Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities [LWN.net]

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 7, 2013 21:02 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities by Del-
Parent article: Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

So... You're telling us that KDE3 was too complex for regular users? Funny, but I know tens of people who used KDE3 just fine. It wasn't that much different from Other desktop environments.

On the other hand, I don't know anybody who used KDE4 with all of its Plasma and Activities functionality.

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Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 7, 2013 22:27 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (1 responses)

> So... You're telling us that KDE3 was too complex for regular users?

Yes, your nerd friends don't count ;) Note, it wasn't just the desktop, it was also present throughout the applications. Today you have superior functionality across the board, but it is not in your face.

> On the other hand, I don't know anybody who used KDE4 with all of its Plasma and Activities functionality.

Well, it is hard to assess your social life, but I do know a number of people using plasma. I also use it myself. Activities is a bit more exotic, haven't really caught me yet. However, notice that you choose to focus on two functionalities that were either non-functional/extremely buggy (karamba) or non-existent (Activities) in KDE3. Neither of which you seem to have gathered first hand experience on. Neither of which you find worthy alternatives for in any other desktop. Yes, even nerds like me enjoy the cleaner user experience with even more functionality than KDE3 ever had.

If you take the time to investigate the design and functionality of the filemanager in KDE, Dolphin, you should understand what I am talking about. It is only an example, move on to investigate Okular, Gwenview, Amarok, Ktorrent, Konsole, Kdenlive, System Settings, Ksysguard, Rekonq, Kontact, Kdevelop, Kate, Kile, Krita Digikam, Ksnapshot, you will see it across the board. The desktop itself really tops it off, just the way users can share various goodies from kde-look.org is amazing and miles ahead of KDE3 or any other desktop on any OS.

Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Posted Nov 8, 2013 0:06 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, as a KDE fan, I find "discoverability" pretty crap. Is it a plasmoid I've got on my desktop? With things like firefox and thunderbird and other stuff in? Pretty nifty, I'll admit, but it took me absolutely ages to work out how to put stuff in it (and there's probably an easier way ...)

And it's disappeared from my wife's desktop, and I haven't got a clue how to get it back if she wanted it ...

And I have to strongly agree with the poster who said familiarity is important. My wife has Parkinsons, so she has poor motor control, and learning is very hard because Parkinsons plays havoc with the link between short and long term memory - how are people like her supposed to cope if the user paradigm keeps changing?

That said, it's also important that the developers think the same way as the user - you may remember I hate Word(-alikes) and love WordPerfect - because the underlying mindset between the two is different and my mindset matches WordPerfect's. That's probably why I like KDE and actively avoid Gnome :-)

Cheers,
Wol