GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 18:57 UTC (Tue) by hmh (subscriber, #3838)
In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by jdub
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

You said:

All of the issues raised were explained, and the whole "confusing users" rationale debunked every time. That's not how we make design decisions at all.

Why don't you place the so-called advanced functionality behind an Advanced button or in another dialog tab, then?

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 19:05 UTC (Tue) by jdub (guest, #27) [Link] (9 responses)

There are plenty of places in GNOME where options exist on separate tabs, dialogues and behind disclosure triangles. It is not as if GNOME has no preferences or options whatsoever.

(Functionality and options are different things, and "functionality" generally doesn't hide in the same kind of places options do...)

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 19:33 UTC (Tue) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link] (1 responses)

You're right, but the critical swinging point here is the concept of
'plenty'. You see, you can make lots and lots of users happy (the 5-nines
you refer to elsewhere) by having an advanced desktop that has a
well-designed layering exposing more advanced functionality to more
advanced users as they drill down. The cost is that you will occasionally
get the layering wrong and make small minds be overwhelemed. Here we have
KDE.

The other option is to use the idea that you're designing for the
majority as a reason to not implement features or configurables at all.
You'll *please* a small number of users this way because you're going to
be lucky and get a good handful of them that find not a thing more than
they need. But these people would have been *happy* if you had more, as
long as you managed it wisely. Here we have GNOME.

And I know you've stated that you don't design for the "majority", but as
far as I can tell you're just saying that:

>> That's a very different class of user to, say, my doctor. He's a smart
>> guy, but totally doesn't give a shit about computers. I want to make
>> Free Software that works for him.

Is the "totally doesn't give a shit about computers" not the majority
crowd? What exactly do you call it if the word "majority" is banished?

WYSIAYG

Posted Dec 27, 2005 0:03 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

The problem on point is referred to as What You See Is *All* You Get, and it's the traditional argument made against GUI's by command-line partisans, as well.

It *is* a problem, though, and the *real* problem that it is, is this:

Non-power-users *don't stay that way*.

People learn. And regardless whether your interface failed to scare them away when they were newbies, if they *can't get their work done* now that they're *not*, they're leaving, anyway.

So the "progressive complexity" partisans are the ones closest to right.

The as-yet unsolved problem is one corollary to "*why* is that menu item greyed out when I want to use it?" -- *how* do you let the user know that there are more powerful commands hidden from them that are pertinent to what they're doing?

Once someone comes up with a good, portable, intuitive solution to that which app writers can deploy without great pain, we'll really be going somewhere.

You heard it here first. ;-)

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:58 UTC (Tue) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link] (6 responses)

But even for an experienced user it's sometimes nearly impossible to find
out how to change some very trivial things. For instance, the only
GNOME-like application I use at times is Firefox (I know it's GTK and not
GNOME but that all comes from the same stable to me). What drives me nuts
in Firefox are the freakin' wrong button order and the key bindings in
the location bar (every time I press CNTRL-U it wants to show me the
HTML-source). Now, after googling for quite some time I found that I have
to put the following stuff into my .gtkrc-2.0 file:

gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
gtk-alternative-button-order = 1

I did that and you know what, it STILL doesn't work! I tried all kinds of
things with gconf-editor and whatnot in order to fix that broken stuff
but until now I couldn't figure out how to change it! The result is, I
stay away more and more from GTK- and GNOME-apps because it drives me
nuts. Now you can call me an oldtime UNIX user (the ones you apparently
don't care about and try to piss off as much as possible) but I still
have some influence and I really can't recommend something (even to your
doctor) which I'm not able to use myself.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 21:13 UTC (Tue) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link]

While we're griping about GTK, can someone please tell me why every time
I hit + in GAIM or another GTK app, it renders as a tiny superscript plus
sign? Why do I always get these weird "binary character" graphics in the
course of normal IM conversations with a small amount of copy/paste? Why
does copying text out of a syntax-highlighting editor result in broken,
non-newline-terminated colourized text showing up in the GTK edit box I'm
pasting into?

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 14, 2005 0:51 UTC (Wed) by diakka (guest, #10310) [Link] (4 responses)

use gconf-editor and set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs".

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 14, 2005 17:35 UTC (Wed) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link] (3 responses)

use gconf-editor and set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs".

Settings you make with gconf-editor will only be used if gnome-settings-daemon is running when you start firefox. If you don't use gnome-settings-daemon, you are correct in editing your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file.

Note that ~/.gtkrc-2.0 is just silently ignored if gnome-settings-daemon is running.

There's also the possibility that you don't have the Emacs theme in /usr/share/themes/.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:24 UTC (Thu) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link]

I made the change with gconf-editor but it still didn't work at first.
Now I switched to KDE 3.5 and the gtk-key-theme suddenly works! I have no
idea why it decided to respect my settings now. The only thing which
started up together with firefox is gconfd-2. Maybe that's the
gnome-settings-daemon which makes it work? I don't know.

Anyway, thanks for all the hints, but my point is that it's extremely
complicated even for experienced users to change such simple things.
Maybe GNOME should provide an "idiot" and a "poweruser" mode if they
don't want to confuse their doctors. Then at least the ones who want to
tweak obscure settings and know what they're doing can switch to
"poweruser" and mess up their UI in whatever way THEY want. I still
believe the UI should adapt to the user and not the other way around.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:25 UTC (Thu) by gallir (guest, #5735) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh my freaking God. Is that "usable", "simple", "it just works". I'm
still parsing what I should do to change key bindings in Firefox.

So, to be sure it reads my resource file I should first do some "ps -
kill -9" commands? No, I can't believe it.

BTW, I'm a vim user. What's the "emacs' style"? :-)

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:37 UTC (Thu) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link]

BTW, I'm a vim user. What's the "emacs' style"? :-)

I'm a vi/vim user myself but I frequently use CNTRL-U in the shell in
order to clear the command line and I want to do the same in the firefox
location bar. But the default binding for CNTRL-U in firefox is "view the
HTML source" which drives me nuts if I hit it by accident. And, believe
me, I'm not the only one here, most of my coworkers complained about
that. Maybe it appeases the Windows crowd (which we don't have here
except for our secretaries and they're not used to keybindings at all,
they just point and click with the mouse) but it drives UNIX users
insane.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 21:43 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (4 responses)

>> Why don't you place the so-called advanced functionality behind an Advanced button

yuck!

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 0:37 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (2 responses)

Please don't do "Advanced" tabs. If you're looking for a feature, you have to look twice, in the relevant tab and in "Advanced". It's like record stores that have a separate "Alternative" section. You have to look twice to see if they're out of something.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 7:25 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (1 responses)

Just have one option somewhere near the top that enables the "Advanced" (more options) throughout all configuration dialogs and widgets.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 10:09 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Apparently this `confuses the users', too. (Well, that's what I was told when they took it out of Nautilus, along with every feature of that program that I actually used it for.)

Perhaps the GNOME project should change the expansion of its acronym: with the near-demise of Bonobo the amount of `network object model' in there is minimal anyway. Given the GNOME attitude (`on crack' and dismissive contempt) to suggestions that perhaps not all features that the program's maintainer doesn't use are useless, I suggest the recursive acronym `GNOME Now for Obtuse Morons Exclusively'. It's not true, but at times it seems to be their goal :(

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 15, 2005 7:53 UTC (Thu) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

And please, don't call it "Advanced". It's not advanced. Perhaps it is rarely used, or obscure. But emacs key bindings are not any more advanced then remapping ctrl-c (ascii ETX, which we all learned was used to abort a program) to "copy". The same thing goes for hundreds of other options that devs like Havoc Pennington don't like to expose.

-Paul Komarek