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  • #91
    Originally posted by prodigy_ View Post
    [...]I seriously doubt that anyone in their right mind uses Gnome 3[...]
    I installed Arch with Gnome3 on my fathers computer and enabled the "Applications Menu" extension, which is -- afaik -- part of the official extensions for gnome3. He likes that desktop quite a lot.

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    • #92
      Originally posted by kigurai View Post
      And what exactly do you want to do with GNOME that you can't write an extension for?
      You may have noticed that I was referring to people telling that Gnome was nice after adapting to it. My point was that the GUI has to adapt to the user, not the other way around. If you can do that with extensions good for you, but doesn't change the posts of others.

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      • #93
        Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
        You may have noticed that I was referring to people telling that Gnome was nice after adapting to it. My point was that the GUI has to adapt to the user, not the other way around. If you can do that with extensions good for you, but doesn't change the posts of others.
        I don't think the GUI necessarily has to adapt to the user. In that case no new UI paradigm could ever evolve.
        The GUI must only make it possible for the user to do what the user wants to do. In some cases it might be that a new GUI has a different way of doing things which will force you to change how you do things. This is not *necessarily* bad, if it does not decrease your productivity.
        I am a heavy user of LaTex. That writing environment was vastly different from my previous tools of writing (pen and paper, Word processor, HTML markup, ...). It took quite some time to get used to, and it is sometimes even quite annoying. I would however never want to replace it with any of the tools I tried before.
        And I have the same feeling of GNOME 3. Some things are different, and some things are annoying. Over all, I still much prefer it to any DE I have used to this day.

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        • #94
          Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
          Don't be silly: KDE is the "K Desktop Environment". That's what everyone (apparently just not you) means by "KDE".



          I can think of a few names (Alan Day, Andre Klapper...) but I don't know them all. They are usually blamed for "not listening" but a design team can only listen so much. We can discuss the merits of their design (I believe they're wrong in a few places) but they're definitely putting design first, which is the right thing to do. The same goes for the Elementary guys.



          Actually not just the core applications. Because Ubuntu has put good care to adopt the two main toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) to ease the discrepancies AND adapt the few important foreigners (Firefox/Thunderbird and LibreOffice), so they belong in the same look and feel and overall design (global menu, HUD, etc.)




          No, KDE is unusable because it puts coding before UI/UX design.

          Unfortunately, design can't be made out of the bazaar's model. It's a cathedral type of discipline. It requires a focused small team with strong leadership and professionally trained people focusing on the different areas of the project. There's no such thing as "open design" except for the part when the team exposes its work and leaves it to coders to implement it openly (actually this is not accurate; coders should be very close to the design team in order to accomplish the best possible implementation, but I'm trying to keep things simple here). A design team can be open to suggestions, and even show all the process' progress like in a permanent "open doors day", but can't be driven democratically or meritocratically. A project developed by a large community with focus away from design has a very tiny chance of being usable.

          Of course, you might say lots of people use KDE so KDE is usable. So is the terminal, but I hope to agree that we're talking ordinary people here, not geeks who can use anything you throw at them.



          I'll be happy with an 80% consistent DE and applications. KDE isn't remotely close.



          I mentioned that already in this same thread. That's one of their design decisions I believe they're not in a position to take. IF they were strong enough they might convince application developers to go with them, but nowadays cross-platform development imposes limitations that must be observed by DE designers. That makes decisions like the CSD from Gnome an exercise in a vacuum, going nowhere. A modern DE design should try to encompass different toolkits under the same umbrella and try to interfere as little as possible with current app development conventions. At least until their own SDK becomes so ubiquitous that app developers accept it as THE way to develop. THEN it's possible to introduce "revolutionary" changes. But even then, it's wise to observe cross-platform conventions as much as possible. Ubuntu has been doing that right with Unity. (We'll see what happens with Unity 8 and the convergent SDK, which will address the desktop this year.)



          I'm not quite sure you know what design is...



          I know exactly what you meant. And I intentionally told you KDE needs to put all these things you mention together under a strong leadership after a thorough design phase, executed by well paid designers (not by coders). That won't happen obviously.



          Again: you don't understand design. There shouldn't exist a "KDE usability project". Usability and UX are crucial parts of design that can't be left to a side project. The design represents the very seeds of the whole project. Not a single line of code should be written without a purpose explicitly expressed in a design. KDE (the DE and its whole community) is fundamentally flawed because of this mentality, precisely.



          You have a serious problem understanding design. It's not about looks or developer guidelines (those are minuscule parts of the design process). It would take a lot to explain what design is in a short forum reply, so allow me to suggest some learning on the subject. (No offense intended. You don't have to know what design is to live happily, but if you want to talk about it, then you definitely do have to.)
          You make good points, but you simply do not define "design" exactly yourself, as it has different meaning in different contexts.
          There is code design, UI design etc. You are right, there has to be kind of a design before writing things, but this "design" (here the way the application is intended to work) should be as much independent from the user interaction as possible.

          I want to keep an open mind and do not like to judge people by their comments, but to me you make the impression of a person who thinks the UI is everything and everything in the background should keep the UI in mind.
          I simply cannot agree with that statement, because it is simply wrong. There is simply a difference between application logic and UI.
          You can have the same code logic in background but entirely different ways of interacting with the application (UI).

          I think KDE is technically moving in the right the direction, as QML will make it very easy to leave the design (the way the applications looks and allows interaction with the user) to people dedicated to designing UX (although I do not expect that to happen, but it certainly makes contributing patches easier).

          P.S: I am not silly saying KDE is a community, I suggest you to read the wikipedia article. Saying KDE is the K Desktop Environment is utterly wrong today. If people are not able to distinguish between applications, desktop environments and communities I would consider them as silly.
          I think I understand now why you do not get my points: You are talking about the desktop environment (Plasma), where (I have to agree) design comes first, as it is all about user interaction and design and less about application logic. But I am talking about KDE applications.
          Plasma is well designed from the beginning imho and extremely consistent.
          Thinking about that, I have to conclude you cannot have meant Plasma either, as many of your statements would not make sense otherwise, so you are talking about more then the desktop environment by saying KDE. Maybe you meant KDE SC.

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          • #95
            Originally posted by Delgarde View Post
            Thing is, the hacks are there today because they wanted to push something out to their users, without taking the time to do it properly - instead of building a Unity8 style system at the time, they hacked something together so they could proclaim their shiny new UI, and only then spend time doing it properly. Those specific hacks will probably be gone in the next version, but if the attitude that put them there hasn't changed, I imagine they'll simply have been replaced with different ones.
            I agree 100%. We'll have to wait for Unity 8 on the desktop, but if the mobile side is any indication, I think they're doing things much better this time. They aren't rushing things as they used to if only because they need the confidence of hardware partners and carriers. Sure, the desktop might become a second class citizen in this landscape, but since all the PR is based on the convergence thing, they are kind of forced to make things work solidly if that has to get through.

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            • #96
              Originally posted by kigurai View Post
              I don't think the GUI necessarily has to adapt to the user. In that case no new UI paradigm could ever evolve.
              Unless the user evolves. More experienced users usually can get around with larger or different tasks that may need a different workflow. In that case the UI should be easily adaptable to the changed way things are being done in an efficient way.
              The GUI must only make it possible for the user to do what the user wants to do
              I disagree. The GUI should make it possible for the user to do what he needs to do in the best possible way. To go back to the text editors example, ed makes it possible to edit textfiles, which according to your definition would be sufficient. But really no one wants to use ed, because it is uncomfortable and inefficient to edit text this way.

              For the rest of your text: If you feel comfortable with the tools you use that is a good thing. But I still think that a tool (and a DE/WM is nothing more than that) should force the user to work in a specific eay. If I can't adapt the GUI to work like I think it should it is useless for me.

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              • #97
                Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
                If I can't adapt the GUI to work like I think it should it is useless for me.
                I agree. But the critical part here "for me". There is just a lot of people (generalizing, not directly aimed at you) that make broad assumptions that certain GUIs are bad *for everyone, no exceptions*. Or the tired, elitistical, view that "it might work for casual users, but not people who do 'real' work".

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                • #98
                  Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
                  If I can't adapt the GUI to work like I think it should it is useless for me.
                  The problem is you haven't got to think how a UI should work in a vacuum. You have been already conditioned by former paradigms and have no idea if you'd be better off with newer ones until you try them fully (more on this later).

                  A "fully adaptable UI" is not really a well designed UI. It leaves design to the user (that's what KDE does, mostly). It doesn't propose anything. It just gives you the building blocks and you have to figure out what to do with them. Most people use KDE like Windows because that's what they've learned to use a computer (and also because that's how KDE presents itself by default). That's a dead end for UI design.

                  Any new UI proposal has to be met with an open mind, try it the way it's proposed and obviously judge it for what it provides. You can't do that properly until you leave your old habits behind and acquire new ones. Only then you're in a position to judge which way is better. Approaching anything new with a bag of prejudices will probably leave you exactly where you started. That applies to UIs, food, music, people, places... Everything!

                  People complaining that a UI forces them to change the way they work remind me of this kind of American travelers looking for a McDonalds with English speaking waiters no matter where they are in the world; instead of trying new food and meeting new people that speak a different language.

                  The GUI should make it possible for the user to do what he needs to do in the best possible way.
                  There's no "best possible way". That's the whole point of trying new ways.

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                  • #99
                    Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
                    The problem is you haven't got to think how a UI should work in a vacuum. You have been already conditioned by former paradigms and have no idea if you'd be better off with newer ones until you try them fully (more on this later).

                    A "fully adaptable UI" is not really a well designed UI. It leaves design to the user (that's what KDE does, mostly). It doesn't propose anything. It just gives you the building blocks and you have to figure out what to do with them. Most people use KDE like Windows because that's what they've learned to use a computer (and also because that's how KDE presents itself by default). That's a dead end for UI design.

                    Any new UI proposal has to be met with an open mind, try it the way it's proposed and obviously judge it for what it provides. You can't do that properly until you leave your old habits behind and acquire new ones. Only then you're in a position to judge which way is better. Approaching anything new with a bag of prejudices will probably leave you exactly where you started. That applies to UIs, food, music, people, places... Everything!

                    People complaining that a UI forces them to change the way they work remind me of this kind of American travelers looking for a McDonalds with English speaking waiters no matter where they are in the world; instead of trying new food and meeting new people that speak a different language.
                    May be surprising for you, but I actually tried Gnome 3 and I don't like it. I although don't use an old style GUI that works like I have learned it (Windows user starting with Windows 95). I have an open mind and tested different DEs and WMs, in the same way that I tested different distributions until I found one that worked like I think it should. In the end I chose tiling WMs over the other approaches, just because it works better for me.

                    There's no "best possible way". That's the whole point of trying new ways.
                    Of course there is. The best possible way to do your work is to minimize interaction with window management related tasks, so that you can fully concentrate on the actual work. For example, if you constantly have to move around windows to get your work done then your workflow doesn't fit well with your GUI, your GUI is not presenting you the best possible way.
                    Of course it may always be possible that you will find a better way in a different DE/WM, but that doesn't mean that just because there are new ways or GUIs with newer approaches that they necessarily have to be better.

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