So many operating systems and so many graphical desktop environments… This article is a comparison of the UI and usability of several Desktop Environments (DEs), that have been widely used, admired and reviled: Windows XP Luna, BeOS 6 (Dano/Zeta), Mac OS X Aqua and Unix’s KDE and Gnome. Read on which one got our best score on our long term test and usage.
First of all, please let me apologize in advance for not including QNX’s Photon, OS/2’s WPS, Amiga Workbench, Solaris’ CDE, IRIX’s 4Dwm or other X11 desktop environments in our comparison. While I have used all the above during the last two years, I don’t have them readily available on my machines anymore (for example the SPARC and Octane & Fuel review boxes we received last year were returned to Sun and SGI respectively), so I decided to include in this test only operating systems that I can reboot at any time and test them more thoroughly when and if I need to.
Also note that this is a quick overview. We can’t possibly cover these environments in-depth, as that would take not five pages, but probably one hundred and five. I am sure that our readers will agree on some points while they will disagree on others. This is fine and normal, so please keep the discussion in our commenting area intelligent and calm. What we are comparing here is the overall user experience generated by these desktop environments and their underlying OSes.
I include the BeOS in this comparison not because I consider it an OS with a bright future but because it was very highly regarded in
its heyday and it still good (in other words, even after 2,5 years of the last update by Be, at least in the desktop area, not many OSes have managed to surpass it yet).
Third note: what we are testing here is not just how things look. The “eye candy” factor is just one of the many factors that makes a DE great or… sucky. Some other factors are when a DE is easier to use or more “delicate” or more speedy than another, or more consistent or more integrated. But let’s start with the looks, as it is the first thing someone will notice when first loading a graphical DE.
The Look and Feel
I recognize that this part is kind of subjective. Some like small fonts, some like bigger fonts, some like funky buttons, others like….
Nevertheless, no matter the different tastes, there is always a threshold line where the majority of people will define as “good”, while under that line would define as “bad” all in one voice. Speaking for myself, I like clear as crystal widgets, with big window manager buttons that no one can miss, and as the perfectionist I am on this subject, I want the UI I am using to be pixel-perfect.
Starting with Windows XP’s Luna interface is not the most pretty one. But it is the most logically designed one. Its widgets are well defined, while special care have been taken to the way things work in a way most people expect or are accustomed to. It is clear to me that the Windows interface is pretty mature and most issues have been ironed out since 1995. However, this all-blue default color on XP is kind of 60’s psychedelic, it gets on my eyes soon enough. On the bright side, the fonts are great, the font shadow on the desktop and window manager is great looking too, making them easier to read. By default the Windows XP interface doesn’t enable antialias on its fonts, but Windows is making use of some very high quality fonts so they don’t look bad at all, even without antialiasing. With XP, the Windows graphics interface is now more skinnable than ever, however the majority of the users that use Windows stay with the defaults.
MacOS X has probably the most in-your-face eye candy of all the DEs compared here. Some don’t like this ‘lickable’ interface while others simply love it. My opinion is that the Aqua interface has seen a clean up with the release of OSX Jaguar 10.2. The button quality is much better now, for example. I am quite happy with the way Aqua looks even if it is not skinnable without the use of some scary hacks. The metal interface seen on some Cocoa apps is an interesting idea, but it is not as easy to read text written on top of the metal surface (for example Safari’s new tabs in the latest unreleased beta are pretty much unreadable without wearing glasses). It is also great to see brand new widgets into the play, like the drawer or the animated alert window attached to the master window. All in all, an innovative and fresh look when it was introduced 3 years ago.
KDE is compared here with its new default theme, Keramik. Personally, I dislike Keramik (for the most part). I find it clunky, extremely loose on details and too much in-your-face. The Qt toolkit actually doesn’t seem to have much of a good support for what Keramik is trying to do. For example, I get Qt or KDE applications not supporting the background gradient Keramik is trying to impose on the back of toolbars, and so we get some apps having some toolbars with the intended color or gradient, and some other toolbars on the same app don’t (and that’s ugly). That might be an app bug, but it is so common (even on KDE’s KOffice) that it reflects badly on the whole experience. It doesn’t matter whose bug it is. The point is that it is there. The buttons are so overwhelming that sometimes their text goes unnoticed (at least they should either bold or shadow the text on these kinds of buttons to expose their importance). I also don’t like its window manager buttons, I find them clunky. Its tabs are so not part of the tab view, they feel alien to it. I do like other widgets offered by Keramik, but the most important widgets are either overwhelming or they lack care on their details. Have a look here for more info on my gripes on that theme (discussed on the kde-usability list a few months ago). Thankfully, KDE is fully themeable. The icons are nice on KDE and their alternatives, like the Noia icons, are great looking too. But Keramik is not.
Gnome is compared here with both its default GTK+ theme and Red Hat’s BlueCurve (Red Hat is the best selling ‘Gnome reseller’ so most of the Gnome users will be using BlueCurve, essentially making that theme virtually a “second default” for Gnome). So, Gnome is not going to get any praises on having a great looking widget theme, but overall it ain’t ugly either. Its widget set is very plain (both BlueCurve and especially the default GTK+) but it doesn’t try to be ‘something else’. The window manager looks of BlueCurve is nice and clean. Its buttons are big and easy to reach and this is a plus. The Gnome/Red Hat icons are not as good as MacOSX’s, XP’s or KDE’s though, but are definitely better than BeOS’ (the default BeOS icons were great in their time, but they have been surpassed now).
As for BeOS [6/Dano/Zeta]’s looks, it was an improvement and a step backwards compared to BeOS 5, at the same time. Today, the BeOS legacy is continued by YellowTAB‘s Zeta product, while there are still a large number of active users of the BeOS 5. Fonts are way better on the Dano/Zeta version of BeOS than before, the Interface Kit is now more themeable (but not fully), and it now supports non-rectangular windows. However, the widget set has seen great innovations and back-steps. For example the Z-Snake effect as seen in the screenshot is a great eye-candy effect (and pretty complex programming-wise), the radio buttons have this clever “switch” while combo boxes are also having animated effects and they also use the Z-Snake when enabled. On the down side, you will find terrible looking buttons, small default window manager buttons that need to be aimed with a gun and not with a mouse…
Rating: (out of 10) Windows XP 8.0, MacOSX 9.0, KDE 6.5, BeOS 7.0, Gnome 6.5.
Usability
The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system. The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it. There are tooltips everywhere, great keyboard navigation that will let you move everywhere in case your mouse has screwed up. It is just the ‘standard’, we like it or not. Can it be better? Possibly. But from usability/accessibility point of view, Luna is the best out there. However, it is not all sugar. The new “Start” menu found on XP is just too loaded with stuff. Programs need an extra click to get into them while it is the most common reason why would someone would click on “Start”. The Open/Save dialogs can be better as well by including a drop-down menu for recently-visited places. I hate it when I save something with Paint Shop Pro on the A directory and then I need to save something else on the B dir and I have to navigate manually each time between 5 and 8 clicks, while it can be done with only one.
On usability, MacOSX and BeOS are the second best, both at the same level I could say. They are consistent and OSX offers some new tricks on the play, like quick navigation with the help of Finder, excellent drag-n-drop support, speech recognition & hand writing recognition (not with great performance on these two features though). What Mac OS X lacks though is good keyboard navigation. For example, I get an alert window to save my text file and I can’t move fro a button to its next button with the cursor keys. Yikes! (Update: Apparently you can enable this via a pref panel, but it is not there by default) Another thing I recently realized deeply is that Macs are way more keyboard-oriented than the rest platforms, because of the lack of a second mouse button (however keyboard navigation is not as good as noted above). If it was not enough for the CNTRL and ALT buttons to do things like context menus, we also have the OPTION button… Not good for most mouse-oriented users, especially in a period where Apple is pushing their Switch campaign to Windows users. Also, I don’t like the fact that Finder doesn’t have more options on its context menus or elsewhere, like the “Open Terminal Here” option (hey, it’s a unix underneath).
BeOS has great usability. Everything is brainlessly easy on that operating system and it is one of the reasons people who have tried it, like it. The OS is extremely simplistic in its nature (even installing drivers is as easy as dropping a file on a directory – and you probably won’t need rebooting either) and its user interface is also simplistic on the way it works. Its context menus make sense and they add great functionality, like the Tracker add-ons (similar to Nautilus scripts), easy ways to copy/move/shortcut files with a single click and has even the easiest way to date on mounting other filesystems! The Deskbar is also easy to use and it does the job adequately. Drag-n-Drop works everywhere! Tracker, the integrated file manager, is awesome too. What I always needed from BeOS though was more context menu functionality when right clicking on some widgets. For example, when having an input box, a text view, or a selectable text item, I want to be able to right click on it and have a cut/copy/paste menu. I always missed that on BeOS, which I know that it never had that because of its Mac-oriented roots regarding its interface (BeOS ran first on PPCs before coming to x86). Also, having the CNTRL key as the default action key instead of ALT, wouldn’t hurt either (and I have heard of some big fights about this in the management/engineering departments at Be back in the day…)
KDE has a lot of new features and goodies with version 3.1, but Konqueror (the main KDE application) leaves a really sour taste. It tries to be everything for everyone, so we get functionality from file viewer, to image viewer, to CVS front-end etc., in addition to its two major uses as web browser and file manager. All that may sounds good, but the problem is that you get extremely long menus or context menus with options that have nothing to do with the KPart currently loaded. I find Konqueror abusing the otherwise great KPart technology; it adds extreme bloat to its interface when it is not truly needed, while configuring its toolbars is a pain in the rear (with bugs too). I have outlined my problems with KDE more detailed here, which was later discussed in the kde-usability list. Another problem with KDE is the extremely bloated default KMenu (which unfortunately many Linux distros keep), big icons for shortcut/launchers on Kicker (a default KDE screen doesn’t fit well on a 800×600 screen) which makes difficult to distinguish that the K is a menu and the other icons next to it are just shortcuts. Thankfully, work has been done on the context menus on the desktop, but when right clicking on the icons on the desktop we sometimes get options that shouldn’t be there (e.g. the Trash’s long menu, while it only needs 2-3 options – this has been fixed in the CVS from Waldo Bastian AFAIK). The main problem I have with KDE is its extreme bloat. Cut the fat and suddenly everything will be better. Second grade problems are the choices for the defaults, like the single-click action and the “hook on the other windows’ borders” of the window manager. I believe that KDE should leave-in the hook on the monitor’s border, but take out the application border hook as it creates a bad impression to the user thinking that “Xfree is slow because when I move my windows around, it is not smooth”, even if this has nothing to do with the reality. It is all about perception, UI is all about psychology, and KDE takes an F on that department.
Gnome is more simplistic than KDE in its choices. It goes straight to the point and the applications written for it tend to follow its Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). What I dislike though is the default Application menu bar on the top of the screen. It takes space for a no good reason in my opinion (not everyone adds icons to that bar all the way through the 1600th horizontal pixel, come on). I am more in agreement with Red Hat’s and Mandrake 9.1 defaults personally. Gnome also is not all that great when it comes to its Trash context menu, Nautilus is ok but I want a dialog box asking me for the root password when I am in need making a system copy/move. The functionality of the Red Hat’s Gnome taskbar is fine, but it feels a bit amateurish, icons in the notification area move by themselves and create unwanted space, the menu is ugly and looks like a potpourri. However, applications like FileRoller and Red Hat’s RPM installer application make the whole experience better. Gnome can easily become better than what it is today. Exactly because it is already simpler than KDE, the work required to clean up things, I think, would be less overall. However, I don’t understand what took the Gnome project (especially Red Hat) developers so long before they start working on the new GtkFileSelection. It is now scheduled for Gnome 2.4, which comes out at the end of the year. Also, why can’t I move the toolbars from Nautilus next to each other and save some real screen estate? Anyway, more here.
Rating: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 8.5, KDE 6.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.
Consistency
The best desktop environment regarding consistency is BeOS, hands down. Because of the (double-edged) sword of not having other toolkits ported to the BeOS and because the guidelines were quite clear on the way things should work under BeOS, you get a very consistent (and simple) environment all the way through. The only other real toolkit ever created for BeOS was LibLayout, which was always very BeOS-ish anyway (except the tab look). Preference panels and even applications share a common behavior, look and feel. They do what you expect them to do (the BeOS way).
As for Windows, It is great to be able to run old Windows software under Windows XP, but that doesn’t always mean that you will get same look and feel and even behavior throughout all applications (example: PaintShopPro 5’s old Save/Open dialog). Additionally, Microsoft has introduced different behaviors on their own products, notably with MS Office offerings, toolbars are more flexible on IE than on other apps, while the .NET apps have a dual look. However, control panels, dialogs, preference panels and all “default” tools found on Windows all follow the Microsoft HIG, so that is a plus.
MacOSX has three main toolkits to play with and while there are a few small differences between Carbon and Cocoa applications, all in all, OSX is very consistent with itself. However, not everything is roses here either. Apple has decided to go “wild” regarding the metal-looking applications like Safari, iMovie, iTunes etc which do create inconsistency to the whole experience. Mac OS X users have written down their complaints about this and other issues. A lot of people though still need to run special MacOS 9 applications who have the old look, so that doesn’t help the current consistency either…
Hmm… Gnome and KDE… Well, it is impossible to say that any of the X11 environments are consistent. By definition they are not. Maybe they are consistent with themselves, but not when counting the whole experience. Even for people who run KDE and don’t want to run GTK+ apps, there are so many other toolkits under X where every now and then you have to download and use an application that only exists under another toolkit (e.g. Motif or Tcl/Tk). Also, the brand new commercial ports of Moho, TextMaker and Pepper also are using… their own toolkits in order for their port to happen easier. The most important free applications under Linux today are also not consistent with the two main DEs: OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. All that adds up to the overall inconsistency of the X11 environment. And we haven’t even mentioned the original Athena widget set, neither the different looks and interface layouts we get from important applications that are still available only as Qt 2.x (e.g. Opera) or as GTK+ 1.x (e.g. AbiWord, Gnumeric, GNUcash and many more).
Additionally, we get Qt applications that have different open/save dialogs than KDE’s… We also get big Gnome applications that don’t follow the Gnome HIGs (e.g. BlueFish 0.9). Surely, badly designed applications can be found under any operating system, but the main applications for the other DEs are HIGified and usability-tested, something that doesn’t happen often for the main third party apps of any X11 environment.
Rating: Windows XP 8.5, MacOSX 7.5, KDE 5, BeOS 10, Gnome 5.
Integration
For me, integration is one of the most important aspects of a desktop environment. The reason I use a graphical desktop environment in the first place is to hide the complex aspects of the under-the-hood system and provide me with tools to configure the system, if and when this is required.
I found that the best DE on integration (see: the DE that requires you LESS to open a terminal window) is Windows, hands down. Everything can be configured with a GUI and when there is not a preference panel for something, there is always… the registry, even when you want to enable the most weird hacks on applications found or your system.
After XP should be MacOSX. A lot can be done via the GUI and via the NetInfo Manager or other utilities found on /Applications/Utilities. Great stuff.
BeOS is very good on abstracting the complexity as well, but it doesn’t offer too many tools (though there are third party tools for such operations and also is easy to add more, as BeOS is a solid and simple system as we reported above). There are times that you will need to open a terminal to do things, like checking the integrity of the BFS, the makebootable utility, lsindex etc. Overall, this doesn’t look bad for BeOS, just because working with that system is simple. But if BeOS was a Unix, the lack of more utilities would be more glaring.
Both KDE and Gnome include some preference panels to configure their own UI aspects, but none of these X11 environments are integrated to the underlying system. Maybe because X11 itself is not integrated, but runs “on top” of whatever Unix carries it. The good thing about it is that you can have choice of different DEs and that you can restart X when something becomes screwy, but in my opinion the bad stuff overwhelms the benefits: non-optimized X11, slow window manager architecture and more. Additionally, both Gnome and KDE don’t offer tools to change the native resolution of X (this will change soon though, but it should have been here years ago already), no tools to configure internet connections, startup OS items, a GUI to load/unload/install/uninstall drivers on the fly [or by rebooting], no GUI on configuring printers/scanners/other hardware. Gnome and KDE feel more like shells, and while this is what they really are if you clearly look at them, they don’t solve the given problem (even if they never meant to, it is irrelevant here, as the overall experience is what matters). Integration is the main key for an OS to feel mature and professional, but because of the multi-platform nature of these projects, it is not possible at this time. Most Linux distributions offer their own additional tools on whatever else is needed, but I don’t get these extra tools with Solaris and Gnome, or with IRIX and KDE, and certainly not with FreeBSD or AIX. You might think (and rightly so) that this is a job for the OS provider to add more tools, but the fact remains that Gnome and KDE are far from integrated to any OS they run on and that does have an impact in the experience.
Rating: Windows XP 10, MacOSX 9, KDE 4, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 4.
Flexibility
I think that Mac, BeOS and Windows have roughly the same amount of flexibility in their UI. They all follow the philosophy of “less is more” and the OS provider just tries to provide the best defaults. You can change a fair amount of things, like position and size of the taskbar, but overall, the experience remains similar to the default.
Gnome is also like the bunch above, but it is more flexible in the way you can play with the way your Gnome panels look and behave. On the other hand, Gnome does not have a proper menu editor and modifying or creating new desktop shortcuts is a pain, going through all those tabs in the dialog box for such a simple operation.
KDE is the most flexible of all. Literally, every modification you can think of is possible there (expect automatically resizing kicker when more apps are sitting on its taskbar and Kicker is aligned in the center of the monitor like OSX’s Dock). However, this flexibility comes at a cost. The Kontrol Center of KDE is just bloated, plain and simple. It is impossible to easily find the most common options which are under tones of other mostly insignificant or nit-picking options. There is a huge list of options on the left of the GUI application of KCenter, and on the right you get the selected KPart application with a number of tab views which each one has a number of options to explore. Some say that this is the very strength of KDE, but for me and others, this is a plague which results into confusion, usability and bloat headaches. I give KDE an 8 (and not a 9 or 10) because of these problems created by this flexibility, not because the flexibility is not there (it is).
Rating: Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5.
Speed
Ah, speed… Speed here is not (just) “raw speed” but also “UI responsiveness” (BeOS users will ‘get’ that term better). Who doesn’t like responsiveness and smoothness when using a desktop environment? Everyone does, and everyone complains when they get lags between clicking a menu, or a button, or loading an app…
I have used all these DEs on new and old machines. I used MacOSX on G3s and on dual G4s. I used BeOS from a AMD K6 300 Mhz up to 1.6 Ghz machine (which is already overkill for BeOS). I’ve tried Windows XP on a dual Celeron 533 and on faster machines. And KDE/Gnome on the AthlonXP 1.6 Ghz and on my dual Celeron 533 (multiple distributions, Linux or FreeBSD). I also used Gnome on a $3000 machine SPARC and KDE on a SGI $18,000 Fuel machine last year.
BeOS clearly wins on UI responsiveness because of its extreme multi-threaded nature and its fantastic kernel scheduler (which plays very well with the app_server). Everything is just snappy. I run BeOS on a 1.6 GHz machine and it is simply overkill. No matter what I do, there is always CPU left for other things. I primarily run BeOS on a dual Celeron 533 and it is also extremely snappy. You click a window and while this application might have another window doing something else, nothing gets paused to wait for the other window to finish what it’s doing. Everything is just readily available immediately. Make no mistake, BeOS is not a fast OS when it comes to server operations (except if you have installed the BONE networking stack), or when you do heavy compilations, and despite popular belief, its SMP scaling could be much better. But being a “multimedia OS”, the engineers over at Be had special-cased a lot of things, making latency and UI a snap. BeOS “feels” fast to the user perspective, even though some under-the-hood operations are not really as fast as Linux or Windows XP. Check out this very recent YellowTAB Zeta DivX video from CeBIT, showing what BeOS can do and how fast it can do it.
Windows XP would be my second best regarding UI responsiveness. It is already very responsive, a huge (and I mean HUGE) improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase, but it is not as good as in BeOS. The user can get a lot of freezing under some special cases until a window finishes what it’s doing, while when I want to save an attachment with Outlook Express and I navigate to the “Desktop” entry of the filesystem it takes up to 10 seconds to read the whole root dir and refresh that window. Or when I right click on the desktop and navigate to “New”, the submenu takes up to 3 seconds to open on the dual Celeron if it is not already in the cache. That’s slow but they seem to be special cases which can probably be optimized easily.
MacOSX is the slowest of all in my opinion. Even on the fastest dual G4, scrolling and resizing a window (or a web page on ANY browser) is jerky and imprecise. Also, when IE or some other app is doing something, the menu bar on top doesn’t respond and all I see is the spinning beach ball. There is no real responsiveness there. In fact, speed is my number one problem with the otherwise excellent OSX. As someone else said once “after you have used BeOS, anything else will never be the same and it would just seem slow” and that has proved true.
Gnome is a bit faster than KDE. While GTK+ 2.x is several times slower than GTK+ 1.x, it still manages to run adequately well (however Metacity is so slow when resizing an window it will redraw its button bitmaps in a really ugly fashion). KDE is plagued mostly of the fact that all its applications are slow to load. In fact, even the smallest Gnome application (e.g. calculator) is slower to load than the big and fat Blender because of the number of shared libraries is linked against! But KDE’s performance on loading its apps is worse. Overall, these Unix DEs are based a lot on how the kernel is configured (same goes for the other DEs too though) and I found that the default FreeBSD 4.x ran KDE much faster than a stock Linux 2.4.12 last year. I remember Gnome 2 running slowly on that brand new Sun SPARC workstation though. So, there is definitely some responsiveness to be gained depending on which platform you are running or how well optimized your X or kernel is, but on the stock Mandrake/SuSE/Red Hat distros these DEs ran from well to slow-ish. They could be better, but right now they are definitely usable.
Rating: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 6, KDE 7.5, BeOS 10, Gnome 8.
Stability and Bugs
I found Windows XP and MacOSX to be the most stable environments in this long term test usage. Sure, I have seen both Finder and Explorer crashes (which are the “desktop shells” for these DEs, as Nautilus is for Gnome and Tracker is for BeOS), but overall stability is good. I think XP has fewer bugs than MacOSX though (has anyone seen the OSX Font panel not showing the preview of the font selected? You need to manually drag that panel down..). I had a few bugs with XP’s taskbar in its first versions (it was freezing after a cold reboot for about 5-6 seconds) but they have all been ironed out now after the SP1. In fact, the most notable bugs I have to report about XP’s default apps is how sucky this Notepad application that I write this article right now is.
Gnome 2.2.0 is somewhere in the middle regarding stability (especially Nautilus which crashes easily). It has a number of bugs (especially Nautilus) but if the guys are able to iron out Nautilus more, Gnome is pretty solid overall. And the good thing is that if something is wrong, you just kill X and you reload. Update: Gnome 2.2.1 seem to have been a stability and bug fixing version mainly for Nautilus.
BeOS and KDE are the most unstable of the lot. BeOS Dano is a beta, but even on BeOS 5.x I could crash the app_server of Tracker easily (both part of the DE part of the OS). BeOS is pretty stable overall, but if you “overwork” it or do weird stuff on it can crash easily too (that doesn’t mean that the whole system will go down. If Tracker goes down is easy to reload it, but if the app_server goes down, you’ll need to reboot).
As for KDE, well, Konqueror is just not stable. Applications written or coming with KDE also tend to crash fairly easily (on a number of machines and different distros/OSes I ran it). However, the biggest problem with KDE is not stability, it is the bugs. Konqueror has more bugs than the whole BeOS does. I just can’t stand it being so inconsistent, bloated, buggy and crashy. Poof. It’s gone.
Rating: Windows XP 9.5, MacOSX 9, KDE 7, BeOS 7.5, Gnome 8.
Technology
Surely the back-ends of the DEs might or might not be part of the DEs themselves, but point is that some of the features found on the graphical servers can be used for user-visible effects and they might have an impact on speed, smoothness, features or quality of rendering. Therefore the technology used behind these DEs is an important factor on this comparison. In fact, this factor can be what allows a DE to do, or what locks a DE to not be able to do because the back-end functionality is not there or because architecture or legacy problems might prevent the creation of new cool stuff (and that’s bad for the future potential of any DE).
MacOSX takes the lead here regarding the technology used. Double buffering everywhere, non-flickered UI, vector icons (Update: someone emailed in to say that they are still bitmap icons used by OSX), good font rendering engine, “real” transparency support, PDF-based, QuartzExtreme for 3D assistance on the 2D space of the desktop and my personal favorite “smooth window dragging” (for lack of a better naming of a VSYNC’ed desktop).
BeOS Dano/Zeta is the only other desktop that supports the VSYNC’ed desktop. However, even if the Dano version of BeOS featured a newer font engine that did a better job than the BeOS 5 one, it still lacks on rendering quality. BeOS Dano also supported full double buffering and non-flicker, while regarding vector icons on the file manager and desktop is currently available via a third party patch over the Tracker codebase. However, Dano still doesn’t support bitmap icons with more than 256 colors (not sure if the YellowTAB guys fixed that for their Zeta though).
Windows and X11 don’t have many of these cool features, in fact X11 is the least powerful of all. While it is network transparent and everything, it lacks the speed and integration to the rest of the system. There is lack of proper overlay support (it just slows down everything), no true accelerated transparency or easy modification of cursors etc. In fact, up until recently many were discussing its limitations for not being able to render well fonts or the ability to not change real resolutions on the fly. These issues are slowly changing for the better with RandR and FontConfig, but X11 is still not up to speed and all that legacy code it carries might prove a stumbling block on adding more demanding features in the future. However, KDE and Gnome support vector icons, while GTK+ 2.x does a better job on non-flickering of applications than QT does (however not as good of a job that MacOSX does).
Rating: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
Programming Framework
The programming framework is an important part of any DE because it classifies them as “platforms” with a strong back-end that guarantees their power, flexibility and potential. My favorite here would be MacOSX and KDE. My worst would be Gnome. BeOS and Windows will be somewhere in the middle, for different reasons each.
I like the API of Cocoa on MacOSX and the API of Qt/kde_libs. They are powerful without being way too complex. Tools and documentation of Qt are excellent too.
For Windows, well, MFCs, .NET and Win32 are really powerful APIs which let you do the same thing in many different ways, but that is also what you might call bloat. I find the Windows API to have a steep learning curve, while the .NET API is certainly cleaner and easier to use overall, a step in the right direction.
BeOS has a very elegant API, really a pleasure to work with, but it is not as powerful than any of its competitors. Additionally, there are no good development tools for BeOS, no good visual GUI designers, no full-featured debuggers, no profilers… Also, under BeOS you constantly need to take care of multithreading issues and write your code around the fact that everything is so multithreaded on BeOS that could create deadlocks where you would least expect it. Writing small apps for the BeOS is a joy, writing anything more complex or serious though is a real pain.
As for Gnome, well, I dislike GTK+ and C. In my opinion, for a desktop environment is more suitable to use a real OO language and a more OO-oriented API. GTK– is there as a C++ wrapper to GTK+, but it ain’t elegant or easy to use. And CORBA is not that easy to deal with either.
Rating: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 9, KDE 8.5, BeOS 7, Gnome 6.
Conclusion
There are a lot of things we did not discuss in this article, but it would not be practical to write a real paper on these DEs. It would take me a month each and many-many pages. But I think this article summarizes well my view on how well these DEs they function and deliver what they are supposed to deliver to the user.
I acknowledge that there are good reasons for dealing with the negatives of Gnome and KDE, since there are other reasons for using Linux, and many people weigh the options and make that choice. However, today we live on times where everyone is pushing Linux on the desktop (or the corporate desktop by the mighty Red Hat) so including the main X11 offerings in this comparison article was appropriate.
Personally I much prefer overall the Windows XP experience with a close second the ones of MacOSX and BeOS. In fact, a DE that could have the best values found on these three operating systems, plus the power of Unix underneath, would make my utopian desktop environment. But there isn’t such a DE (in fact, there is no such thing as “the perfect desktop”, this is just a myth), so I usually reboot to them to enjoy their capabilities.
Here is the final rating, summed up from all the ratings above:
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
just look at the file open dialog – anything since 1995 on
windows beat it and in terms of functionality, you just type *.* in the file name field and it would not expand the wild card – that’s worse than win3.0 IIRC
XP’s RDP can play VCD (mpeg1 video) over a network and run MacOS emulation with a decent frame rate – doing similar things in X is either impossible or with an unusable performance.
if X, or XFree86’s impl. of X is fast, why there is the need for the linux kernel patch to improve UI responsiveness ???
I had expected much more from the article, based on its table of contents and avowed purpose, than what was delivered. The reviewer appears to lack the technical expertise and design saavy required in order to properly evaluate the items she discusses. Instead, the review consists largely of comparing various OS in terms of how well they do things the way Windows does. Numerous comments about what the right-click menu should contain and how the taskbar should look backs up this perception. Given this criterion (i.e., “how good a Windows is it?”), it shouldn’t be surprising that Windows “wins”.
However, as someone who works with all these OSes (and more) on a regular basis, and who does programming on them, administration of them, and user interface design for them, I can attest that both her criteria and her final judgements are arbitrary and useless. (Certainly anyone who doesn’t find a Unix-based OS to be the most stable has not worked sufficiently with it and its competitors to know of what they speak. But I am critiquing her review, not the merits of the individual OSes here.)
Ultimately, this review is too subjective and unformed to be anything more than a testimonial for the author’s preferred OSes. Which is disappointing.
PS – An editor, or at the very least a spell-and-grammar checker, would go a long way towards creating a more professional article, which in turn would make it more likely that you’d be taken seriously as a reviewer instead of as a mere booster.
Heh, you call this ‘definitive’?!?! LOL
You’re kidding, right?!
with NTFS and a user account – limited in xp’s term and non-root in *nix world – I don’t need to have too much of a concern for virus
IE and stript ??? scripting is disabled in my IE except for a few trusted sites.
In fact, I never used any anti-virus software on a daily basis even on win9x – since I dont run untrusted programs/activeXes and script is generally not allowed in IE and OE and file sharing is only started when I need it.
Combined, these steps let even win9x ran on my computers
much more stable than X with any apps more sophiscated than an xterm.
>”The buttons are overwhelming” is not the same as “the temparature of the solution was 26 degrees”.<
No, you can’t review the user experience of an OS as if it were an experiment in physics. Beyond simple (and uninformative) statements, everything gets into the realm of opinion.
I guess nobody here has read a movie review.
I see a lot of folks here that don’t like the review and critizise the reviewer and her criteria.
Why don’t you write your own review? Complaining is one thing, but doing it better is another thing. OSNews is accepting reader submissions, so go ahead and do something better yourself.
Firstly nice review… I think it puts things usefully for many people. However the review is of coarse biased… (To have an un biased review you would need somebody who had not used a computer before)…
My point being that I personally find many of the features in a desktop like KDE to improve my desktop experience beyound what is offered by the more mainstream DE’s… I am sure that if windows XP offered some of these features and KDE did not people would notice.
Anyways KDE (and other X-WM) features I find it difficult to live without)…
1) The ability to stick any app to the screen so that it stays on top no matter what – This can get a bit tricky with dialogues but I find it essential.
2)Focus Follows Mouse / Focus does not raise window — This makes life a lot easier when accessing reference material from another app.
3) Multiple Desktops – I don’t use them that much but they sure are useful.
4) My Kde Desktop is incredibly responsive under load. I can have a Render happening and My processor (a Duron 750) and my memory (756MB) Can be maxing out with no slow down to the system. In fact I can browse the web use Emails etc and not notice any difference to performance at all. I can compile software and watch fullscreen DVD’s at the same time and only occassionally notice any problems with the performance of the DVD.
Overall I think though that the X based DE’s lack the polish and intergration of the Native DE’s, However since both KDE and Gnome are now on 6 Month release cycles I would expect the situation to improve quickly.
I think that as Linux is better geared for the desktop the quality of these environments will improve.
Yes Stew, you may ask.
Whilst this is an interesting, entertaining and somewhat informative article, I would hardly call it ‘The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison’.
There are a number of points which I take issue with. Particularly the integration rating, BeOS gets 10 because it only supports BeOS apps. A KDE system, with only KDE apps installed, would provide similar level of functionality to BeOS system (IMHO). Additionally many X11 apps, with their inconsistent bunch of toolkits, will run on Windows XP or Mac OS-X just as much as they can run on a system running GNOME or KDE (which could be Mac OS-X, or Windows XP). I believe Eugina is confusing her OSs and her desktop environments.
BTW one last small point that I have to mention, Opera has used Qt 3 for quite some time now.
The other part of this ‘comparison’ which really shows it up for what it is (Eugina’s Definitive Desktop Environment/Operating Systems Opinions), is the final rating. The final rating should not be a simple average of all the seperate sections, which implies that all sections are of equally weight. It should either be a separate, independant rating (the reviewers overall impression) or it should be weighted average, with each of the previous ratings given a weight and then averaged.
I believe the third sentence of the conclusion sums it up: ‘But I think this article summarizes well my view on how well these DEs they function and deliver what they are supposed to deliver to the user.’
I would agree with that line, to be honest Eugina’s concise view of Desktop Environments, is much more interesting to me than an exhaustive comparison (of things which aren’t really comparable anyway).
I particularly liked the link with her thoughts on Keramik, I really like Keramik, but the toolbar backgrounds and the borders do annoy me.
For those who think that GNOME is consistent, looks clean and esthetical. You probably have skipped or ignored my UI review that I made 2 days before official GNOME 2.2 release. None of these issues have been solved or paid attention to. You can read the review here:
http://www.gnome.org/ ~chrisime/random/ui/
NO – we have all seen your site, and noone can believe that a GUI designer like yourself would design such a horrible looking website!
http://www.kde-look.org/ solves all your and others Keramik issues
. I prefer simple Windows 2000 look or Mosfet HighPerformance-Liquid under KDE.
<<I see a lot of folks here that don’t like the review and critizise the reviewer and her criteria.
Why don’t you write your own review? Complaining is one thing, but doing it better is another thing. OSNews is accepting reader submissions, so go ahead and do something better yourself.>>
My my, aren’t we turning into the Don QuiX(P)ote of the IT world here! But I understand Stew. When I take a break from rescuing virgins from the flames of perdition, I write article too. Of course nothing of such a high quality in the convicted criminal monopolist’s eyes. I simply cannot believe anyone even considers XP to be an “operation system”. It is more like a user “honey pot” to catch the credulous in a labyrinthine back-ended mother of all security flaws.
> NO – we have all seen your site, and noone can believe that
> a GUI designer like yourself would design such a horrible
> looking website!
Do you value how the site looks or what’s written inside (the information it spits out) ? It’s right that my english grammar sucks bad ass and it’s also true that english isn’t my native language and it’s true that I’m no webdesigner. Regardless of these issues, the context is still true and can be verified by everyone on her or his own. I think you are a GNOME user, feel free to ignore the issues on your plattform. I’m not the person to be blamed for issues related to the Environment.
> http://www.gnome.org/ ~chrisime/random/ui/
May suggest the spell checker for this one, too? 🙂
> […] We have all seen your site, and noone can believe that a GUI designer like yourself would design such a horrible looking website!
There is nothing wrong about that website’s layout, honestly. You don’t need to win a design prize with a UI mockup, now do you?
Which is why you have no credibility. You probably have every virus in the book, and are the very reason I am still logging requests from hosts for root.exe.
I don’t see how on earth you could come up with some conclusion that just because a library isn’t programmed in C++ that it isn’t worth your while. C++ is classically bloated, and you do pay for the extra overhead of “object orientation”. I’ve had to program using the windows whatever libraries, it is the most confusing library I’ve ever seen; I’ll even take Qt over Windows. GTK+ does have an object hierarchy unless you are extremly blind, and has extremly good bindings for Objective-C. My only bitch about Qt is the liscensing. Your damned right that Cocoa being a good library. Your article is completly biased imho and it’s a shame that you ever had the gaull to post it.
Is there any substance in your last post?
Why do you suddenly get all that defensive when I was only asking for people to write down their different opinion? I’d seriously be interested in reading a profound, prejudice-free article representing an opposite position.
I really prefer KDE over anything. I also find it to be more responsive on my machine than Windows XP. Also Windows XP seems to swap my apps to disk pretty soon, while in KDE/Linux they’re just availlable when I need them.
I love the new keramic theme and the way KDE looks, while I don’t like the XP default theme at all. At higher resolutions, the fonts in Windows are a lot worse than in KDE.
I don’t think this is a good article since many things are just a matter of taste and also really depend on what you are used to use. A thing I really missed from the article was the cost of the software. For me, XP is pretty expensive.
First I’d like to say I really liked your article. (even though “my” GUI didn’t win)
One point you probably should investigate is the new O(1) patch on Linux (is in 2.5 branch now!). The reports says you’ll get a much better responsivness using this one.
Regards
Erik Axel
Chris Simmons, “You do realize that Zeta is coming out this year, from YellowTab, right? They’re far from dead, imho.
”
As I said in the post, “dead” doesn’t mean obliterated. There will be a core of loyal users who will continue on with BeOS. However the dream of reaching critical mass and having widespread acceptance is dead. Just look at BeOS from 1999 and look at BeOS today. In 1999 it had the potential of catching on, today it has zero chance of doing so. That’s a reality. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t continue to sell it or use it, or that anyone will. As I said, I’ll probably buy a copy of Zeta for nostalgia purposes. If you think it will ever reach a significant percentage of the installed platforms, even 1%, then I think you are living in fantasy land.
I really prefer KDE over anything. I also find it to be more responsive on my machine than Windows XP.
One reason why Windows is very unresponsive sometimes is the fact that window operations like dragging go through the applicaion’s main event loop (at least in Win32, haven’t tried .NET yet). That means when the app is busy handling other events, it is unable to respond to such messages.
In X11, the application owning the window does not have to worry about moving the window at all, since the window manager does take care about that.
221 comments for a single article, is this a record?
I didn’t think that the article was that good though, way too subjective, zero research and user-testing.
If eugenia rounded up 100 people, all with different computing backgrounds, and let them use the various desktop environments, well *then* it would be interesting. Currently it’s just an editorial..
This is probably one of the most ill-informed, poorly written articles I have seen on this site. Definitive? Hardly. It told me nothing I don’t already know! And the technical content is as watery and thin as my Aunt’s tomato soup!
This was the final nail in OS News’ coffin. I don’t take slashdot too seriously, but OSNews has become the laughing stock of the Alt OS community. And given the number of posts I am sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Now all you need is yet another article on why BeOS “isn’t dead”.
WTG Eugenia!
The most intelligent way for responsiveness is to Lock a file only on write. However, your store changes in a temporary attribute (not possible in most places, so a temporary file) until a copy task is complete of the original, then make the changes immediately afterwords. and Unlock.
Or, you can just do nothing, and let the programmers take care of it, like Linux or Zeta. That way you get this:
file->Lock();
file->Write(offset,&buffer);
file->Unlock();
file->AddAttribute(bool,”RunDeamon”, true);
You had a lock of about .000002 seconds.. at most. It is very unlikely (even with a Node monitor in place) to be able to access the file at the exact same point of time the lock occurs.
Another thing that is wise, is to create a scheduler in the file system. When another app calls a file that is locked, you return a code of FILE_LOCKED, the app simply does this:
if (file->Open == FILE_LOCKED){MyNodeMonitor(“unlocked”, &file);}
and with your MessageReceived for your BApp or Looper:
switch (msg->what = NODE_MONITOR){
case FILE_UNLOCKED:
{
mainClass->OpenFile(mainClass->FileToOpen);
break;
}
}
That means as soon as it is no longer locked, it opens. 😉
Of course this is just how I do it. Works for me 😉
Okay, for all you who do not know, I just spawned two threads. A BMessageRunner thread and a BLooper thread. One which sends messages, the other which recieves ;-). I have nothing to worry about how it is done, the system does it for me, and the UI stays perfectly responsive (the work is being done by the system to alert me when the app is no longer locked).
In this case I do not display a note to the user, as this will last at the most of just a half second or so regardless of how well another app writing to the file is. The system automatically will unlock it on a schedule and suspend the other apps operations for about 2ns. Totally imperceptible, but that is what multithreading is 😉 Of course, it also depends on priority.
A priority of 10 (Normal) will result in a 2ns period of time in which the CPU is used for app #1 per schedule pass. And 15 may result in 3 or 4 (it will be revisited more often, and out of order based on priority and such from my understanding of things.
Now, of course, I just use the stuff, and write some of the other stuff, so you don’t need to take my word for it. I didn’t design it, or ever even see any code that does all this, but it is what happens (enough coding mistakes trying to learn how to deal with files, and you will figure it out soon enough).
–The loon (What was I talking about??)
Oh, and it should be ZBitmapButton, heh.. and a note on that (previous post I made, like #121)..
The other Bitmaps are optional, only need the first one, and leave the others as 0 (NULL), which will cause the images to be tinted or grayscaled for effects (Well, I plan on it being that way.. haven’t coded it yet).
Some People fail to see some critical features that konqueror has that many filemanagers / browsers dont have !!! Konqueror TOTALY does circles around IE ect..
PROTOCLS !! konqueror handles MANY ptocols.. IE handles just a few..
in example:
“sftp://[email protected]“
IE:
http
smb
ftp
Konqueror:
http
smb
ftp
sftp
rio
nfs
audiocd
napster
camera
man
many more..
and you get a “feel” the overall filebrowsing feel when you are using one of this protocols is that you are browsing in you localhost in terms of what you can do!! you can edit/move/copy files directly and do many of the same functions that you would do to files that are in your local file system. and any of these protocols in Konq move WAY faster than in IE. specially smb/ftp.
Kioslave allows you to have many more.. weeee…
Add Tabbed Browsing / Split views and you have an awesome way to manage multiple directories in a single window ! Or you can browse websites in tabbed or split view!!
Let me Tell u SPLIT VIEWS ROCK !!!.
for pics look at
http://www.kdelook.org/content/show.php?content=5466
<<Why do you suddenly get all that defensive when I was only asking for people to write down their different opinion? I’d seriously be interested in reading a profound, prejudice-free article representing an opposite position.>>
For the last ten yeard, good tech writers have been exposing Microsoft and Microsoft’s software. It would be a total waste of time explaining anything to a devoted Windows user. It would be like explaining logic to Dubya, like trying to convert Saddam to a born again Christian sect, trying to de-program & un-brainwash someone suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome. As another one of many MS victims, you seem very confortable in your opressor/opressed relationship with the criminal corporation. You are more than welcomed to stay there.
The biggest problem is that she is using the wrong criteria for desktop analysis
She uses The Look and Feel, Usability, Consistency, Integration, Flexibility, Speed, Stability and Bugs, Technology, Programming Framework.
What about security? Leaving this out for me draws question
to validity the whole analysis.
What about Value? ($$ vs what you get)
And lock-in.
What about hardware support?
Gnome runs on many platforms unsupported by Windows etc.
Specific problems:
Programming Framework
– This has to be the most misinformed section. There are dozens of api that work in Linux. Both gnome and kde can use XML to define layouts.
What about wxWindows, FOX, PyQt, wXRuby, Java?
There are so may interfaces for programming I think the majority of programmers
if they have worked with both would prefer the flexability, code availability
and cost of GTK and secondly QT.
The Look and Feel
“I don’t like keramik”
-Ok change it
-different distros change them
Which distros did you look at Xandros? Lindows? Mandrake 9.1?
“Gnome widgets are plain”
-so fix them
Usability
“problem I have with KDE is its extreme bloat.”
-pick a distro without it – knoppix
Consistency
She talks about applications not desktop. If this is truly a desktop review than no applications
would be mentioned.
Integration
She doesn’t want to have to open a terminal app. Well she doesn’t to edit a configuration
file. The registry is much more confusing the configuration files
as there is no space for comments.
“no GUI on configuring printers/scanners/other hardware”
-mandrake
-knoppix both have one
I respect your opinions and your review Eugenia, but you should have left off the term Definitive. Not much to say that hasnt already been covered and then some, so I’ll just share my own quick opinion…..
I personally think XP is garbage. Its the same thing we’ve been staring at for 8 years with new fluff added to it. I would give it high marks for consistency and speeed and low marks for innovation and customization.
OSX is super purdy, and has really nice innovations like OpenGL rendering of the UI. But, its still a canned setup and, like XP, youre really stuck with what Apple and MS want….not what you want.
I personally run KDE3.1 under Gentoo (Gentoo = speed…..lotsa speed). I really cant understand how anyone can think windows is more functional than KDE is. When Im in windows at work or at home for games etc, I feel handicapped. With excpetion to playing games, there is nothing windows does that I cant do in linux. In fact its quite the oposite. I want to do somthing in linux I can got get whatever program it is that I need for free. With OSX and Windows you have to go buy very expensive software to accomplish your goals. On the konqueror note, I really dont understand your position. Konqueror is great to me. Does everything window explorer does, but better and faster. Not sure where you get this KDE = bloat crap either. Its not even close to the bloat of windows and its 1gb install. The big problem with KDE has been that its cluttered or messy, and I think that 3.1 has come full circle to cleaning that up and making things much more user friendly without taking away the ability to customize everything.
Im not too fond of Gnome personally, but I will give it its due props. Its clean its fast. Ive had stability issues with it, but Im not gonna hold that against it til 2.x has really matured. My problem with Gnomw is that its too clean, at the sacrifice of easily accessible functionality and customization. But, I believe theyre moving in the right direction.
One last thing to mention about the latter 2 that I believe is very important and should be considered in any “Definitive” review is the fact that the devolopment pace of KDE and Gnome are and will far outpace that of the Windows and OSX UIs. MS has released the same ole UI since win95 with nothing more than refreshments. I expect OSX will be the same. Then you have to wait several years in between any possible UI enhancements or innovations and then fork out $$. Longhorn UI looks just like XP with some refreshments as usual, and theyve borrowed the multiple desktop idea from the Linux world. KDE and Gnome on the other hand will generally see 2 to 3 or more point releases a year and most likely 2 or maybe even 3 major releases in that same timespan.
This is just my opinion, but I think your review was far from “Definative” and was anything but objective. I really think there are few ppl out there that can be objective much less definative. I work with KDE3.0/3.1 and Windows2000/XP equally almost all day long. With regard to those 2 UIs I can be objective and I TOTALLY prefer KDE 3.1 outa the group. Its as fast, its more stable, its more secure, its more functional than windows and its all mine (configured to look, act, and feel the way I want it)
As another one of many MS victims, you seem very confortable in your opressor/opressed relationship with the criminal corporation. You are more than welcomed to stay there.
ME? A MS victim? What in the world led you to that funny conclusion?
>I do a lot of 3D graphics, web/graphic design, photography,
>and music on my PC and there are NO alternatives for the
>software I use on any other platform except OSX.
No, Linux runs just Ventura, Gimp, FilmGimp, Blender, Maya, Houdini, Softimage, Mantras, Mainactor and Real3D.
Nothing special here…
Kde has configuration for X. You can change resolution, etc. Of course, you need a working setup to get there.
Also, kdeprint has printer configuration if you use cups as a driver. Select printer, paper, resolution, etc.
It may be more of a distribution issue here.
Odd the konqueror crashes. I haven’t had any since rc6. Again possibly a distribution issue, since I’ve had two or three updates to kdebase.
Another quibble. You used a piece of software that is unsupported, ie. beos. Yet you could use it without getting some key or something. With XP, you have to ask permission to use what you have purchased. Once it’s not supported, you will be out of luck, even if it is a favorite. Maybe outside of the scope of the article, but that situation disqualifies XP from any of my machines.
Derek
–Windows-the king of games. Compatible with any new games. Console games are ported to Windows first ALMOST all times.
–MacOSX-pfffttt…. sure you can play recent titles on that, BUT who likes FEWER new games and who likes to see having to wait an additrional 3-5 months to wait until the mac port of the new game is finished?
–BeOS-heh, very few recent titles are on that platform
–LINUX(KDE/GNOME)-Yes you can play PORTED titles OR play recent games under WineX. But what now? SOME of recent titles works in WineX, but they will be SLLOOOWWWW. One of my game is soldier of fortune 2. With the SAME setting and playing on the SAME map, I get a 20-40FPS(frame per secend) DECREASE IN WINEX! Note that my normal FPS is about 125FPS in an empty map (System: p4 2.8, 1gb ram, geforce ti 4600)
…Sorry RMS, I didn’t know you were posting under the name of “Stew”…. Now I must leave you to you personel hades. I have virgins to rescue, and miles to go before I sleep.
eComStation is readily available, as is OS/2 if one looks at all online. Its WorkPlace Shell, long lauded as one of the best GUIs ever developed, *still* has capabilities like work area folders, templates, and visual cues that more “modern” desktops seem to be lacking.
By failing to include it or its successors simply because it’s inconvenient, I believe you do your readers a serious disservice. They already have a clue about the common Linux, Windows, and Mac desktops. How about introducing them to something “new”…?
Are you even trying to lead a conversation here or are you just building chains of nonsense phrases here?
Simply unbelievable. Living in a college dorm between two of our student network techs I get to hear their complaints. XP is not well loved. One has wiped it for a Win2k install. Gamers especially dislike the latency tradeoffs (framerate up, sound down to the point some games aren’t playable). And I just opened Kcalc, and it opens faster than any single app I run on Win2k (disclaimer: Mandrake 9.1rc2, so I’m compiled for 586). Most *everything* is more responsive under linux than MS (although BeOS does well here too). I clicked on a folder on my desktop and there it was open. No having to watch the little sandglass. If MS wasn’t slow, and ugly, and dumbed down (try to search for “regression” in excel, its not there…took two Physics Phds half an hour to find it as “line fitting”), then it could be in the running . Assuming you don’t care to be bankrolling convicted criminal enterprise. Admittedly MS is everywhere (as are Fords or Chevys,) but when BMWs are *free* it is just unbelievable that people can suggest that the Ford looks better or handles better. It just doesn’t. I mean not even. ROFL!
say, eugenia, you referred to dan0 as “beta” in reference to its unstable app_server – does that apply to your experience with zeta, as well?
Someone mentioned konqueror being bloated. I don’t think konqueror’s many features slows it down much, since konqueror is modular. Meaning it loads the needed module when it’s requested. For me konqueror is the trap that makes it really hard to use any other DE than KDE. (Yes I realise I can use konqueror outside KDE, but then I wouls have to load tons of extra libraries, which I don’t want to). I’m addicted to many of konqueror’s excellent features.
Looking at the review it seems that some of the good/bad points being made for each DE, could well apply for some of the other ones too, making them a bit wothless. Also I think it’s totally unfair to rate KDE’s consistancy, looking at non-KDE applications.
I would have installed the linux DEs on a distrobution which favours none of them, e.g Gentoo (if I was to publish a review).
Seems you found out you like Windows XP best, but I don’t think you really found out why. I sure don’t know why.
well i have read a lot of posts, and i agree that kde/gnome have there faults.Also with respect to the article a little more taught might have been put into the review of the desktops.As to the the font issue i think that with gnome and kde support for widget AA my eyes are alot less strained, I supposed this is a good thing.Gnome has some issue with stablilty but these will be worked out in no time.Kde well as i do not use this desktop for everyday use i am not qualified to comment on,but i have it install on my gentoo system along with fluxbox,xfce (can’t think of the rest).enough about that… linux as as a desktop enviroment is here with kde 3.x and gnome 2.x and will get even better with time, where as with most other (DE) unless they radically change the direction of their development and design will not have any major innovation. And will be borrowing(stealing) more and more from kde/gnome to encorprate them into there design. With respect of X i think that yes it is big (not bloat) but for what it can do outweights the costs,also with the 4.3 version will see big improvments in the how X handles errors and such things.
ps. I am typing this from a college computer(win2k) and i must admit that the fonts suck big time in comparsion to Gnome 2.2 AA(they just looks better).
nils (linux only shop since 1999).
ok, Eugenia has 5 different categories where she scored each of the 5 DEs:
-Look and Feel: Windows XP 8.0, MacOSX 9.0, KDE 6.5, BeOS 7.0, Gnome 6.5.
-Usability: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 8.5, KDE 6.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.
-Consistency, Integration, Flexibility: Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5.
-Speed, Stability and Bugs: Windows XP 9.5, MacOSX 9, KDE 7, BeOS 7.5, Gnome 8.
-Technology, Programming Framework: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
however, how does she arrive at the “Fianl Rating”?
if she took the average for each DE, her math is wrong and the outcome is different.
averaging the 5 categories together reveals:
OSX 8.33
XP 8.30
BEOS 7.70
Gnome 7.30
KDE 7.10
so how did XP win again??
They are not five categories, they are NINE. Do YOUR math.
One of you said, well, go write your own review, and I have done that.
http://members.lycos.nl/daang/os-comp.txt
I have not focussed on the UI usability or ease of programming, but more to availability of programs, Drag-n-drop support and such.
“Consistency
She talks about applications not desktop. If this is truly a desktop review than no applications would be mentioned.”
But people usually use a desktop to work with applications, they don’t spend all day admiring the window decoration or playing with the taskbar/dock. The UI guidelines for applications and the consistency of the applications is a big part of the desktop’s usability.
7.30 for GNOME ? and KDE put down to dirt with 7.10 ? Dude you can’t be serious. I mean your post is far from any reality. KDE is used by 5 times more Linux users than GNOME which you can verify on many votes and polls made on various pages even now on OSNews.com many more people talk about how much they prefer KDE and even on Slashdot these days no one even takes GNOME into mouth and you want to put it over KDE ? GNOME has nothing to offer, a crappy framework, no documentations, no tools, a horrible unesthetical UI and whatever and is not pleasing to use. I think that Eugenia valued all Desktops (and Operating Systems) more or less good she only undervalued KDE in 2 categories but I think she made this on purpose only to not put GNOME down to much. To give both Desktop Environments a chance to evolve but we know that KDE is simply better.
Now all you need is yet another article on why BeOS “isn’t dead”.
Personally, I’d be interested in reading such an article, particularly a review of BeOS Max. (If there is an OSNews review, please point me to the article.)
I recently had a Linux user suggest I take a look at this OS as a faster booting alternative for my Celeron 400 notebook. Linux seems to take forever to boot, and XP is not an option (too expensive, my hardware is too old, I do not want to support Microsoft, etc.). I can’t afford a Mac, and I like what little I’ve seen of BeOS in terms of the look (which is important to me – better looking usually also means easier on the eyes, and my eyes are bad enough
).
Now, on to the article itself:
I’ll agree with those who say Eugenia’s article is opinionated. (By the way, for those few clueless who obviously didn’t figure it out from the name, Eugenia is a she, not a he.) But then, since the article is billed as a review, I would expect it to contain some opinion. I have no problem with that and, in fact, appreciated it. I found the article well laid out and presented.
Although I am not a Microsoft fan, my limited exposure to XP (on my wife’s laptop) tells me that it seems a big improvement on previous incarnations of Windows. If only there wasn’t that whole activation issue. It does seem a bit harder for non-technical (i.e., those who do not design for Microsoft or work as programmers) people to tweak certain things in XP with regard to look and feel (at least my wife has had trouble with certain aspects and she does work as a programmer). However, my own personal biases (and I admit, I am biased) will preclude me from ever using XP on a machine of my own. (Of course, my current machine precludes me from using XP anyway. And buying a new machine is not an option at this point. Unfortunately
)
I will conclude by simply saying that I enjoy reading Eugenia’s articles (no, she did not pay me to say that
), even if I do not always agree with her views and conclusions. I find them to usually be informative and offering plenty of food for thought. Keep up the good work!
“This is mostly because at the moment there are no good applications available for it.”
Riight, GIMP, Evolution, GNUMERIC, GNUCash, SODIPODI, DIA, GAIM, etc are not good applications. Another bias review by another barely informed user.
Lemme guess, you used kpaint for all of the images on your review site, oh wait what images?
> It would take a very long comment to identify all of the
> absurd claims in this article. Overall, its entire basis
> of judging seems to be on the writer’s likes and dislikes
> (such as I don’t like C, thus Gnome has a bad programming
> framework).
I think a more hilarious fact was that Eugenia said good things about the Win32 API and MFC (an extremely shoddy and thin c++ wrapper for the Win32 API), but slated GTK+ because, amoungst other reasons, it is C based. The Win32 API is the _classic_ C based API. It makes the whole statement seem very badly thought out, or at the very least naive. The Win32 API is not just a ‘steep learning curve’ it’s actually extremely ugly, inconsistent and has too much legacy and not enough elegance. I program it daily, believe me, I hate it with avengence.
So, again Eugenia tries to do something worthwhile and gets crucified. Instead of using her article as a starting point, some of you compulsively make her the subject. Sad.
I think this is the Year Of OS X, when it will fully blossom and its power, from all aspects of it, will really begin to shine. It isn’t perfect though, that’s for sure. People talk about the Dock alot, but I like the Dock. It’s Finder windows that I think are the weakest part of the OS. The windows themselves are fine, but it is not the best way to navigate. I knew this because of my NeXT workstation and thought that was the weakest part of it. Fortunately, their are utilities like MaxMenus that help greatly in this area. But, OS X is becoming a truly great OS.
Windows XP Pro is, I think, the fastest and most stable of the major commercial OSes. I say that knowing it took a long, long time for Windows to get to this point.
And now Be is back! I’m sort of stunned by this, that Zeta turns out to not just be R5 with some patches. I can’t wait for this, especially because Be was/is the fastest OS and the one with the greatest potential.
I love to use Linux distros, but Linux is in a different place, I think. I’m very impresseed by KDE 3.1 in particular. But, to me it’s impossible to compare an OS that has hundreds or even thousands of professional programmers to OSS. It’s just different.
I want to continue to experience more OSes – like eComStation, FreeBSD and many more. So many OSes, so little time 🙂
For me, the KDE 3.1 toolbars look right except if you “ripp them off” to a seperate window.
3/4 of your counted applications are NO native GNOME apps. KDE has native apps that fill this gap. Without companies such as Eazel or Ximian then GNOME would only offer the Panel these days.
“XP’s RDP can play VCD (mpeg1 video) over a network and run MacOS emulation with a decent frame rate – doing similar things in X is either impossible or with an unusable performance.”
X can do that too. In fact, there is a video-playback-software designed perticularly for client-server operations (www.videolan.org)
“if X, or XFree86’s impl. of X is fast, why there is the need for the linux kernel patch to improve UI responsiveness???”
If changes can be made to improve desktop-experience, why shouldn’t that be done? People have happily used X on desktops for years, and now the Linux hackers just thought that “Hey, if we did this, we could make their experience even better”, so they did it. The responsivness-thingy isn’t due to X, but due to Linux-kernel. FreeBSD has coped better on that regard. Kernel-hackers just fixed that thing, that’s all. So far, Linux kernel has handled the desktop OK. 2.6 will handle the desktop really, really well.
To my knowledge, XAA (X Acceleration Architecture) has been benchmarked to be fast, even faster than equivalent systems on Windows.
I have used remote X on a LAN without any problems. People have used remote X back when networks were alot slower than they are today. If I’m short on bandwidth, I would use something like TightVNC
Elaborate, please tell me which ones are and are not gnome applications.
Here is an HTML version: http://members.lycos.nl/daang/site.php?page=oscomp
For the rest: Except Nautilus and Dia all Gnome applications have not been updated to use Gnome2. GNumeric, Abiword, Gaim still use Gnome1. Of Evolution only a bèta Gnome2 version is available. I already mentioned this under “Applications Available”.
And still, there is no webbrowser for Gnome. Mozilla might be able to use Gtk+, but that does not make it an integral part of Gnome. In both senses: not integrated and not Gnome, as Gnome is an extra layer on top of Gtk+.
Comming from the same person that said that
i quote..
“.net will kill all operating systems” (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=686&page=2)..
I find this article very hard to swallow..
GIMP: Yup – http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
Evolution: Yup – http://developer.ximian.com/projects/evolution/
GNUMERIC: Yup – http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
GNUCash: Yup – http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
SodiPodi: Yup – http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
Dia: Yup – http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
GAIM: Yup – http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php#q44
Thanks for playing.
<<Assuming you don’t care to be bankrolling convicted criminal enterprise. Admittedly MS is everywhere (as are Fords or Chevys,) but when BMWs are *free* it is just unbelievable that people can suggest that the Ford looks better or handles better. It just doesn’t. I mean not even. ROFL! >>
Yes George… I couldn’t agree with you more. This Eugenia/XP phenomenon may be a result of TellyTubbism. It may be a tellytubbyophiliac reaction to the first background image one is presented after installing XP. All that’s missing is the mound, the wabbits anf the little guys with TVs embedded in their stomachs. This syndrome affects parents who are obliged to watch the Telly Tubbies with their kids. After awhile everything starts to ressemble that Windows background, the mind “dumbs-down” to the level of a child’s. That explains why parents who have children who watch the Telly Tubbies like Windows, and are even willing to hypocritically support a criminal organisation that lies, frauds, bribes, threatens, and subjects the weak to its whims.
“For the rest: Except Nautilus and Dia all Gnome applications have not been updated to use Gnome2. GNumeric, Abiword, Gaim still use Gnome1. Of Evolution only a bèta Gnome2 version is available. I already mentioned this under “Applications Available”.”
They don’t exist because they aren’t GNOME2 applications? What kind of crap is that? LOL
“And still, there is no webbrowser for Gnome. Mozilla might be able to use Gtk+, but that does not make it an integral part of Gnome. In both senses: not integrated and not Gnome, as Gnome is an extra layer on top of Gtk+.”
Huh? I guess this project doesn’t exist yet then.
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/
right. ha ha, what a joke. Good example of breaking things down into a bunch of micro-analyses, then adding them up and the finished product (“analysis”) doesn’t, well, add up.
The action is with the apps. Apple is doing things with the iApps and soon iWorks that are putting everyone else to shame. DE’s are becoming less and less relevant.
“The “pros” used to use opengl cause it was made for modelling and rendering not gaming”
I guess that’s why Quake 1, 2, 3, Half-Life, Return To Castle Woflenstein, Medal of Honor, _Doom 3_, Counter-Strike, X-plane, and many many others use Direct3D instead of OpenGL… Oh wait, they don’t! LOL!
Direct3D is still not as good as OpenGL is. It’s getting there, but it still has a way to go. And one area where it fails miserably is portability. Write a Direct3D-game, and you are hopelessly tied to Windows. Write OpenGL-game, and you have several platforms at your disposal.
is conflicted and can’t seem to quite admit to herself that the best PC experience is the one she just plunked down the $$$ for. That would be a mac (a 12″ powerbook).
ok, Eugenia has 5 different categories where she scored each of the 5 DEs
Actually, there are (by my reckoning) eight scores rather than five.
Eugenia’s Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
Nic’s averages:
OSX 8.33
XP 8.30
BEOS 7.70
Gnome 7.30
KDE 7.10
Actually, my math reveals yet a different set of numbers (what a surprise):
Averaging all nine scores reveals the following results:
XP 8.44
OSX 8.33
BeOS 8.06
Gnome 6.78
KDE 6.72
Using the five categories (averaging the three Consistency, Integration, and Flexibility scores into one score and doing the same with Technology and Programming Framework scores) results in the following averages:
XP 8.55 (as in Eugenia’s final ratings)
OSX 8.37
BeOS 7.73
Gnome 6.92
KDE 6.78
What does all of this mean? It proves you can do just about anything you want with numbers
Personally, I like averaging all nine scores together. No worries about weighting or other issues.
I’ve tried BeOS, it doesn’t deserve the marks it’s gotten. Asthetically even the old Mac Classics could beat it (God I loved those machines, I’d ebay one if I had the money). But what got me in particular was this
BeOS is very good on abstracting the complexity as well, but it doesn’t offer too many tools (though there are third party tools for such operations and also is easy to add more, as BeOS is a solid and simple system as we reported above).
followed by this
Additionally, both Gnome and KDE don’t offer tools to change the native resolution of X (this will change soon though, but it should have been here years ago already), no tools to configure internet connections, startup OS items, a GUI to load/unload/install/uninstall drivers on the fly [or by rebooting], no GUI on configuring printers/scanners/other hardware.
KDE has (in some cases since 1.0) had support for
Internet Config: KPPP
Startup Config: Ksysv
Printing: kups, other tools
Scanning: Kooka, xsane (which is GTK/Gnome, I know)
Drivers: The Linux KControl module to recompiler the kernel
What’s more, almost every version of these you get has a whole load of other tools thrown in by the distro: e.g. Redhat’s tools (Gnome), Mandrake’s tools (Gnome), SuSE’s tools (KDE – all the way!), which are at least as valid as “third-party tools” mentioned for BeOS.
It was therefore rather bizarre to see
Rating: Windows XP 10, MacOSX 9, KDE 4, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 4.
at the bottom. I think BeOS came out of this a bit better than most other reviewers would allow. But all in all, an interesting article. A couple of months ago the comments would have been fun.
Aitvo: “They don’t exist because they aren’t GNOME2 applications? What kind of crap is that? LOL”
I wanted to compare Gnome to KDE. I actually took those Gnome1 apps in the rating, but lowered it because they are not updated to Gnome2. If I would not calculate them, Gnome would get an 1.0 instead of the 3.0 it has now on this point. If KDE 3 shipped with all kinds of KDE 1.1 apps, it would also get a much lower rating. And if I would make 5.0 of it, they still don’t integrate, which is another point Gnome scores low. And this still doesn’t make Gnome available in Dutch, the third point it scores low. But that last one can change if anyone can explain me which LANG code I need to use.
About Galeon: this is indeed a Gnome app, but the embedded browser is Mozilla, which is not Gnome. With KDE, Konqueror uses KHTML, which _is_ Kde. And that is the difference. If you like, compare the scrollbars of Galeon and the Gnome-terminal to see what I mean.
Look you are acting clueless my friend. You suggest other people to get some background before talking and you on your own talk clueless outside.
A) The GIMP is a GTK+ only application. NO GNOME components is used in the code.
B) Evolution is a full GNOME application.
C) Gnumeric is a full GNOME application.
D) GNUCash is a full GNOME application.
E) SodiPodi only uses GNOME-Print (if exist) but the rest is GTK+ only.
F) DIA is a GTK+ 2 port only. No GNOME components.
G) GAIM is a GTK+ only application, contains NO GNOME components or code.
You should seriously investigate better before trying to fool someone who spent some years on GNOME. Your funny gnome-office page even contains OpenOffice as GNOME app while it’s obvious even for stupid apes that it doesn’t contain ANY GNOME related code.
I simply found this “Comparison” to be one of the badly written articles I have EVER seen at OSness I appreciate what Eugenia was trying to do but the lack of evaluation consistency, repete falure of understanding, and total lack of what consititues gui consistency are blaringly obviously to anyone but the most inept readers. Just to go thru the list:
Look and feel:
First this entire catagory is ALMOST ENTIRELY subjective. I am just talking about button size either accustom usage is NOT the same thing as correct usage. Anyone will get used to the way a UI does things given enough time and experience. Yet most of the review basis its decisions (in this catagory) on subjective UI usage.
The only things that can really be evaluated (in this catagory) is Look & Feel configurability, system clearity, and widget usage complience (i.e. does the UI take full advantage of screen “hot zones” and do widget elements remain consistent.) Yet there is virutally no mention of these few useful “Look & Feel” topics in the review.
When we are finished what we finally end up with is a review of which OS UI is the “prettiest”, according to the reviewer, based on its default settings (unless we are talking about Windows XP.) Even if the reviewer was not trying to do this… this is effectly how it Look & Feel was reviewed.
Usability:
Finally a useful review topic. This is where the review decied to place the look and feel elements the could have been useful. I.E making the first catagory ENTIRELY WORTHLESS! No problem., at least it was included.
But wait…. this section takes minimal amount of time actually looking at usability standards and universally accepted usability principals and spends most of its time commenting on personal preferenced. So we are left with almost the same thing that was reviewed int the “Look & Feel” section.
What little “good” this section actually reviewed (i.e. complexity, multiple input navigation, and consistency) are reviewed INCONSISTENTLY accross the systems. Not to mention the duplication of review. Why are we taling about UI consistency in usability if we are gonna REVIEW consistency in the next UI section. Ok well Windows XP has good tooltips and keyboard navigation…. but do we mention that in BeOS or KDE or GNOME? These lack of consisten review makes the final eveluation basically a “Which on I find easiest to use.”
Consistency, Integration, Flexibility:
OMG this is the worst of ALL of them.
There is cusory mention of consistency of previous versions of windows… but NO mention of other toolkits… say mozilla, java, dephi, or even dos.. Fine.. no problem… as long as these reviews are consistent. But Hey they review KDE based on NON KDE toolkits, Gnome based on non gnome toolkits, BeOS on JUST THE CURRENT version of its toolkit, and then totally ignores in inconsistency of OSX’s three different CURRENT toolkits! (i.e burshed metal vs Aqua.)
Integration is glossed over by totally ignoring the some aspects of one UI and going in depth with others. Sure you can do anythng in the Windows GUI that the Windows GUI will let you do but what about the hundreds of things that you cannot do in Windows because Windows doesn’t want you to do them. Then there is no consideration for the differences of what distrobutions allow you to do for Windows but the author spends half a paragraph talking about the lack of integration as a detrament to Unix (i.e. Windows Advanced Server gives you more integration to the network than Windows XP Home does, or multiprocessor configuration, or server configuration; sense most of us run some kind of server on our home machines now.)
Then the reviewer starts spouting off random technical thoughts that are simply untrue. Things like: “non-optimized X11”, “Gnome and KDE don’t offer tools to change the native resolution of X”, “a GUI to load/unload/install/uninstall drivers on the fly”, and “no tools to configure internet connections” are simply ignorant statements.
Then Flexability??? WTF… how can mac (which has almost NO options for changing the gui either via skins or system UI options) compare with Luna (which is entirely skinable and has many many system level UI choices) … Again the review falls back to “Which one I hear is the most flexable.” This is even more frusterating because the review actually says that 9in the Look and Feel section) that Windows XP is more flexable than OSX.
Speed, Stability and Bugs;
Speed has already been killed by several ppl so far.. I will not repeat the total lack of “review” that the speed statements are.
Please give use some numbers to support stability… even your own numbers would be nice. What you give use for stability and bugs is (AFAIK) entirely subjective. I have not had KDE crash on me yet… but I cannot go a day without Windows XP crashing. We are left with nothing but a vague sense of how YOU felt the stability of the systems where. Again another “Which one I hear is the most stable.”
Technology, Programming Framework, Conclusion:
This part almost made me want to cry. “X11 Technology, Programming Framework, Conclusion” as a statement in the same sentance network transparency got blow off is so rediculas. The review make NO attempt to compare USEFUL technology as opposed to “eye candy” technology. Can MacOS log in as three different users to three different GUI’s at the same time? Can OSX run its gui on a machine other than the one its connected to? Can Jaguar run indiviual applications on different computers over a network? Sure it can! When you INSTALL X11! But hey, you can always make your GUI nice a pretty! That obviously makes it superior technology. Just because someone doesn’t use the technology available in network transparency does not make the feature worthless! NO comparision is actually make between the toolkit technologies! etc.. etc.. etc..
Statements like, ” like the API of Cocoa”, “I find the Windows API to have a steep learning curve”, and “I dislike GTK+ and C” are really the only insite we have to good API’s vs bad API’s. “Which one I find better.” is again ringing in my ears. In this case its even worse because the reviewer only skims over what “good” is in his/her definition.
A review is suppost to compare and evaluate (on as equal footing as possible) products based on common criteria. This “review” was a total faure in that respect. Trying out all the products does not turn an OpEd piece into a review.
Strid…
You said 4/5 were not gnome apps, now you yourself show that you were incorrect. By attempting to prove me incorrect (which you did not, a GTK application can also be a GNOME application even if it doesn’t use gnome specific libraries.) you have totally discredited yourself with your own argument. Cool 😉
But [Eugenia is] pretty easy on Windows. Case in point: Here we have an operating system where every single menubar an every application is along the top of the screen, and you pull down menus, even in old Win16 apps, and yet the MAIN SYSTEM MENU is along the BOTTOM of the screen and a menu shoots up from it! There’s no reason at all for this. Once people get their minds contorted to deal with this inconsistency, they barely notice. But the same could be said for any inconsistency.
While I agree that a lot of usability is just “what you’re used to” and thus Windows wins in every category, I think overlooking such blatant UI inconsistency is taking it rather easy on them.
Excellent point! How many people don’t realise how braindead it is to select the “Start” button to shut down the machine? Yeah, that sure is intuitive.
Then we can discuss the Windows File Mangler. . .err. . .Manager. Newcomers will know this ‘tool’ as the Windows Explorer. What a pathetic and awkward beast that is! It is far more a productivity impediment than aid. Since it has remained fundamentally unchanged since the days of Windows 3.0 however many users have patiently internalized the numerous weird rituals needed to make the Mangler do its work and now can no longer see just how remarkably unintuitive and cumbersome the thing is.
Eugenia gives points for more menus available from RMB clicking on things. In XP these menus seem to be tacked on as an afterthought rather than arising naturally from some object oriented design of the UI. This also brings to focus comments about the language the interface is coded in. Being coded in C++ does not make an interface object oriented and an Object Oriented UI need not be coded in and OO language. One has little bearing on the other.
I think it is too bad that the one production OS that has ever effectively delivered an object oriented interface was excepted from this ‘Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison’. OS/2 (and now eComStation) has many of the features that other OSes were awarded points for and has had some of these features for about a decade now. The Workplace Shell achieved object orientedness through elegant design rather than through layering on the bloat to a bad design to give desktop features object-like characteristics.
Anyway I think that it does the readers a disservice to include a truely dead, nostalgic hobbyist OS like BeOS in this ‘Comparison’ but not an OS that is in production and current active development like eComStation. This is all the more striking when one considers that OS/2 (and therefore eComStation) has had for a decade features that are now being considered ‘revolutionary’ because Microsoft can (poorly) emulate them.
I know it hurts, Be-fans, but face the truth: Be is dead. No one uses it for real. There are a few nostalgic ones out there who may occasionally fire it up on their dusty and unused old Win98 machines to show to friends and reminisce about what might have been but that is about all. On the other hand, eComStation is piece of brilliant engineering equal to Be but with the difference that it is still quite lively. Your wishing that it had been OS/2 that had died instead of BeOS cannot change history. Try to get over ‘the unfairness of it all’ and present a slightly more comprehensive ‘Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison’.
I somehow expected that you replied with such a bad excuse.
I must admit that I made a mistake with 3/4 of the applications because I was in the wrong assumption that GNUCash is GTK+ only (Never used that app). This came to the conclusion and sum that 1/2 of the applications you mentioned are NOT GNOME related and therefore pure GTK+ apps. I for my own differ this otherwise we need to add all QT apps to be KDE apps as well (but they are not). There is a big underlaying difference of GNOME vs. GTK+ apps. E.g. not using the same Configuration system, not using the same HIG, not using the same Dialogs, not using the same framework such as gnome-vfs and other things. You liked to show me and others wrong and now you come up with such a crappy excuse. Basically worthless the trouble of conversation. Regardless of the fact what apps are GNOME or GTK+ the problems here are that all these applications act differently, don’t work seamless integrated and so on. They are all individual apps. So you can’t compare that with the applications that a pure KDE system offers. The counterparts found on KDE are through and through KDE apps, starting from using KParts, Same object Toolbars, same object Fileselector and so on.
Some lines later you expressed that GALEON2 (or Epiphany) is a full worthy GNOME application. This is true but only for Galeon 2 and Epiphany. This is not valid anymore for the embedded component which requires Mozilla therefore shows XUL in your rendering Window.
Sorry but you have NO legitimate knowledge and throw only pieces of junk into this round and basically disqualifies your argumentations.
I understand (we all do) that you like to defend your favourite Desktop Environment which is obviously GNOME but please stop throwing wrong informations into this round. Look, even when I hype KDE now then this doesn’t mean that I am illiterate what GNOME concerns. I worked longer with GNOME, supplied more patches to GNOME and wrote more own things GNOME related than you. So please stop trying to fool me, you need to wake up earlier for this.
“She just wanted hits for the site…”
Have any of you people stopped to think that Eugenia writes these reviews and editorials in order to spark discussion and various viewpoints? Is that idea so hard to wrap your minds around?
Instead of picking her apart, why don’t you pick up where she left off? That’s the whole idea. But noooo, it has to be pointed out that it’s the worst article ever written and blah, blah, blah. Don’t you people know how to take a lead and run with it? It isn’t about Eugenia, it’s about OSes. What part of that don’t you understand??
“which you did not, a GTK application can also be a GNOME application even if it doesn’t use gnome specific libraries.”
Then they also count as KDE programs, making KDE even better. And what remains is that about 4/5 is not Gnome2.
About integration: in KWord I can insert an embedded spreadsheet with Insert-Object-Spreadsheet. In Word I can insert an Excel-spreadsheet. In Abiword this seems not to be possible.
“While I agree that a lot of usability is just “what you’re used to” and thus Windows wins in every category, I think overlooking such blatant UI inconsistency is taking it rather easy on them.”
When quickly writing my review, it was quite difficult to come up with good and bad points about Windows, indeed. Everything seems very “natural” because I have used it for so long.
But there are feautures I really miss in the leading desktop environments, between (brackets) the osses I saw it in:
– Why doesn’t the Save dialog only show an icon, which can be dropped to an Explorer window? This makes network transparency easier to implement: the program sends the file to the Explorer via IPC and the Explorer actually saves it (RiscOS)
– Why can’t I paint buttons? I want to paint the Yes button in the Save dialog green, and the Yes button in the Delete dialog red. (OS/2 Warp 3)
– Why can’t I select some text and drop it in an Explorer window in Windows? (KDE and BeOS)
– Why can’t I send a file by dropping it on an IM window? (Windows MSN)
– Why isn’t an application only a folder. (MacOS, RiscOS)
– Why not the menubar at the top of the screen. This has been proven by usability research, because you reach screen corners more easily. (MacOS, KDE)
(I have seen the things above myself, so do not say that it’s not true. I have not heard it, I have experienced it myself.)
I’m sorry, but as far as I am concerned any window system
that REQUIRED me to MANUALLY SUPERVISE keeping my mouse
pointer within the scrollbar slider while I move it, and
WHICH SCREWS UP IF IT SLIPS OUT deserves a failing grade
in the usability department.
Rating Windows XP at 9 on usability is BULLSHIT on just
this ground by itself !!
No, Linux runs just Ventura, Gimp, FilmGimp, Blender, Maya, Houdini, Softimage, Mantras, Mainactor and Real3D.
Nothing special here…
Ventura – Not according to Corel’s site. As far as I remember Corel pulled the plug on it’s Linux support and it’s app where slow due to using a WINE layer.
Gimp – It’s good, but it’s not Photoshop. CMYK support not quite there yet.
Blender – Nowhere near the capabilites needed for pro 3D.
Real3D – Currently beta software on Linux. Buggy as hell on Windows.
MainActor – No Linux version available at the moment according to MainConcept’s site.
Leaving FilmGimp (now CinePaint), Houdini, Maya and SoftImage. So OK, there are some products out there (with VERY expensive price tags)
Still nothing to match Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, Director MX, Adobe Illustrator, Quark, Cakewalk, Cubase.
Even if Linux had some of these apps I still wouldn’t move to it as there are the other issues of hardware support and ease of configuration/installation (Linux needs to get rid of the ‘dependancy hell’). Yes, Linux is getting better, but it’s also getting more fragmented – not all distros support everything in the same way, new distros ’cause someone wants to do things differently, different desktops, different toolkits, different scripting languages – Linux is beginning to look more bloated than Windows in some cases.
At the end of the day, the PC is a tool and I choose what I can get my work done on.
<<“She just wanted hits for the site…”
Have any of you people stopped to think that Eugenia writes these reviews and editorials in order to spark discussion and various viewpoints? Is that idea so hard to wrap your minds around?>>
Pretty good article overall. I was kinda sensitive to my favorite operating system reading it, but after thinking about from a more un-biased point of view, it all makes sense. It’s funny reading these comments about how ‘insert your fav OS’ should have scored higher.
One feature that I see very little exposure to is the ability to end mis-behaving programs. We all know that apps have bugs and crash. How can they be gracefully ended? Windows has gotten good at this. Just Ctrl-alt-delete and then pick the app to end. BeOS is the best, with the ‘Vulcan grip of death’, or Ctrl-alt-delete (since windows made this the standard) . How does this work in OS X? Linux os okay, using the ps command and then looking for the correct process id, then typing ps -9 psid. I don’t always get the right id, since there could be several processes running for an app. Not very elegant.
Ease of use features like that are WAY more important to me than system icons looks, or transparency, etc.
I accidently hit enter and a partial msg was posted anonymously. So I will continue here. I said “She just wanted hits for the site.” So Jay, what’s wrong with wanting hits for the site? Whats wrong with selling Micro$lop $oftware with inaccuracies about their insecure and infantile operating system for morons? Nothing at all. That is, if you like watching the Telly Tubbies on Saturday morning.
I just typed “regression” into Excel 2000’s ‘answer wizard’ and got 13 hits, the first one being “Regression analysis tool.” You’re correct in that it’s inexplicably not in the index, but thinking to go to the answer wizard and typing “regression” into the box labelled “What do you want to do?” is not so counter-intuitive that it should take Ph.D. candidates a half-hour to find. I don’t even have a degree and I thought of it in about 20 seconds.
I don’t like to defend Microsoft normally, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault if your friends aren’t able to use the HELP command. Perhaps they should turn that friendly paper clip back on.
Hmm, I have 1 out of 20+ Programs where I can’t specify where to install it (Canon Printer Driver).
My point isn’t that you can’t tell the installer where it goes, it is that Windows by design doesn’t encourage the user to know where thier files live or manipulate thier files by actually clicking on them. It provides the start menu, but most programs are just dumped in C:Programs…., thier config files wherever (sometimes in that same folder, sometimes otherwise), registry edits made, dlls installed over eachother, and a startmenu item pops out along with yet another item on the desktop. In fact, the default behavior in WindowsXP is to not even show the “Program Files” directory to the user. I find this behavior frusterating and inconsistent.
You’re not completely honest about the applications not belonging to gnome and I think you know it.
First, like eugena, you take a biased mindset. in Eugenas case its windowsXP, in your case it is KDE. Both of you take this starting point as perfect and compare the other on this terms with it.
Eugena shows here biase by dislikinggtk+ (c) and gtkmm combination, while praising the win API (c) it C++ wrapper and expecting that the DE solves problems the windows way (menu-editor),
You show your bias by demanding a API like KDE (window API clone), not a bunch of libraries that can grow or shrink with the demand of the application or too the developers liking. So what makes a GNome application, your definition. You would like that, but nobody told me or the developers of those application that you are the judge here! Take Gaim and Pan, both no Gnome application in your definition. Nut both trying very har to comply to the gnome HIG. You see not only technical merrits make a application Gnome, don’t believe me look sometimes in there changelog and see what they are doing. The look makes it also Gnome apps.
The KDE api approach isn’t the holy grail you know, I think that the tools approach of Gnome has something going for it. In my opinion gtk+2 application who are trying to comply to the hig are also Gnome applications.
windows xp, like os x and windows 2000 supports hardware alpha blending (ie “true transparency”). ever seen those winamp 3 skins with the soft edges? wonder why they only work on 2k and xp?…
I agree that its good to spark viewpoints, but I still would have preferred a more objective review. Using terms like definative and clear bias towards Windows is just gonna spark flame wars and bring out the trolls. Its clear that KDE and Gnome didnt get the time of day in this review, and that is really sad and disappointing. Especially when its the Windows and OSX UI that are generally static or should I say stagnet. Like I said earlier, since 95 MS has continued to polish the UI turd. In just 2 short years, KDE and Gnome have made major improvements to get to the good solid point theyre at now, and just wait and see what they have in store over the next 2 years of improvements while XP and OSX are still eating the same dogfood.
>>MacOSX/Cocoa uses Objective C, the Red Tape C with an awful syntax. It is MacOS only.
Hmm, well if you like Objective-C or not is your opinion. But MacOS X also has 2 other APIs to its GUI toolkit that are considered on equal footing with Cocoa. They are called Carbon and Java. Carbon in particlar supports coding in C/C++. What were you looking for, a toolkit that supports VB or something?
Just want to i say i think this is a very good article and leave a word of appreciation to Eugenia.
One of the reasons i read osnews.com daily is exactly because i can count on the articles refecting the reality instead of the blind propaganda you get on “/.” about “linux in wonderland” or any mac related site for that matter.
Critiques should be taken in a contructive manner, that’s the way things improve.
And if my grammar “sucks”, well too bad, im portuguese and english isn’t my “native” language”.
Dude, how can you rate a UI based on how many games it has? When you are playing a game on a computer, you can’t even see the desktop. ???
Hi,
Well, I don’t know howto react on your message now but simply belive me. Look I advocated GNOME for the past couple of years now, advocating it, contributing to it as good as my time made it possible, wrote CVSGnome a GNOME buildscript which also took me from middle 2001-2003 as maintainance and I also tried to write my simply own GNOME application. All this requires good knowledge from a) installing GNOME correctly towards b) programming a GNOME application from scratch c) contributing patches to other GNOME components which also takes fairly some amount of time. I simply didn’t snipped with the fingers and all these things came up from nowhere. The problem over the time is the frustrations of the situation withing GNOME. I pretty much prefered GNOME 1.x over anything else even over KDE, then with GNOME 2.x I pretty much got disappointed with it because it took the road of MacOSX look like and some other stuff got totally changed that made it unusable for *me*. I was totally pissed off to see what actually happened with GNOME and most of the direction that GNOME leads these days are mainly decided by one single person. Nowdays it looks like this, whenever this person says ‘Jump’ then everyone in the GNOME community asks ‘how far and how high’ without even questionizing that his vision and direction of GNOME may be right or not. Anyways, I then tried some pre KDE 3.0 versions (the first time after years) which was more or less meant to be a joke. I thought myself let’s try that stupid shit for some minutes, you don’t loose anything, then you can delete it again. But then I realized how much advanced, ahead, consistent and integrated it was. Due the frustrations of GNOME I spent some time into KDE, went to their developers pages, investigated into all sorts of things like development possibilities, availability, documentations and so on and realized that the whole Desktop, development utilities, programms and so on are more enchanced than the counterparts on GNOME. I previously always thought that GNOME is the ultimative Desktop for Linux but then after I investigated into KDE I found out that I was wrong. As you see, I’m not hyping KDE and bashing GNOME because of the fun or because of being a silly person. No, I have investigated a lot of time into both Desktops. Spent a lot of time in irchannels, spent a lot of time on the Mailinglists and much more. Well explaining all in detail will take a lot of time and we could do this per email if you wish or on some irchannel. I still belive that for some people GNOME may be the ultimate Desktop and I also belive that GNOME may enchance to a direction that is questionable for me and I’m sure it will find it’s users too. But for me GNOME is simply stagnating, it has a lot of issues that I have addressed various times. Even trying to convince people that Esthetical things are important and even trying to reach the developers that integration is indeed necessary but nothing happened. Everything is stagnating, a simple freaking fileselector will make it into GTK not earlier than 2.4 or 2.6 (and GNOME 2.4 will depend on GTK 2.2), esthetical issues that could already be solved because of really small issues takes AGES until someone starts caring for it, snap to grid for nautilus no way and so on. Simple little things which are trivial are so much hyped under GNOME that I need to touch my head and ask what actually happens. To sum it up I’m simply not happy with GNOME anymore now that I saw KDE. Compare KDE 3.0 with 3.1 and you seriously SEE major changes and then compare 3.1 with 3.2 (soon) and you see another major changes while GNOME on the otherhand makes little progress, from 2.0 to 2.1 nothing big, from 2.1 to 2.2 again nothing. Of course form CVS I see that there are changes going on like thousands of *.po file changes and some trivial bugfixes and enchancements but not the progress I like to see in a desktop. It’s frustrating to wait AGES if not YEARS to see some significant progress in GNOME. If you use another computer such like Windows or MacOSX then you have a lot of time because YOU already have an OperatingSystem and Desktop where you can get work done, but for some of us (including me) we depend on these alternatives such as GNOME or KDE. I was always willing to help better improving GNOME (contributing more patches and so on) but as I said I generally dislike what happened with GNOME this leads into frustrations again and demotivation to contribute to it (see, why should I contribute to a Desktop that I don’t like anymore). I have mixed feelings regarding GNOME as someone said some days ago. This is some sort of hatelove, on the one hand I like programming C, I like how GNOME installs the files (so clean and logical) but on the otherhand I don’t like some of the new changes such as GConf, reverted buttons and so on, this totally pisses me off and as more I deal with it as more it pisses me off. KDE on the otherhand offers everything that I always liked to see in GNOME, a clean integration, esthetical looking apps, good usability and functionality and so on, I’m even that far saying that KDE is in some situations ahead of WindowsXP. The GNOME people are sitting down on their earned fruits from former GNOME 1.x days and forget that there is also KDE which doesn’t sleep. Today because of the nice framework, because of the good documentation and because of the many developers and users KDE offers a variety of applications that can be used, apps that don’t look like ass, apps that do what they are meant to do, simply, effective and many of these apps communicate with each other e.g. embedd parts from one app to another and so on. It’s rapid in development and now wiht KDE 3.1 (towards 3.2) you see how heavy people work on it. GNOME these days and past months had a lot of bad press and whenever this happens you can see it as kind of mirror on their CVS, whenever there is bad press the committs to CVS goes towads 0 and then days later people contribute to it again 200-240 committs per day (where 200 are usually documentation and .po files). While updating KDE in a hourly basis really shows changes, significant changes, better integration and so on. But there are still some issues in KDE that I don’t like. But well as I said I only give you a quick overview what I really think about this situation. Well GNOME should seriously start doing trivial things such as a FileSelector, better documentations for Developers and start updating their Webpage (that they planned to do 2 years ago already). There is to much advocating and techtalk in GNOME than actually DOING serious changes in it. Some people are doing changes (no doubt and thanks to all of them) but many others are simply only dictating the shit out of it. It would be really nice if GNOME had a serious direction, a serious roadmap, better planning and a stricter development road. Even if this all sounds hard but without Ximian, Sun, Redhat and that failing company Eazel then GNOME would be nothing today while KDE made the most out of their own. Ever asked where the Eazel people left ? None of them work on GNOME anymore (besides the on or other) but the majority simply disappeared into nirvana.
If you like we can continue this conversation on private. And sorry for my bad grammar.
oGalaxy, please use paragraphs by pressing the Enter key…
Anyone find it strange that with all of the Microsoft innovations over the years, that their UI is still chopped ful of useless modal dialogs? Of course it doesn’t crash, it doesn’t let you do more than one thing at a time!
First sorry, I was using Links to write this text so no Paragraphs. I like to add one line that I think is important as well. Look the past couple of weeks how much effort from GNOME developers was spent to get KDE into an unification process it went that far that Havoc Pennington (for sure a respective person but I have hard time with his ideas and visions) asked KDE to unify the CORE bottom layers of the framework, this causes KDE to change a lot of code and that’s what pissed me off again. As if it wasn’t enough for the responsible ones totally crappyfying GNOME the same persons want to do it with KDE. This for my own personal opinion will bring KDE and the Desktop back for another 1-2 years because of radical changes (And I spent carefully time reading all sorts of Mailinglists) after you read all the various mails from various people you gonna understand the full situation and with a bit of programming skills you realize that talking about this is for sure honourable but changing this in practice is insane. That’s why I started my argumentation some days ago here and got flamed for it just for expressing my very own opinion. KDE has a stable framework. There is no and I mean absolutely no need for them breaking their framework up for the requested changes from the GNOME camp. I mean why is GNOME going from one technological idea to another ? Why not settle down to what’s there already and concentrate into making a working and really usable Desktop ? Why does it have to adopt one shit after another ? At the end it doesn’t even reflect into a usable Desktop or more or better applications. Even YET many applications doesn’t really use 100% of the functionality that GNOME offers today such as full use of Bonobo or Corba. Fragmentation is the key, even GNOME seem to realized it that’s why they got the idea working together with KDE on a new framework with sharing bottom libraries so both can rapid progress and use one bottom layer. For the GNOME side this is good, for the KDE side this is bad (because they need to trash a lot of their components). I don’t simply speak about DBUS here. I speak about ATK, GLIB, new VFS layer, GStreamer and so on and even that retarded GConf crap. Now you understand why I personally hype KDE these days a) because I’m sure it’s far ahead (specially after reading Miguel de Icaza’s mail which gave me the last kick to say ‘now is the time’), b) because of the own made investigation that KDE has a good plattform, good apps, integration, easy use, windows’ish look and well a lot of other things mentioned by other people as well. I think KDE is successful and will dominate the Desktop no matter if a bunch of kids hype GNOME from a technical point and from a programmers point KDE dominates. Trashing the bottom framework is plain stupid and we should do everything to protect KDE from doing this. See in 2 years again, GNOME still patches and glues stuff together while KDE offers a more integrated Desktop, once again better apps and so on.
End of communication.
Hummm, it seems all the GNU’s are doing their anual migration from the slashdot savana, perhaps the open-source pasture is running out for them there due too overpopulation, too bad their not lemmings…
To qualify as definitive, you’d need to have a broad sample.
Check out the bitch sites regarding UI complaints for the different issues people have with KDE, Gnome, etc.
Also, you’d need to try each one out, where possible, on multiple machines. You would ALSO need to try these out on different distributions. Gentoo vs. Suse vs. FreeBSD vs. etc. Each one will do something different and complaining about KDE or Gnome’s supposed inconsistency or slowness does nothing if it’s the underlying distro, OS, or hardware ( dual CPU or funky video card ) that’s causing the problems you find irritating.
Even better would be to see if a bunch of people wanted to participate. Maybe time some basic stuff such as opening a browser or whatnot. More useful would be if people went digging to find inconsistencies in UI. This would probably be far more productive and would provide a much better definitive review as well as remove the underlying hardware and OS as factors.
I appreciated your post very much. The thing is, I think people see Eugenia as being static and unbending, but I have, in fact, seen her opinions change over the course of time, as she, like any of us, sees more, uses more and learns more about different OSes. I know her current choice of XP Pro is not an idle choice – it is based on her own user experience. I also know she couldn’t care less what Microsoft thinks. She always calls them as she sees them, no matter what.
In some ways, I too was surprised the KDE and Gnome received less attention. In my own post, I pointed to KDE as a real up and comer. But, like I also said, it is different with Linux. When you look at the resources companies like Microsoft and Apple are pouring into their OSes and then see how things happen with OSS, it is hard to compare. But, there is no doubt that KDE and Gnome have come a long way.
The important thing is, when Eugenia writes an editorial or review, she isn’t doing it as a platform for her opinions, but as a springboard for discussion. She does give her opinions – what kind of a Greek would she be if she didn’t do that? But, they are not intended to be the focus of people’s responses. I don’t want to see 290 criticisms of Eugenia’s opinions, I want to see 290 posts that reflect what those 290 people think – think about the issues, not about Eugenia’s opinions.
@glanz: I am not responsible for your missed keystrokes 🙂
I don’t know how can someone *dare* to say KDE is not integrated . As you can see – reading a little bit of the documentation – it is one of the most complete and integrated desktop UI for X, that also integrates with the underlying system (ex: X extensions, CUPS, SANE, lm_sensors, pppd, samba, openlsp, java, ldap, openssl, wine, openSLP, PAM, …).
I think KDE should got 10 for integration, as it works with a much more set of environments than Windows XP.
You can point to http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.1.php and see some of the suported (or required) libraries/drivers/applications.
That’s it.
I’ll grant you this that it did take some time to configure my KDE desktop to my exact needs and preferences. But now that that is done I’ll never go back. As I spend at least 5 hours a day on computers investing a day on a desktop setup exactly for my needs was no big deal.
Bugs in KDE and text based configuration – Eugenia go get a good distribution like SuSE and make sure your hardware is supported. I haven’t had these problems.
After dabbling w/Linux distributions for the last 2-3 years, KDE 3.1 has finally convinced me!
I’ve hardly booted into Windows for the last month! I still have to for video editing and Games (Civ III), but for the most part Linux has reached that plateau that all Linux distributions have been trying for!
Windows XP, while nice, can’t doesn’t hold a candle to KDE 3.1, if having a highly productive, customized desktop is your thing!
is very easy. Just press Ctrl+Alt+Escape and use the skull-and-bones cursor to kill the app you want.
WinXP more stable than OS X? Gimme a break. I’ve *never* had a WinXP box last more than a week without locking up, crashing, etc. I agree, 2k/XP are *light years* ahead of 9x, but they “just ain’t there” in terms of stability. My Mac can easily do 30 days uptime, no sweat. I usually only reboot it for software updates.
And WinXP more stable that GNOME? WTF? Maybe I don’t use WinXP and GNOME the same way you do, but I sure as *hell* don’t think WinXP is more stable than GNOME *at all*. Yes I have had some GNOME apps crash on me (Galeon and Totem in particular). But I just fire ’em up again and all is well. In XP sometimes that’s possible, sometimes you just get into a never-ending cycle of “End task”, “End now”, “End task”, “End now”, and nothing ever happens. And then there’s the lovely blue-screens and spontaneous reboots. Once again, light years ahead of 9x, but these things are *not* gone in XP/2k. I routinely have my GNOME desktops running for 60-80 days straight, no sweat. Let me reiterate that yes, sometimes *applications* crash, but nothing so serious as to force me to logout and log back in. When I do logout/login, it’s usually because I got a new version of GNOME.
Your long reply shows you’ve many issues with Gnome and I’m sorry that you feel that way but can’t change it, you liked GNome for the wrong reasons and now you want to change it into the thing you really wanted, another WIN API clone.
First you didn’t answer my post, what makes a gnome application a gnome application. The API isn’t like any of the other DE we know. If you can speak of a API. Well except, in my opinion, the Amiga approach. In my opinion the binding is the gtk+2 widget set and the HIG look.
They’ve unlike other DE I know not the desire to make everything Gnome. What they do is providing building stones for making a DE and you can take or leave the things you want or don’t want. That’s why those stones (libraries) are popping up everywhere: pango, atk, glib, gconf, gtk+2, etc. A lot of projects taking or discussing to take parts of it. And with gnome you can do that, You can take seperate components and leave the rest, it is designed that way. You find this approach confusing and allien, I find this refreshing and totally different from all the other DE setups.
I don’t now what you expected from gnome, too guess by your reply and all you other posts I see everywhere where the word Gnome is mentioned on the internet, you expected that the API (if you can speak of that) would become more like the Windows or KDE one. But if you followed the Gnome approach over the years you must have seen that this was absolutely not the intention of Gnome and I applaud them for considering the platform where they are build on, namely *nix. The building tools and building blocks approach is how *nix did and do thinks and made it the strong platform it is now. I hate the day when THE ONE RIGHT WAY to do things is taking over.
I totally agree with student #12, and wonder why he got modded down. His comment was very well written and wasn’t particularly rude other than in his opinions of the writer. Apparently he got modded down because he stated his opinion as a fact, and god knows nobody can do that on OSnews.
->Fritz
Well, what distro this guy uses ? Which kde version ?
I like kde, and read that konqueror is not stable makes me laugth. May be on redhat (that crash many apps because their genetically modified gcc & co) But if you uses a real linux system, it’s as stable as windows xp. Konqueror crashed sometimes on 3.0betaX but not anymore. IE version 6.0 with SP1 still crash once a while.
And the same for the rest of the apps.
I just know that I will never spend $200 for a system that is not better than a system for free. Even for a “support” that doesn’t exist. A least the french microsoft team.
Woohoo. 300 comments