Teaching users

Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:18 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

One of the joys of Linux is that it allows users to learn. Sure, most people find things complex to begin with, and that's why we need sensible defaults. But for the system to be a joy to use, one must be able to grow with it. The design should, in my view, allow users who wish to just "use it" to do so easily, but it should lead the curious gently to learn how to do more.

This means, for example:
- Good documentation
- Online help (eg tooltips, and detailed information in the GUI)
- Discoverability (no hidden options, keyboard shortcuts visible in menus (*cough*, XP *cough*)
- The assumption that many times, users will "grow out of" GUI tools, and therefore the GUI tools must explain what hidden "magic" they are doing, and must also assume that the user might edit the file by hand.
KDE is in many ways exceptionally good for this.

A few other random thoughts:

1)I really like GTK. In particular, on lower-end systems, it's much faster. For example, on the Zaurus, GPE is very good, whereas qtopia is, I think, unusably sluggish.

2)GNOME is the only environment I know of which has *lost* features in the last 2 years!

3)Whatever one says about GNOME vs KDE, it's a different ball-game wrt the applications. Many of the "G" applications trounce the "K" applications. eg Abiword >> KWord, GRIP >> KAudiocreator, eog >> kview, xscreensaver >> kscreensaver. But not always. Eg Konqueror >> Nautilus, KPPP >> GnomePPP.

Interoperability, choice, and cross-pollenation of ideas are vital!

4)Som specific rants:

* WHY does firefox have so many hidden gnome dependencies? Eg firefox uses the gnome system default email client. Even if we use KDE. Some of these ought to be customised internal to firefox.

* Why does Mandrake have tools which break the principle of "growing up"? They work by "magic", and break any custom configurations you may have.

* The Gnome filepicker. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!

* Complexity. The most recent versions of the DEs seem to be too interwoven. This is Unix - we're suppposed to have small, discrete applications which are modular. I'd rather have less interdependencies. For example, a recent update of KDE pulled in a new version of DBUS and HAL. Fine. But *why* did that break, of all things, the VLC player, which uses WxWidgets? Or when KDED crashes, why does it kill off khotkeys, and make kicker un-restartable?

Teaching users

Posted Dec 14, 2005 2:05 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (4 responses)

2)GNOME is the only environment I know of which has *lost* features in the last 2 years!

Which is really the source of much of the frustration that some users experience when using current versions of Gnome. If Gnome 1.x had never existed, there probably wouldn't be so many people complaining about 2.x.

From the time Gnome 1.x became stable enough to use (in Oct. 1999, IIRC) until the time it became too ill-maintained to depend on, it picked up a lot of users who came to have certain expectations about the next release. 2.x was a big dissapointment, but there was hope that 2.2 (or 2.4, or 2.6, or 2.8...) would be better. But instead of features reappearing, they just kept dissappering. For example, one of the first things I noticed about 2.12 is that one can no longer open a terminal window from the desktop menu.

I fully expect the Gnome desktop to eventually just disappear entirely (maybe this is a feature that they're saving for 3.x), leaving behind about 50 processes running in the background and consuming hundereds of megabytes of memory for no apparent reason.

OK, I'll admit it: my frustration has given way to a sort of resigned facetiousness. :^)

Teaching users

Posted Dec 14, 2005 4:56 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

> For example, one of the first things I noticed about 2.12 is that one can no longer open a terminal window from the desktop menu.

You do have nautilus-open-terminal installed, right?

Teaching users

Posted Dec 14, 2005 10:23 UTC (Wed) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link]

> you do have nautilus-open-terminal installed, right?
No:
Package nautilus-open=terminal is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package nautilus-terminal has no installation candidate

:-!

Teaching users

Posted Dec 14, 2005 15:02 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

Nope, never heard of it until now. It installed OK (Ubuntu Breezy), but it doesn't seem to do anything. Perhaps I need to restart Gnome.

Teaching users

Posted Dec 14, 2005 18:58 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Dunno. Works fine in Rawhide.