targeted users [LWN.net]

targeted users

Posted Oct 30, 2004 19:43 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285)
In reply to: That much? by hingo
Parent article: KDE and the Linux Journal 2004 Readers' Choice Awards (KDE.News)

GNOME, by and large, is not targeting people who read linuxjournal- for some years now, the goal of GNOME has been to grow beyond that very small market, which means doing things differently. So... if KDE wants to continue to focus on existing Linux users and hackers, that's great, more power to them. GNOME is aiming at different users- frankly, users who don't read linuxjournal, and who mostly don't even know what the difference between GNOME and Linux is. (Try to explain to a windows user some time the difference between X, a kernel, and KDE/GNOME...) So if KDE wants to continue to win these types of polls, great for them- GNOME will continue to focus on the much larger world of people who want software that Just Works. There is space, I believe, for both projects, especially as they increasingly focus on different goals.

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targeted users

Posted Oct 31, 2004 8:26 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

But this is exactly what surprised me, because I've always seen KDE as the desktop that is more "newbie-friendly" and GNOME's design decisions to me seem to be based on a philosophy of doing things the way they have always been done in the Unix world (an example is GIMP opening n number of different windows, instead of one window with many dialogs). The problem is, there is a reason why 99% of people use Windows and nobody has been using Unix for desktop purposes (except universities). That's why "user-friendly" distributions like Corel, Xandros, Linspire always use KDE.

But it's true that the talk in the GNOME camp has recently been the way you said, it will be interesting to see where it leads. Personally I'm glad that KDE doesn't do this spatial-filemanager thing, but if that turns out to be the next big thing, it's good to know that it is available for Linux.