A Week With GNOME As My Linux Desktop: What They Get Right & Wrong

[theghost]

Nice editorial, Eric. I think you concerns raised in this article are fully valid and I don't perceive it as a rant.

I really like KDE and use it daily on multiple machines but to my opinion, it has many true points:

* KDE is and feels like a bunch of good and bad applications tied together with tape (resulting in bad usability)
* Although Plasma5/KDE5 looks nice, it's basically version 4 with a few new features and still the bad usability (I know porting takes time)
* There are a lot of applications that aren't even maintained anymore and are working not so good
* KDE concentrates on to many fronts (KDE Multimedia Center, Calligra, Porting everything to Qt5, New VDG-Features, Wayland, SDDM, ...)
* Really slow start up
* Terrible sound apple

But dont forget things got already better:

* the VDG (most important)
* Move to QT5
* Better release strategy
* Nice synergies between multiple distributions (Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora KDE, Manjaro...)

I think KDE should rethink their strategy.

Do we really need to support and port all these applications that are not maintained?
Do we really need a Media Center Desktop?
Do we really need another Office package?

If you ask me, KDE should improve User's and Developer's needs first.
Improve Kwallet integration (e.g. auto open on login), integrate ksshaskpass, integrate ksuperkey, all these nifty hacks which makes live easy on KDE
And please rethink default options (like fullscreen composition off) etc.

[sjukfan]

Trigger warning: Contain automatic login

Just kidding, but even if I don't agree fully with the review it's a good eye opener that not everyone use their computer in the same way as yourself. Some people want their root and swap partitions encrypted, other people want automatic login like in windows. And as long as I don't have to admin their computers, they can do whatever they like in their bedrooms

[Ericg]

Trigger warning: Contain automatic login

Just kidding, but even if I don't agree fully with the review it's a good eye opener that not everyone use their computer in the same way as yourself. Some people want their root and swap partitions encrypted, other people want automatic login like in windows. And as long as I don't have to admin their computers, they can do whatever they like in their bedrooms

I don't mind people disagreeing with me on specific points, that is perfectly fine. Personally I run encrypted root & swap with automatic login because if you can get past my 20+ character boot password... I got bigger problems and my ~8 or so character user password isnt gonna stop you.

But beyond that there are certain things that are objectively good, and objectively bad when it comes to user experience and design. Wasting whitespace? Objectively bad design. Prompting for root three times when you should only need it once? Objectively bad design. If KDE's printers wanted to prompt me ONCE for root then i'd be more okay with it. It still shouldn't, that is definitely a sudo operation, BUT prompting me three times in one action? That is unforgivable from a design standpoint.


Edit: also Windows only does automatic user login if you dont give yourself a password and youre the only account.

[A Laggy Grunt]

The big thing I caught on to was the keychain thing on page 2.

I don't like my keychain/wallet to be automatically opened. I like to know what's asking for it.

[Luke_Wolf]

I sent an email off to Michael, as well as my faculty supervisor, asking for their opinions on the piece. If they agree that it crossed the line into ranty-ness then yes, I will pull the article and try to tone it down a bit. But if both of them say it didn't cross that line, in their eyes, then it will stay up. Which, might be the problem: I was trying to stay juuust on the good side of the line between "painfully blunt" and "ranty attack", because nothing is gained by me sugar-coating this piece or ignoring problems where they exist. The only way things can possibly get -any- better, even marginally, is by being completely blunt and honestly critical.

Okay, so one important thing to understand is that there's a difference between being blunt and being emotional. In dealing with teams there's this thing called Constructive Criticism, which is to say being critical of something in a friendly as opposed to confrontational manner (which you yourself mention in this very post), it doesn't mean that you water things down but it does mean that you alter the tone. The reason being that things need to be said, but if you act in a confrontational manner the individual you're being critical of isn't going to listen to you. Similarly in debate a calm head and a level voice is more important than a good argument

If you just want to condemn something and you don't care who agrees with you and you don't care about debate then a philippic / rant is fine, although sarcasm tends to work better. However if you seek to open a conversation you're just going to polarize both sides if you choose to go that route. If I was writing this Op-Ed with this content with the goal of starting debate / pushing things forward I would write it from the stance of "Here's things GNOME is doing better than KDE, and here's how I would improve them", possibly doing more work with the screenshots to highlight various points.

I have no problem with editing the article again, I have no problem if my opinion is an unpopular one and people disagree. This is an opinion piece after all. The only thing I care about is whether or not the piece is unfair. I said from day one that I would accept any and all criticism of my pieces as long as the criticism is constructive and direct-- which I am trying to do. Which is why I hope, Luke, that you do not think I am simply handwaving your posts and not taking them seriously, because I am.

I understand that, and expect it, you're one of the more reasonable individuals on this forum after all.

[anda_skoa]

If you don't care about security then you can just create a passwordless wallet and use that, just use blowfish and don't type anything for the password, AFAIR it doesn't prompt you for the password after if you do that.

Or let the wallet be unlocked by the credentials provided at login using pam_kwallet https://www.dennogumi.org/2014/04/un...llet-with-pam/

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

The desktop is ready but almost none of it's application. Where is KDevelop? Where is Dolphin? Where is Phonon?

There is a couple of misunderstandings in here:
- Phonon is not an application, it is the Qt4 media player API
- KDevelop is an IDE (integrated development environment, a program to write programs with), not a workspace application

KF5 doesn't even have a music player

Likely also a misunderstanding: KF5 (KDE Frameworks 5) is a set of libraries that augment or extend the feature set of Qt5.
Qt already has a multimedia/player library, which might not require augmenting or extending.

Cheers,
_

[GraysonPeddie]

I sent an email off to Michael, as well as my faculty supervisor, asking for their opinions on the piece. If they agree that it crossed the line into ranty-ness then yes, I will pull the article and try to tone it down a bit. But if both of them say it didn't cross that line, in their eyes, then it will stay up. Which, might be the problem: I was trying to stay juuust on the good side of the line between "painfully blunt" and "ranty attack", because nothing is gained by me sugar-coating this piece or ignoring problems where they exist. The only way things can possibly get -any- better, even marginally, is by being completely blunt and honestly critical.

I have no problem with editing the article again, I have no problem if my opinion is an unpopular one and people disagree. This is an opinion piece after all. The only thing I care about is whether or not the piece is unfair. I said from day one that I would accept any and all criticism of my pieces as long as the criticism is constructive and direct-- which I am trying to do. Which is why I hope, Luke, that you do not think I am simply handwaving your posts and not taking them seriously, because I am.

I enjoyed your tone and I don't find any anger in your article. And that's reasonable to highlight all of your points about KDE.

It's a long article with an angry / incredulous impassioned and in many places over the top tone, therefore by definition: a rant.

Find me a portion of the article where Eric gets very angry.

[smitty3268]

Find me a portion of the article where Eric gets very angry.

Yeah, that's what i'm wondering. I thought the whole thing was very well laid out with specific criticisms and not just emotional outbursts. Luke is the one who seems to be very angry and ranting to me.

[liam]

Nice comparison, thanks! I agree that it appears like gnome has designers assigned to almost everything they do by principle, and it's not just a bunch of coders that may or may not ask for "help" from some design team. That side-by-side comparison clearly demonstrates it.

Still, KDE software probably has more features / is more powerful, so if you are a power user and not afraid of "interesting layouts" in some places, then KDE is pretty nice as well. I use unity, which has some stuff from Gnome, but some Canonicalisms too. And a separate app store / update manager like KDE.

You're right, they have designers, but not ux experts. Some of these decisions are things that just wouldn't get past the brainstorming stage.
Here's a short list: the recent message tray implementation, buttons on top of windows, icons for menus (worst offender is nautilus), app menu (more debatable, but certainly quite questionable), volume/brightness sliders are side-by-side, conflation of alerts in calendar (as a ux folk once told me "it appears that they added it there b/c they didn't have another place to put it, and didnt want to create another area for it"---that's not an exact quote, btw).