Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Personally I've always found Gnome much easier to use the KDE. Kcontrol is confusing and it is difficult to find configuration stuff, for instance, and when I tried theme-ing and changing things around most of the time I'd end up with a fairly unusable system.

I was of the opinion for a long time that both Gnome and KDE were fundamentally worthless. I prefered to use the slick 'minimalist' window managers.

It wasn't until Gnome 2.6 or 2.8 before it starting appealing to me. Now I use it almost exclusively. (but I will always have a soft spot for things like Ratpoison :P ) I am hoping that KDE version 4 will be a big leap ahead in terms of usability for the KDE desktop.

I am also hoping that desktop standards keep progressing well also. There are a number of KDE applications that I like using and I like how Koffice is turing out. The great thing about standards and such is that even though there will always be people that hate KDE and love Gnome or visa versa there is no reason why choosing one or the other should hurt application support and integration.

And on a side note.. Completely unrelated...

If you have checked out yet take a look at the 'fish' shell. It's a effort at creating a easy to use Unix shell. They are doing some neat stuff to help integrate the command line into the desktop.

For instance the 'open' command checks the mimetypes of files then uses that to find out the default applications for different file types through the freedesktop.org *.desktop specifications. For instance if you choose to use Evince as the default PDF user through nautilus then you can go 'open somedocument.pdf' in fish and it will open the program in Evince.

Also you know how the 'help' command being non-existant in Unix shells was a old joke on basic lack of usability? Well Fish has 'help' that works. Just type 'help' and your browser opens up to the fish help page. Do 'help commandname' and it will open the man file for that command. It's kinda fun.

They simplify and rationalize stuff also. For instance doing loops and stuff is a easier to learn syntax:
It's
for i in 1 2 3 ; echo $i ;end
or
cat file|while read i; echo $i;end

And it keeps track of stuff better so it's easier to go
for i in (foo); if grep $i cow; command $i;end;end

It's still pretty buggy, but it's fun to use.

cat file | while read i; do echo $i; done