
I was following BeOS for various years in the pasth and lost overview to it then I investigated into Zeta BeOS and OpenBeOS for a few minutes some weeks ago but I don’t see the connection between both can you explain more why there are 2 different approaches to bring BeOS back ?
And why isn’t QNX included ?
> KDE and Gnome are good environments but I think they suffer
> from the different ways apps behave, there is a general lack
> of consistency. If I install a new app I never know exactly
> how it will look and behave.
Little info, only GNOME is affected by this and will be for another couple of years! Not KDE. KDE is absolutely consistent.
>And why isn’t QNX included ?
I explained in the beginning of the article (I deleted the QNX partition a few months ago and I wanted to include OSes that I had readily available). IMO, QNX’s UI wouldn’t take big scores anyway (for different reasons…) and it is not as widly used (not even more than BeOS AFAIK)
Eugenia says it doesn’t matter whose fault it is for the problems she describes with KDE, many of which I have not experienced personally.
I think it matters. I am running a CVS copy of KDE circa pre-3.1 and I don’t have any of the bugs she described. If Konqueror was so crashy, I wouldn’t use it as my permanent browser. I have not seen any of the rendering bugs she describes with Keramik. And so on. She does make good points, but many of the problems she describe just aren’t from the KDE I know.
There is no real description of her test system, but I’m guessing she is using Red Hat which is notorious for its bad treatment of KDE. Why not use a better KDE distribution such as SuSE or Mandrake? Of course to be fair you would have to compile everything properly and do the same with GNOME.
And btw if you compare Qt apps with KDE apps, it’s much worse when you compare some of the horrendous GTK+ apps like the GIMP with GNOME apps.
I read some of the responses and I am surprised at how some people have reacted.
Don’t let the OS zealots bother you. I thought it was a fair article even thought my favorite OS did not win.
Good article. And OS News is a great site. Keep it up…
– Mark
> Newer betas of Longhorn take this to an extreme, making the entire user interface some shade of blue.
Well, M$ always liked blue…
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bsod&btnG…
This is a really biased article. Methodology is pretty awful.
BeOS scores right after OS X???? Give me a break. BeOS widgets are AWFUL. They don’t follow _any_ of the UI methodologies.
It should have been done like this: http://www.xvsxp.com/
Please, next time consult this very basic article when judging UI: http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html
MacOS X pretty much wipes the floor with all other UIs. I wish I had some cash to buy a Mac for home.
Nick
This one wins them all
http://www.attrition.org/gallery/computing/errors/bsod_cnn.jpg
Though this fake is nice:
http://beklathon.homestead.com/files/BILL-GATES-bsod.jpg
>This is a really biased article.
I can assure you, it is not. I am a user of all these systems for years and I give them credit only when they deserve it.
>BeOS scores right after OS X???? Give me a break. BeOS widgets are AWFUL
First of all, here we compare BeOS Zeta, not BeOS 5. And even with Zeta/Dano’s widget set, BeOS scores WORSE in that “look and feel” department than OSX, as you also feel appropriate.
But the *final rating* is a SUM of a LOT of different things, not just how things are looking to your eyes. Please re-read carefully the article.
If you want to be able to tab to all UI elements like in Windows, just go to the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Full Keyboard Access, and at the bottom of the window change the radio button from “Text boxes and lists only” to “Any control”
You don’t even have to do this to dismiss dialogues, just use command+<first letter of the option> like for example if you want to cancel use command+c
I agree that XP has great keyboard navigation but I also think that OSX keyboard navigation is great but different, and it does need bit of a getting used to.
While I didnt agree with everything she said, esp in the look&feel section, it was a good review. I am interested to see how the final release version of Zeta will fit into this.
WhiteRabbit
NC
Good article overall, but i do think it could have benefited a lot from more reasearch on all of OSes compared. I know you tried not to be biased, but the reality is EVERYONE is a slightly biased, even if the person does not realize it.
I also think you were a little too harsh on KDE/GNOME, many of the issues you mentioned are not the fault of the DE’s themselves, rather X11 and other toolkits. You we re comparing DE’s so when you compare KDE to some other DE you should assume that every app is a KDE/QT app, the KDE developers have no power to make Motif, X11 etc apps all look like a KDE app. They also can’t mask X11’s speed problems problems. I hope you’re catching on to waht I mean. If you were comparing OSes I would understand this, but you are comparing DE’s. Therefore, if you compare GNOME to KDE you are comparing ONLY GNOEM APPS, CONFIG UTILITIES ETC. with KDE’s counterparts and nothign else.
Eugenia,
I’m not sure if we’re on the same wavelength but UI ‘prettiness’ has very little to do with UI usability. Usability is what matters to users. It takes VERY long time to get the UI right and to make it flawless. Looks don’t really have much to do with this (but they do help). It’s all about the workflow and consistency. I have to say that I have not used Zeta but I have seen the screenshots of it and they repeat many of the UI mistakes that we’ve seen in many of the previous UI prototypes.
Nick
Dano’s font rendering is good on paper, but in real life it just sucks. I find R5 much better in this regard.
A typical Dano backstep that you didn’t mention is the new titlebars that the user can’t shift-slide anymore.
XP and BeOS both include mnemonics (underlined keyboard shortcuts) that OS X lacks. This is one thing that I can’t stand about MacOS.
BeOS and OS X use better message boxes than those common on Windows (Save|Don’t Save|Cancel rather than Yes|No|Cancel)
BeOS Tracker and Windows Explorer have an address bar, the Finder doesn’t and it hurts.
The OS X Finder and Explorer can show the Desktop folder in a window. Tracker doesn’t allow the user to do this (just like previous versions of MacOS and OS/2 which also include this stupid limitation).
Consistency – BeOS has *no* HIG, how can it be the most consistent? You might want to check the links below and reconsider the 10 you gave it….
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/InterfaceConsistencyInPreferences
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/InterfaceConsistencyInSelections
A good example of *inconsistency* in OS X is Safari. For 20 years Command+W was used to close a window, but with Safari it closes tabs. This is a good UI choice that will help users prevent data-loss, but the legendary MacOS Consistency is now officially over (actually, Aqua took care of that a couple of years ago…)
Flexibility – WinXP is much more flexible than OS X and BeOS. There are at least twice as much preferences, and with third party tweaker utilities like X-Setup, it’s more like tenfold (TinkerTool is very minimalist).
BeOS is indeed snappy, but even us “Bealots” 😉 admit that it has the slowest Mozilla port bar none (and this is the only modern browser available), and Tracker is nowhere near the speed of Explorer when it comes to folders with huge amounts of files.
XP is definitely an “improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase”, but for some odd reason, it is not as good as Win2k. Many a time have I encountered Start/taskbar freezes that take seconds off your productive time (even post-SP1). It never happened with Win2k.
KDE and Aqua are hard to compare, but I believe that Aqua is more optimized and slightly quicker, or maybe it’s just Konqueror that spawns windows slower than the Finder…
Finally, I must say that I really enjoyed reading this comparison (keep up the good work Eugenia), and sorry if I repeated any of the previous comments.
>but UI ‘prettiness’ has very little to do with UI usability
Nick, are you SURE you read the whole article???? There is a *different* section for “looks” and a different for “usability”!! I don’t understand what you are trying to say here! In my article all that stuff are all seperate.
I find it interesting that so many people complain about gtkmm when in fact it is the most pure C++ gui library out there. I think developers have been working with broken and/or incomplete environments for so long when they see real C++ code it scares the crap out of them.
Leave it to a bunch of nerds on a website to pick a fight at every opportunity.
OSes are NOT striving to meet some tangible goal. They aren’t competing for an elusive technology. They are trying to zero in on an experience that pleases the most people possible. I tell you now – there will never be an OS that pleases everyone every time. Someone will always dislike what they are using.
Eugenia’s review, in my opinion, was pretty fair. I’ve definitely been known to tell Eugenia directly that I think she’s wrong. In this case, a) I happen to agree with her lineup, despite the fact that I really like Gnome, and b) I think no matter what the result, there would be 50 people, 35 telling her she and her article suck and 15 telling those people to shut up.
I use XP every day, many hours a day, and it virtually NEVER crashes. Maybe 3 times since I’ve installed it back when Devil’s Own first was released. But some idiot always insists it crashes after 30 seconds of uptime for them. Experience is different for everyone, and for each person, perception is reality.
If you have an opinion, please — offer it like an educated adult. Don’t criticize her work or her opinion.
Of course the review was biased – all reviews are biased.
The good thing about Eugenias reviews is that she is honest about her biases, so you can take them into account
While I agree that Windows XP is better than the previous versions, I still feel like you failed to address a few functions of the OS/UI that truly make people nervious about using thier own computer.
One of the main areas I am talking about is package management (ie installing, uninstalling software and config files). Windows takes a pretty scary approach to this in that when you install an app, it pretty much dumps the app/support files wherever it damn well pleases. You don’t normally see this, because it puts a “shortcut” in the start menu and that is your interaction with the program. However, should something go wrong, or should you need to untinstall the application, you are left to the whim of the windows installer app to clean up after you. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen the message, “File foo.ini was used by this program, and may be used by other programs, actually, I am not really sure what it does, but you can possibly delete it”, or something to that effect. One area where Mac OS X (and maybe BeOS, im not sure) shines is that the program you have are the actual executables, and any config files or preferences they have go in a well defined place in the system. If you want to delete an app, 99% of the time you just drag it to the trash. WYSIWYG at its finest.
Another area where Windows lags is Power Management. Perhaps its the use of power hungry-hot running x86 processors (maybe Centrino will help), but Windows laptops have a hell of a time sleeping and waking from sleep. They also frequently don’t last for more than an hour and a half on the battery. You should be able to close your laptop and have it save its state, go to sleep and live for at least a few days. When you want to use it again, it should wake up immediately and restore itself.
Finally, Windows has a pretty ugly driver system. I understand that much of this has to do with the sheer amount of devices that windows has to work with, but driver packages are far from easy to understand. Some things work out of the box, some require you to “insert the windows CD”, some install, but then leave your devices half working. I don’t particularly think any OS out there now handles this the best, but it would be nice if you had a driver “folder” where you could just throw your driver files. If they were in there, they were active, if not then they aren’t. Perhaps something like the MacOS 9 extension folder. Mac OS X has an OK system with kexts, but then again, most users don’t know they exist, so when they have to install one, they are lost if something goes wrong.
A good example of *inconsistency* in OS X is Safari. For 20 years Command+W was used to close a window, but with Safari it closes tabs.
The official release beta of Safari has no tabs, and DOES close the window. You are talking about the leak build which they are internally testing.
Two quick points
Removing BeOS apps is as simple as removing their folder, config files go in ~/config
Also, BeOS has a driver folder where you can just drop drivers, with most devices other than video cards no reboot is necessarty, they just start working.
You said “all reviews are biased” and “[Eugenia] is honest about her biases”.
Well, did you read the comment where eugenia said “I am not biased”? 😉
Somone: This is a really biased article.
Eugenia: I can assure you, it is not.
That’s comment 36, this very forum.
I also think you were a little too harsh on KDE/GNOME, many of the issues you mentioned are not the fault of the DE’s themselves, rather X11 and other toolkits. You we re comparing DE’s so when you compare KDE to some other DE you should assume that every app is a KDE/QT app, the KDE developers have no power to make Motif, X11 etc apps all look like a KDE app. They also can’t mask X11’s speed problems problems. I hope you’re catching on to waht I mean. If you were comparing OSes I would understand this, but you are comparing DE’s. Therefore, if you compare GNOME to KDE you are comparing ONLY GNOEM APPS, CONFIG UTILITIES ETC. with KDE’s counterparts and nothign else.
Excellent point, Mario.
Roberto, I get the feeling you’re trying to pick a fight. When Eugenia says she’s “not biased,” she means she doesn’t start with a dislike of a particular UI and go in with preconceived notions.
When someone says that all reviews are “biased,” they mean that each reviewer is offering their opinion. Everyone else gets that. We use the same word, but we mean different things.
I know you understand this difference, that’s why I suspect you’re mad and just trying to make other people look foolish. Sorry, buddy, it’s not working.
I’d probably have rated OS X slightly higher but otherwise they’re probably not far off from the ratings I’d give–with the caveat that my “users don’t care about implementation” rant from a previous thread is something I still believe.
I find OS X to be pretty responsive on a system level; the chunkiness shows up more on a per-application level. The spinning beach ball of doom generally only affects one application. Windows 2000 and XP don’t suffer from that, but my experience they replace it with the “mysterious system freeze”–every once in a (long) while the system just stops for several minutes. The other thing I’ve noticed with Windows (albeit only in Pre-XP, because my experience with XP isn’t long enough to have seen if this has finally been fixed) is what I call “creeping crud syndrome.” A perfectly well-maintained Windows 9x or NT/2000 system will, over time, get flakier and flakier, to the point where the system must be reinstalled to fix the problems. When I mention this to other Windows users, they all nod. This is a usability issue in the “long-term road test” sense–it’s worth mentioning. (I haven’t had that problem on my PowerBook with OS X, but to be fair we’ll have to check back in this time next year to see if that’s still the case.)
To the people crying “subjective review!”… eh. It’s all subjective. There are common UI practices, but even some of the supposedly objective ones can be argued about. (Mac users will defend their fixed menu bars to the death by waving GOMS analyses at you, for instance. Yet a quantitative GOMS keystroke-level analysis “prove” that Vim is a better text editor than BBEdit.)
Thanks Eugenia, for that delicious article….as always never one to disappoint.
I particularly admired your honesty…and am very interested in GUI/UI/DE. I was wondering if you will be doing something similar on 3D-enviroments, as this is possibly the future of Desktop-Environments?
Well, I disagree with you.
I think “all reviews are biased” and “this review is not biased” are conrtdictory statements.
An opinion is not the same as a bias. A bias is a preconception, or a prejudice, or a personal preference, tainting an opinion, making the opinion unreliable.
As webster says, “a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment”, or “prejudice”.
Prejudice, bias != opinion.
Windows takes a pretty scary approach to this in that when you install an app, it pretty much dumps the app/support files wherever it damn well pleases.
Hmm, I have 1 out of 20+ Programs where I can’t specify where to install it (Canon Printer Driver).
Have you EVER used Linux? Here you really can’t say where things are installed, and I hate it.
@Euginia: GREAT ARTICLE!
Really, I was reading it and thought at 95% that you are right, and I have used BeOS, WinXP, Gnome and KDE (sorry I have no PowerPC
.
My own opinion in short terms:
– Gnome launching programs slow, KDE even slower.
– Windows has great Keyboard accessibility and is so snappy. I personally think it’s on par with BeOS – sometimes slower, sometimes faster. But compared to all other DEs, its like a Ferarri.
And I understand that every review is a little biased, but I know Euginia, and in previous articles she was often much more biased, so she really tried hard to give a fair review.
Keep up the good work!
Well I still have PIII 450 mhz 256ram I can assure you windows XP is slow! It’s so bloated, windows 98 was flying on this machine, so was windows NT. Apart for the eyecandy and stability issue, I don’t find it so different from the older windows versions but yet it’s so much slower and bigger.
BeOS was just flying and it was relatively stable in a time windows was crashing every 3 minutes. Ok some apps crashed and took down tracker but that was more due to bad apps rather than BeOS.
I windows XP I still need to reboot to get software installed, that not a userfriendly experience is it. A good desktop should be responsive even with my hardware if not it’s bloated.
However I do admit XP is the most stable OS I ever used
> I find it interesting that so many people complain about gtkmm when in fact it is the most pure C++ gui library out there.
You never coded in BeOS I see
rpm -ql program
dpkg -L program
Not very hard, IMHO.
Excalibur wrote:
> The official release beta of Safari has no tabs, and DOES
> close the window. You are talking about the leak build which
> they are internally testing.
What’s a “release beta”? Apple have learned their lesson with the fiasco of Safari hosing people’s home directories. Ever since this horrific bug was fixed, Safari has been off the public beta stage. b62 and b64 have only been sent to testers whom Apple know won’t complain if hell breakes loose.
And for you info, the tabs are here to stay (with Command+W and all). Read the blog of Apple’s Dave Hyatt for more details:
http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/2003_03.html#0026…
I actually find that on my brother’s Gateway Essential with a 500 MHz Celeron with 96 MBs of RAM that RH8 runs far nicer than Win98. Also I find at where I study that RH8 with GNOME you are able to surf the net alot quicker than on the very same machine (they have removable Hard drives) that Win 2000.
Before I start reading user comments, I want to thank Eugenia for writing an excellent review. It was fair, unbaised and basically spot on. Good work. Its a pleasure to read such thorough and well informed articles.
Now, time to sift through the comments and join the flame fest.
I find it to be refreshing, Eugenia does a good job telling us about her opinions and it seems she is very fair with her DE review. I personally like the KDE interface but I can see what she is saying about each one and yes I do think Windows has a superior interface design as well, For development I use QT and I use QT for a couple of reasons the most pressing one is its cross platform capabilities. All the problems I have with GNOME and OS X interfaces I think she hit the nail head on. Good Job Eugenia
Seriously, seriously, how can Euginia put Win XP above Mac OS X? I mean…seriously?!
Mac OS X mops the floor with Windows. As many people have said, the dialogs in Win XP blow. Win XP, IMHO, looks like ass. And WinXP on _my_ machine is slower than Mac OS X on my iBook. And, may I point out, Mac OS X is running on a 600mhz machine. Win XP is on a 1.6ghz machine.
Windows UI is also often inconsistant (Dialog boxes, again…). Also, why does skinning matter? Hello, you seem to be constantly harping how “It’s not included in the OS!”. SKINNING ISN’T INCLUDED! It’s an _addition_!
Ack, this article wreaks.
Hey guys, relax. Not the first (and probably not the last) time Eugenia write controversy statements. Unless what she could claim, she has troubles to understand what “objective” means. Her notion of “comes as default matters more than everything else”, personal color tastes and a definite inertia in her computing experience totally screw up her reviews.
A long time I noticed that. Better read the headlines here and the articles/reviews on some other sources.
Overall, I think this was an excellent article, fair and pretty much consistent with my experience (except re: crashes of Konq).
However, as Eugenia herself said, it is necessarily somewhat subjective IN CERTAIN aspects.
Unfortunately, I think this cannot be fixed, even though she brings up extremely important issues that need to be discussed a lot more.
Here, I’d just point out one: the whole “feature bloat”, versus “clean default” argument best seen in the Gnome/KDE debate. Or as it was explored in greater depth in the exchange between Havoc and Mosfet. I’m afraid ultimately, there is no “right” and “wrong” here – either you like to have tons of options, or you like to have a “clean and spare” default. Sometimes I feel like Eugenia (and Havoc, and generally the “spare” camp) don’t appreciate the fact that as Mosfet puts it, it doesn’t have to be “too many options, confusing”, but rather “tons of options WELL ORGANIZED will not be confusing”. Eugenia seems to think that it is _impossible_ to combine the two, that at some point “no matter how well” you organize, you’ll have confusion with too many options. I strongly disagree. I think it is a cop-out, and I think that Havoc simply is unable/unwilling to think hard enough to come up with organization solutions and takes the easy road of hiding options (deeply, so you have to dig down just to tweak rather _basic_ stuff). Hey, sorry if imagination fails you – but many inventions wouldn’t even come about (such as tabbing) if everyone had Havoc’s attitude that you “can’t” organize. That’s a lazy way of thinking. Havoc simply took organization features such as tabbing, drop-down menues, context menues etc., and STOPPED thinking further whatever year his outlook was formed (mid 90’s). I bet if Havoc was working back in the 50’s he’d never imagine the mouse. Sorry, just because you don’t know how to organize, or cannot think in a revolutionary way doesn’t mean it is IMPOSSIBLE. I think it is lame to deny people choices or bury them deeply. Defaults matter, and I prefer a feature-rich default.
Having said that, I do agree that the KDE feature organization is poor, and so in that sense Eugenia is right. But her (Gnomish, and Havoc) prescription is wrong – you stop to innovate UI ideas too quickly and settle for the easy solution of stripping away choice (and sending the pro user to dig deep). Obviously, there needs to be a balance, and it will be different for different people – so if you have just ONE default (by definition), you need to make sure it works for MOST people. And here, I feel Eugenia’s camp underestimates users – people are much more flexible and able to learn, and are much less confused than you give them credit for.
Still, a very fair and good article.
I’m talking about the versions with tabs are not available to the public. They ones you are refering to are leaks. Meaning they are not written in stone. If you want to judge an internal build as law, thats you perogative there.
That was just an example. Fact remains that text is not very visible on the metal interface. With Safari or not.
Another example of why more Mac users are on anti-depressants than the rest of us.
Squidgee she does a very good review and I find OS X to be more processor intensive and slower than XP, comparing OS X and Windows XP. I find no problems with XP and I must say, Windows XP is by far the most stable and best OS microsoft has ever released. But alas, a Windows vs. OS X war is one no one will ever win.
A previous post called this article ancedotal. That’s clearly not true.
As a developer, this article has given me food for thought. I’m bookmarking this with a view to addressing some of the issues. I’m glad to see there wasn’t an element of flame like one sees in Petreleys articles, at any rate.
Free Software developers have a tendency to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches at the first sign of criticism, which I guess is necessary to a certain extent for them to keep their sanity.
I know Eugenia had to go for the “current” iteration of software, but I had a secret hope she’d include Win2K in the comparison – it was/is different enough from XP, yet current enough to make for an interesting comparison.
XP and OSX (mostly) are mature, meanwhile, Gnome and KDE are “a work in progress”, and it shows. Linus said linux would not be desktop-ready until 2006, which means we are still 3 years away – a lot can change… of course, at that point Longhorn will be out, BeOS updated, and Gnome & KDE probaby still a work in progress (though usable, while today it is not ready to be a 100% Windows/Apple substitution for the masses).
But pretty easy on Windows. Case in point: Here we have an operating system where every single menubar an every application is along the top of the screen, and you pull down menus, even in old Win16 apps, and yet the MAIN SYSTEM MENU is along the BOTTOM of the screen and a menu shoots up from it! There’s no reason at all for this. Once people get their minds contorted to deal with this inconsistency, they barely notice. But the same could be said for any inconsistency.
While I agree that a lot of usability is just “what you’re used to” and thus Windows wins in every category, I think overlooking such blatant UI inconsistency is taking it rather easy on them.
And yes, this DOES mean you could deduct points from KDE and Gnome for the same thing, too.
Escape to cancel and command first letter of any other option (fer instance, command-d for “Don’t Save”). Piece o’ cake..
Very nice job. Nothing to complain about.
I’d have to say to the people in here, if your complaining about something, it’s more then likely you that is messed up. Not the review, not the OS.
BeOS usability – For example, when having an input box, a text view, or a selectable text item, I want to be able to right click on it and have a cut/copy/paste menu. Agreed, a right click context menu would be nice, but the system wide Alt-Z, Alt-X, Alt-C and Alt-V still work as you’d expect.
“What Mac OS X lacks though is good keyboard navigation.”
and
“Another thing I recently realized deeply is that Macs are way more keyboard-oriented than the rest platforms”
Make up your mind Eugenia.
I suggest you re-read what I write there. “keyboard navigation” and “keyboard oriented for other tasks” is not the same thing.
why are all you people saying that gnome is crap?
and Eugenia (who i respect i might add) Your saying gnome is ugly? Have you used gnome 2.2 with xft2 ? actually i suppose you probally have, the fonts are so purty ok? and the ugly icons can be fixed with icon themes now in 2.2. Heck they even include a theme manager that lets you install various kinds of themes. I like gnome. It definatly might not be as consistant as kde, or as complete, but it is pritty ok.
One thing I’ve noted about win XP is that is gets slower and slower if I don’t reboot the machine, perhaps, twice a week (Win XP home Edition). Have you noticed that ? anyone ?
I basically agreed with most of what was written. A few comments:
First the flexability was IMHO very unfair.
Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5
I don’t know BeOS but XP isn’t even in the same ballpark as either X environment in terms of flexability. Network transparency is a huge feature in terms of flexability and didn’t get mentioned. How do you use multiple video cards with a single window? How do you display Windows on an arbitrary group of nxm monitors using multiple video cards?
How about multiple language support. X applications have supported full character sets for over a decade and this technology is very mature.
Finally a dozen different widget sets may be horrible for consistency but it is wonderful for flexability.
___
There were minor points I disagreed with. I think speed of use is more important than speed of load. Take the mac interface from the 1980’s it took forever to load apps but once loaded they were pretty fast. To this day Windows can be very unresponsive when it has network problems.
I do not know what you do for a living, but Im afraid reality is not what your doing on a regular basis.
Luna – crashes so much, much more than Windows 2000’s shell. And its rediculous look feel by default blows. The look of WinXP and officeXP and the new office are totally inconsistent, which makes me think that their user interface group is so irrelevent they must still be looking at Apple’s guidelines set forth many years ago.
Don’t you get it yet, you dope, MS only changes the look every few years to make you rebuy bug fixes and SPY on you.
MS has the notion of skinning per se. (thats a corpoate idea of skinning), but you can only use their skins or something else you have to buy.
No matter – I completely wasted my time on this whole topic.
KDE and OSX should have been 10.
“Luna – crashes so much, much more than Windows 2000’s shell. And its rediculous look feel by default blows. The look of WinXP and officeXP and the new office are totally inconsistent, which makes me think that their user interface group is so irrelevent they must still be looking at Apple’s guidelines set forth many years ago.”
The problem is, Luna cannot crash. It’s not a program.
MacOS X doesn’t have vector icons, it just uses really big bitmaps and scales them down
Sure when u run winXP on the most powerful comp available it wins, but personally, I’d love to see it be compared to any other OS when using 128megs ram, or/and a very slow processor like 400mhz, Windows XP would lose for sure
The specs of the machines I used are detailed in the article. Primarily, I run XP PRO on a lowly dual Celeron 533 Mhz with 256 MB of RAM.
Escape to cancel and command first letter of any other option (fer instance, command-d for “Don’t Save”). Piece o’ cake..
Hmm, very good thing. I liked this in windows because since MS started to hide these usefull indicators by default in Win2000 more and more programmer’s “forget” about them completetly in dialog boxes
But how is this handled in MacOSX if 2 options start with the same letter? And is it possible to *fully* control the Mac with the keyboard only? This means some way to maximize/minimize windows, move windows, switch between tabs in option dialogs, etc….?
One Question Eugenia: Why is the BeOS (or what is being reconstituted as it)in here? I know your’e a fan of it and have used it extensively, but, the userbase must be a lot smaller than all the people that use Mac OS X and Linux (on the desktop). Correct me if im wrong.
The OS camp is basically heading toward Windows vs *nix (OSX, Unix, and Linux). I’m a programmer, so I’ve used and coded on OSX, XP, and several linux distros.
XP’s blue aqua skin is just too cartoony. I reverted it back to the win95 look. It is still an architectural mess and susceptible to bit rot (I do a reinstall every couple of months).
I am deeply impressed with the immense progress that Linux has made since I started toying with it in 1999. The KDE-Gnome rivalry might be a little damaging, but if you have an os written by hobbyist, everyone will have their own idea how to make it their own.
I like Mac OS X the most. Applications install and remove easily (just remove the application file itself, and done, unless you do a package install). Everything is laid out cleanly. Quartz Extreme on a good GPU is beautiful. I do not like how apple is wrecking their previous gold standard for UI consistency, but Aqua seems like a better step in that direction.
Nothing’s perfect.
Though you did try to look at all the characteristics, there are a few things I think you missed. I’m gonna mention KDE a lot because that’s what I use.
– ALT-F2 in KDE. It’s a run command dialog. I find this an easy and convienent way to open up any program and rarely use the K menu (start menu equivelent).
– Linux is (at current) still for reasonably technical people. If your biggest concern is ‘it’s pretty’ then you probably shouldn’t use it. Different DE’s are really good for different people. I use a Mac at work, Windows at school, and KDE at home.
– It’s easy enough to change your theme in KDE. I think it’s just as easy as in Windows. Of course, you have to use KDE a bit before it becomes easy, but ditto with Mac, Windows…
– What about changing the default app for opening up a document? I think it’s so incredibly easy in KDE, while I’ve seen friends spend far too much time trying to figure it out on Windows. Of course, that was 98. I haven’t seen anyone do this on XP.
– Multiple desktops. I can barely get along without these at work. I take them for granted with KDE, being able to keep my work seperated and visible.
————
Thanks for all the work you put into the article, but I’d be more able to believe a review compiled by several people. Or at least read over by one person who uses each DE _heavily_.
-RW
It’s really not quite fair for Eugenia to judge KDE and GNOME on ‘consistency’ when you include other apps not written for its toolkit. Many people like myself use only KDE apps when using KDE, GTK when using, *box, Windowmaker, etc.
Also, since there are so many KDE apps, it’s really quite easy to get away with running only KDE programs when using it. Based on a fair comparison, I think that the ranking should be KDE, BeOS, Windows (not all apps support theming even MS Office XP), Mac, GNOME.
KDE and Be apps all behave and look the same as each other.
Sure when u run winXP on the most powerful comp available it wins, but personally, I’d love to see it be compared to any other OS when using 128megs ram, or/and a very slow processor like 400mhz, Windows XP would lose for sure
That may be right, but a Ferrari is also slower than a pickup on a VERY bad road, but since I don’t drive on such roads(don’t have such a PC) it’s important for me how an OS performs on _my_ system (Athlon 1.33) – and here Windows wins *by far* over any *nix desktop and probably MacOSX.
I sometimes get the feeling that eugenia is a bit overconfident about her UI expertise.. The truth is, she’s way more qualified than most of us who comment here– this article has proven to be especially objective–
and worth reading.
Hopefully my favorite environment (Gnome) can take care of some of the things she mentions.
On a side note, I’ve gotten hooked on bluecurve… but I’m amazed and intrigued kde can be adjusted to look this clean! :
http://img.osnews.com/img/1347/myKDE3.jpg
(a modification by eugenia)
After reading that article I did a small speed test. The 3 OSes are Windows XP Home w/Luna enabled, KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.2
The OS at top is the fastest and the OS at bottom is the slowest
My 2.8GHz P4 (suprising) 1GB DDR333-
Windows XP
KDE 3.1 (I am SHOCKED)
GNOME 2.2
My 533MHz Celeron 256MB PC100 (as usual)-
KDE 3.1
GNOME 2.2
Windows XP
It seems like that KDE and GNOME are having some kind of “speed cap”….. :/
How about trying to run your reviews on the same hardware wherever possible?
Obviously you should be able to run Gnome vs. KDE vs. XP on the same machine. I’m not sure if BeOS has a version that runs on a semi current system ( never used it ). You could even try running Gnome vs. KDE on more than one linux or BSD install, just to see if there’s something the distro is doing that’s causing things to act flaky.
What I got from the review was that all of these were tried on different machines and that’s part of the problem. Obviously you don’t have a choice with OSX, but comparing BeOS, or KDE, or whatever, on a dual CPU system and then Gnome, or whatever, on a single CPU system is likely to give vastly different experiences. I think laptops were even mentioned at one point. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen a laptop that I’d consider a “high performance machine”.
If BeOS won’t run on the same system, why not? I’d say if you can’t load them all on the same machine, then there’d better be a reason, and it should be reflected in your scoring. OSX we already know the reason and I can’t see why you’d deduct points for it. But if they all won’t run on the same machine, then there’s simply no way to get meaningful results here. Also, without testing on more than one linux distro or BSD, you cannot say that it is KDE or Gnome that is causing the problem with consistency or performance.
Load times are quite possibly at the mercy of the underlying system. It’s not quite fair to say that the load time of Gnome app Y is slower than the load time of KDE app Z if you run Gnome under Gentoo and KDE on FreeBSD stock out of the box.
It may take a bit more effort, but I think it would create more consistent results. It should at least more consistent methodology which should help remove some of the bias comments. After all, at least your base starting point is the same.
Just my .02$
Also, since there are so many KDE apps, it’s really quite easy to get away with running only KDE programs when using it. Based on a fair comparison, I think that the ranking should be KDE, BeOS, Windows (not all apps support theming even MS Office XP), Mac, GNOME.
Why is Gnome on last position? When i use(d) Linux I used Gnome2 mainly because it was more beautiful and it had something called HIG (or human interface guidelines) and nearly all programs for Gnome followed them.
>How about trying to run your reviews on the same hardware wherever possible? Obviously you should be able to run Gnome vs. KDE vs. XP on the same machine. I’m not sure if BeOS
This is ONLY relevant for the Speed category. And YES, I have **EIGHT** OSes on that machine (dual celeron 533), including all the above you mentioned with their DEs. And also I have **9** more machines in my office, playing with many OSes over time. Remember, this is a long time testing, including experiences from many machines AND a single machine.
And I’m not afraid to say so. I think it’s pretty honest, if opinionated, and people shouldn’t whine just because they don’t like the results. No review is “impartial” – the reviewer’s biases are always in play to some extent. At least we know Eugenia’s up front.
stopdabombing: I think that GNOME’s lack of configurability at the moment is more from the recent change to Metacity than any real decision to remove configurability totally. Still needs to be corrected, of course.
What both GNOME and KDE need to do is make sure the configurability they have do not devolve into the mess that KDE is currently. I’m sorry, oGALAXYo, but it’s just impossible to say that KDE is not a horror to configure as a newbie as it is right now. Windows always seemed to get this right with a simple rule – put the simple stuff people usually alter on the top, and put the rest in an “advanced” screen with tabs. It’s a _huge_ turn-off to see 50 options squished into one window. The only good thing that can be said is that RedHat 8.0 KDE has sensible defaults, meaning I don’t usually need to wade into that stuff.
-Erwos
First off nice on avoiding marios comments about comparing de’s as that in itself would make most of what u put down nix de’s obsolete.
RIght other things u forgot to mention the single most useful thing that slaps windows silly. Multiple desktops something both gnome and kde have supported for years and what mac osx supports and from what i seen longhorn will more than likely have. This feature alone is awesome.
It seemed you could not find one nice thing to say about kde or gnome without instantly going into some sort of bashing most of what u said i was just thinking wtf ? no seriously.. u sure u were using kde 3.1.
speed wise is awesome.
Also u mention bluecurve default for gnome in rh8 but thats also default for rh8 and kde. yet u only mention keramik.
Lets see changing themes with xp . Yeah 3 different themes but to get more u have to get a third part app which is shite.
I do agree changing resolutions etc.. should be in the de’s on nix no doubt. And i would rate them down quite a lot for that.
As for unstableness of kde / konqueror. maybe 3.0. Not 3.1 sorry thats just wrong.
SOme things justs didnt make sence.
Yes linux wm still have a lot of maturing but the bloat u so frequently threw at it because u couldnt be arsed with a valid criticism was just bullshit.
Sorry to say it as far as responsiveness goes kde has been good.. It got vast speed improvements from 3 to 3.1.
Lovely u talk about registry for microsoft, nice having to go through that to configure simple things that u cant see. WHen u have kcontrol which configures everything to do with kde right there and u call it bloat ? bullshit right now im on 3.1.1 and damn its slick. It has everything i need. No one else can compare but u knock off points for bloat. Im sure with win xp had as many features u would be praising it like mad.
Last thing i have devils own winxp installed when i was testing it explorer does tend to crash. However i have seen it rarely take down the whole system. Which is good.
I am only comparing kde / gnome and windows aint used the rest so dont have a right to say anything about how good / bad they are.
Yes my comments are biased
http://slicker.sourceforge.net/
ahh yeah now we are talking.
http://slicker.sourceforge.net/screen-real-applets.php
but no doubt you would see this project not as an innovative idea but as bloat.
Pertaining menu bars, task bars or the panel, they should be at the top of the screen. People, in the western world, read top to bottom, left to right. Hence having the task bar at the top makes absolute sense.
The trash can should be at the lower right of the screen. Most people are (unfortunately) right handed and, as such, it is an easier movement to drag an item to the trash in a sweeping arch (clockwise direction).
The print function should be directly above the trash for drap and drop functionality and for the same reasons as listed above.
Much more UI info can be found at: http://www.asktog.com
At least you are able to learn. But don’t bother saying “thanks Roberto for educating me”, I will keep on doing it regardless.
Yikes – this guy doesn’t know a thing or one.
I use a three button wheeled mouse on my old 333Mfz iMac and it wroks great. Left/Right/scroll wheel cum middle button. OS X supports right button clicks just fine and most OS X programs have it implemented.
The single button has consistently been found to be less confusing to newbies, whereas two or three button mouses are supported by 3rd party USB devices.
Get a MacAlly icemouse http://www.macally.com/spec/usb/input_device/icemousejr.html – sheesh.