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GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:05 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465)In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by jdub
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Well, my apologies for stepping over the line a bit with that last post.
The airport kiosk remark is just the best describing remark I've come up
with after tinkering with GNOME a few times in between spans on KDE over
the years. (IIRC, my earliest time spent running around on an actual
Linux *desktop* was Red Hat 5 or 6).
My biggest criticism (is this constructive?) of GNOME is that every app
and dialog feels like it was deliberately reduced from what it could have
been. In some cases, this is genius and the dialog is simple / elegant /
pretty. But way too often does it simply get in the way (Your file picker
is a *big* example - why won't it let me sort by file type and why isn't
it immediately evident that I can type a location?)
If GNOME stood alone on the desktop market, I think it would be a great
desktop. The fact is that it stands next to KDE, and even though I admire
your looks and in *some* places the simplicity, any time I spend any
length of time at all in GNOME I come away frustrated after X number of
important things appear to have been intentionally excluded. (X is
porportional to the amount of time I spend on GNOME)
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GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I only learned about the `Ctrl-L to type' thing by following that mailing list thread. Affordances in GNOME are frequently absolutely *awful*, even in very widely-used common dialogs.
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 14, 2005 5:17 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
In my opinion, Gnome shouldn't even have a file picker. Saving a document should just ask for a name and drop it in a default location. After that you can put it somewhere different with Nautilus. Opening a document shouldn't even get a dialog: open it from Nautilus or drag and drop it.
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 14, 2005 11:45 UTC (Wed) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]
Gah, do that and I'll give up helping the folks I know who use GNOME getthemselves out of trouble!
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 14, 2005 13:58 UTC (Wed) by mauvaisours (subscriber, #6130) [Link]
Have you learned about this useful little thing called "Folders" that helps you organize what you do ?
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 15, 2005 22:25 UTC (Thu) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]
Well you are right in one sense, what should a user do in the root? You really should have everything in your home directory, perhaps in the "my Documents" folder. Or even better let people "tag" their files, and make it a database.
On bigger multiuser system it's even worse, have you ever tried to find the account of your friend John in the local /afs.. "Now was is /afs/fnord.se/homes/h/dk/sf/u2313n23? I can't really remmeber... "
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 27, 2005 23:05 UTC (Tue) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
"why isn't it immediately evident that I can type a location?"
OMG!!! Do you know how many times I screamed at that stupid dialog because I thought I couldn't enter a location?
I positively hate hidden functionality and think all GUIs should be "discoverable" which means that you should be able to learn at least 99% of its functionality just by "looking around".
I find that most of the time for me Gnome either does not have the functionality I want or they have hidden it so well that even I as a very experienced user can't find it.
But it's not only Gnome, I love Firefox for example but I still miss some of the settings that you could find in the Mozilla preferences. I want a button "Trust me, I know what I'm doing" that show me all those option pages they removed! (And please, do NOT tell me about about:config!!)