Submitted by Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney’s streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. Some funny responses by the passers-by in this little nonsense-investigation.
Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney’s streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. Some funny responses by the passers-by in this little nonsense-investigation.
It just simply proves that people are sheep, and willing to agree with anybody given the right suggestions.
They all hated vista, but felt that kde4 was easier to use despite the fact that it is more different from xp than vista is…
… Oh yeah, it also proves the Mojave experiment is complete bull…
Actually it doesn’t prove anything at all.
But it does raise a smile when one thinks about all the sheeple out there who would say “Linux is hard, Windows is easier”.
At least it shows that normal people do not like Vista and are willing to switch ..
I’d say that’s incorrect.. The point of Project Mojave was to prove that most the people whinging about Vista wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the ass. It was to prove that people are just anti-microsoft regardless.
So yes, I guess it proves people are sheep, but doesn’t disprove Mojave.
My personal opinion though, ignoring ubuntu (its much harder then neccessary), I tried KDE4 on my carPC, and the settings managers provided (and applications), simply weren’t up to scratch.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the idea of KDE4, I think its UI is magical. But at the end of the day, it simply needs better means of configuring the system, and linux still needs work overall.
Everything is still a bit too adhoc on linux unfortunately. More standardisation is needed (which is happening), and my personal opinion is that the GPL needs to be dumped, because its a massive licence that neither developers nor end users can really understand (they either need a summary, or a lawyer).
Nobody wants to work together, and a lot of people in the community still make the lamest excuses (many still believe that the linux filesystem hierarchy is wonderful, whilst its obviously not user friendly, and developers are starting to ignore it more and more).
But, there is still nearly 1 year before Windows 7 is final, so a lot could happen then
For an end user, the GPL is completely irrelevant – it’s a distribution license, not a usage license. Users can do anything they like with GPLed software. It’s only developers and distributors who have to worry about it, and for developers it’s only an issue if you’re writing non-GPLed software. I don’t see how this is a barrier to adoption at all.
As for the filesystem, I don’t see how this is relevant either. Regular users don’t see the filesystem layout itself on any current OS. Everything a user might be interested in resides in their own home directory, and most of them (especially Linux, where UI tools treat the home directory as if it were the filesystem root) try to prevent users from mucking with the filesystem.
I don’t see how the Linux filesystem is any worse than the chaotic mess Windows has if you actually look into the Program Files or Windows directories. Windows hides it’s crap in a couple of directories a typical user will never see, and Linux hides it’s crap in ten or so directories the user will never see.
Mac OS X actually has a Unix-like directory structure too. It’s just hidden from Finder, so you can only see it using Terminal. I don’t think any Mac OS X users actually care about that either.
Massive License? Have you ever tried to read closed source licenses? They are mine fields of legalese. You might need a lawyer to read the GPL properly but you need a team of copyright lawyers to read even the open-source MS licenses, not to mention Apple.
Since when does nobody want to work together in the community? By definition, it would not be a community if nobody wanted to work together. The hundreds of thousands of people who have helped to develop the Linux kernel alone testify to how much people want to work together.
Claiming that developers and users don’t understand the GPL is absurd. I understand the GPL and I’m neither a developer nor a lawyer.
Clearly you fail to understand the FLOSS philosophy. Claiming that people don’t adhere to the FHS is to show you don’t understand the FHS. People wanting to implement another standard is the whole idea behind opens source software and is in no way an indication that most people don’t want to use it.
Except that half of those people in the video were currently using vista. There goes your theory.
The rest of your post is a random off-topic rant.
Everyone remember, this video is supposed to be humorous. They say themselves it doesn’t mean anything.
Edited 2009-02-06 15:44 UTC
What? KDE does not configure your system. It provides a way for you to configure the user interface. Each distro has their own tools. I find most of them are fairly easy to understand, for example, opensuse’s YaST.
Hmm? So something that makes you hard to steal other’s code for profit is hard to understand? Right!
This is even more ridiculous. KDE and most other open source software relies on working togeter. Which of the larger project that you have heard of are one-person projects?
Oh, and the UNIX file hierarchy. That really is personal taste. For me, from a developer point of view, you have better defined standard locations for files in UNIX than windows, like usr for you system resources, /usr/local or /opt, depending on your taste, is for locally installed software, /etc contains your system configuration files, and anything that is your personal stuff sits in /home/username, with configurations hidden in .applicationname etc. I think this is better because you can easily reuse resources system wide, while in windows, each package has their local resources that it is hard to share. From a user point of view, I think /home/username is definitely easier to under stand than C:\Documents and Settings\UserName and D:, and E:, Z:, and H: ….?
[EDIT: typos and typos …]
Edited 2009-02-06 20:14 UTC
That is way too bad, but I am always saying: KDE4 *IS* Vista wanna-be project since day one. Good for KDE devels to reflect on this.
Shame on me to feed the troll, but it’s easy to see the one needing to reflect on things are you.
As this clarly shows what the KDE developers have said the whole time, with KDE 4 they want to go past all exixsting desktop enviromnets. With people mistaking it for Vistas successor, it seem they already have made it. Ant it marks your wanna-be statment as pure trollish nonsens.
The problem is that when you compare KDE to Vista/7, you’re really comparing apples and organes, since KDE is not an operating system. I wonder what their reaction would be if you rebooted the machine and fired up Gnome, along with XFCE. Then let them hook a Zune or an iPod up to it and see what happens. I’m not saying the results would be bad, just that more experimentation would be fun
I wouldn’t be too sure that KDE 4 is copying Vista.
The only similarity I can see is the black semi-transparent taskbar, with the half-light, half-dark shading. Lots of other things use that too – most newer Apple apps (iTunes, for example, or Front Row), lots of websites… It’s just a trendy thing. Everyone will probably get sick of it in another year or two.
Other than that, it looks more like Mac OS X to me. The icons are a similar style to Mac OS X’s icons, the widget theme looks like a slightly squared off version of the Mac OS X theme, with gray buttons instead. The general colouring and the way the window decorations blend with the menus and toolbars looks a lot more Mac-like than Vista-like. Right down the the obnoxious blue scrollbars, and some of the neater styling hints, such as hilighting active text boxes with a blue outline.
At 1:20 the dude says “I’m just worried about bugs” (in using a new system).
Well I guess KDE4 is off the table then!
(doesn’t stop me from using it tho
From the Mojave experiment we learned that people can’t tell Vista from Vista.
But I agree with what someone said above…they can say it looks neat and its easy to use, but have them plug their iPod into it or try to stream netflix.
Why on earth would an iPod be a problem?
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod
Or streaming netflix?
http://www.deviceguru.com/boxee-adds-netflix-movie-downloads/
Enjoy. On Linux.
The video shows the public can’t make an informed decision based on 20 seconds of watching a hip salesman give them the old razzle dazzle. I’m sure if he was showing them Windows XP with a fancy theme or stardock installed they would react the same way. Hell they might act that way with Windows 95 a nice theme and active desktop an older version of stardock or any number of linux window managers, MAC OS 9 or whatever.
Edited 2009-02-06 18:12 UTC
It simply proves normies are stupid, let’s send the lot of them into space.
I just installed KDE4 and the kicker instantly reminded me of Vista’s start menu.
Now, having seen the general public mistake KDE4 for Windows, will this give any of the KDE4 developers pause or was this their plan all along? I suspect the latter.
KDE 4.2 is released already. Windows 7 isn’t yet.
How can these facts be reconciled with a conspiracy theory that KDE was designed to look like Windows?
I think you may possibly have got the roles of “original” and “copy” backwards.
I think he meant Windows Vista– not Windows 7. I could be wrong, though. He seems to refer to both.
Edited 2009-02-07 03:46 UTC
Windows 7 looks like KDE3.5, even down to the clock on the taskbar, the way it displays time and date.
Have a look at the screenshots of the two.
And since KDE3.5 has been out for a year or two, and Win7 is not yet in the shops, it is clear who copied who as far as interface design go….. but who cares ? KDE folks have not patented their design so anyone can use the improvements they made to the basic UI.
In fact, they say a picture says a thousand words…
http://s145.photobucket.com/albums/r240/ddonley/?action=view¤…
http://s145.photobucket.com/albums/r240/ddonley/?action=view¤… KDE 3.5
Edited 2009-02-07 13:29 UTC
True.
But the fact that Windows Vista and Windows 7 are copies of KDE makes an absolute mockery of the notions that Windows apologists often like to put forward that “Linux is too hard”, that “Windows is easier” or the “Linux lacks polish”.
Absolute tosh.
Well, both are menus, so you’re right. They’re working differently, so you’re not.
At about 1:40 the guy says “this is is easier to use…” in a sentence which must surely have begun “If this is easier to use…”
The whole thing is nonsense. They find one woman who’s very supportive, who answers “yes” to all their leading questions and probably just wanted to get on telly (why else would you waste your time on these guys?). They find a number of cautious “maybes” and one guy who likes it because it looks like Mac OS X !
Just one question. How do I get their job?
Depends really on what they mean by “looks like Vista”. If they mean the glossy look, KDE has had that before Vista ever came out.
I agree with the other poster, KDE4 is a Vista/OS X blend, visually speaking. Of course KDE4 is not Windows under the hood. But visually, the guys tried to copy just about everything from both commercial OSes. Copy, copy, copy… It’s all about copying the neighboor (whose grass is greener).
The silly thing was not copying this:
_ [ ] X
instead it is like:
/\ ….. \/ ….. ….. ….. X
Really nice UI designers! Now my hand needs to move a little more just to minimize the window.
KWindows!
See my post about Win7 being a KDE 3.5 blend. Everyone is copying the best ideas from each other. Where is the problem?