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
Hi, well comparing GNOME with AMIGA is plain stupid (if I understood you correctly). I spent 1984-1996 on the Amiga as my main plattform. The whole system and philosophy GNOME vs. AmigaOS is different. The OS framework is different, the Desktop framework is different, the look and feel is different.
Well I have no problems with a Windows approach of the Desktop and as you can see from many replies here and on other places you see that other people don’t have issues either. Besides the fact that Windows is a commercial OS doesn’t make it bad. GNOME right now tends more to look like Macintrash OperatingSystem X with the NULL usability. Adopted 2 of the most retarded things from Windows (Registry) and the button reorder shit from (MacOS). then it stopped.
Even so, they have decided for this but I still put my own personal needs of a Desktop over this. While GNOME offers the pleasing eyecandy effect It still doesn’t offer the needs and requirements of a whole Desktop. Now we are in the luck of having two Desktops offered. The cool one (which sucks because it stagnates and makes no real progress. A hackers joketoy. No matter how much SUN contributes to it (hoho ATK and the stupid Usability Review which was the cause for GNOME to fuck up that way without any value and some stupid bugfixes) that’s basically ALL comming from SUN. Even now (some 1-2 weeks ago) Bill Hannemann got upset with on Desktop Development List because of no feedback to the ATK people and he was heavily critizising the teamwork. And on the otherhand we have the functional one KDE, rapid development, more and better apps, the apps are present today.
Sure they are 2 different Desktops, 2 different roads (at least one has a road, the other doesn’t need one *g*), so to get work done people better decide to use the one that offers all the tools really necessary for this task. And KDE offers all these tools GNOME has nothing and no matter how much we like to talk it away. GNOME will require years to come to the level of usability and functionality of KDE.
And what you and others always forget, GNOME the GNU Object blah blah model blah. Was meant to be THE DESKTOP for Linux and not The Desktop that takes various roads and still don’t find it’s way to go. Still with 2.2 GNOME has no stable and functional framework. This explains why they need to adapt DBUS, that’s why they are permanently putting wrappers inside the code to change e.g. 5 different Toolbars to 1 Toolbar and keep the API the same, that’s why they still discuss where they should put the LibEGG code and in which library they should put the new Fileselector in and so on. All these things should have been thought of before switching from one plattform to another and not in the middle to something new. This only explains and shows how much crap is remaining in the existing code. The HIG came up months (if not 1 year after 2.0) and many applications got ported and look like ass and fixing them will take them ages (well probably never fixed).
Whenever I read people talking how nice and clean and well layouted GNOME is then I say ‘wow an ATK user who is blind’. Even those who worked for longer and more and better onto GNOME than others never realized how ugly and unesthetical their Desktop is (not before I made the UI review) this only shows how unprofessional and unqualified these people are making a Business related Desktop and some people I know started to fix these issues from ONE disaster into another HIG disaster (that is, they spent half a day fixing the shit and it’s still not HIG conform which usually takes me less than 5 seconds to find out). Because they work on it individualy instead talking to each other and make a real plan howto do the changes so other people who like to bring it up to HIG level can benefit from it). There is no teamplay in GNOME only freaking dictators.
Oh by the way, I know that GNOME is written by mostly volunteers (well ‘mostly’ isn’t the right word anymore but we’ll leave it that way) and that we have no right judging about GNOME in this way because it is volunteer work and if you want to have things changed contribute to it or fork it.
But, why is it announced everywhere then ? Why did their target change from normal freak user to customer and business ? Now I viewed the things as a customer and business related person and you got quite some feedback here. Even if you or others don’t like my opinion but it was worth for me finally to bring my concerns up on a neutral place (because comments like mine was written by many other people as well but usually deleted on the gnome related pages).
Yes Windows XP is way more stable than OS X, Im not going to say its more stable than Linux, but yes much more stable than OS X, My XP machine is going almost 6 months with no unintentional reboot, sure I have app crashes and all I do is fire up that application again, and I keep working. Save your Apple spewing politics for people that actually care to hear stuff like that, In the old days I could say the mac was more user friendly, but today the ease of use in Windows XP has surpassed that of the Mac. Macs have nothing else left, everything that was a concievable reason for choosing the Mac, the PC does now, sometimes even better than what Apple has to offer. Save your politics, but let me ask you something, Apple has its switch ads and they claim so many people left the PC, more than half those ads are fake by the way, I wonder tho how many people actually left the Mac and bought a PC? I think the number is more than Apple is willing to admit. Because with people actually buying the Mac, marketshare should be increasing instead of decreasing…
Woooow you use a lot of words without answering me! But okay.
Listen, I’ve used the Amiga form 1986 till my 4000 broke in 1998 as only desktop at home and I don’t mean only playing games with. And yes I still link the amiga gui with Gnome. I’ve evaluated qt and gtk+ as widget set for our in-house build and used Medical Image Manipulation applications and frontends. I have choosen for gtk+ two years before SUN adapted Gnome (we used solaris machines back then, running a KDE desktop). To call people who support gnome children shows who is really the kid in here, also to call everybody who disagrees with you stupid is really childish too.
What really amazes me is that your claiming to be knowlegdable about the structure of KDE and Gnome and fight the inclusion of building blocks that are being used by Gnome into KDE with the claim that this would destroy the integration of KDE. You (if your a that knowlegdable) and I know that the inclusion of those building blocks will not be visible to the developers that use the KDE API for creating applications. Come with real argument instead of the FUD you’re spreading. Calling something retarted and stupid doesn’t make it so.
First you attacked gconf, now you’re attacking every single library that has the faintest connection with Gnome. The mask has fallen of, you’re the only one who doesn’t see it.
Listen, I’m not illiterate what Amiga concerns, you can still find me in some Paradox and Amiga channels on EFNET if you like.
Well for the library issue, I think you are missunderstanding something here. I only expressed what I know about GNOME not what I have cut out of my ass. The wrapped libraries I have talked about is acceptable because it only shows the cleanup process inside the code but it was worth to bring that issue up because it’s simply true. You can read more about that on the february archive on mail.gnome.org of desktop development list.
The GConf windows registry approach is indeed retarded and plain idiotic. That’s what we on Amiga have fighted and made jokes about for over one decade. I recall so many people saying ‘Look at Windows registry how stupid this is, this can’t beat our S: or ENV: directory’ and indeed, I find more similarity with KDE’s way of storing settings in the .kde/config dir than with GConf on GNOME and the various other places GNOME still stores configurations. I mean, simply have a look in your homedir if you know howto run ‘ls -Al’ from commandline and you will realize that I don’t speak the untruth here.
From a programming view of point I’ll take the libraries offered by Kickstart and Workbench over everything else. Not to mention that AmigaOS offered a reference manual since day 1 which was complete and usable. Not to mention all the books and writings related to Programming the Amiga from Hardware point, Library Point (System) and so on.
I can’t find any equivalents of what was Amiga with what is GNOME today. I tend to say that Enlightenment comes closer to the Feel of an Amiga Workbench than GNOME.
Simply turn on a MacOSX and then GNOME and you see that GNOME has more in common with MAC than Amiga and it doesn’t take much to understand this.
You must love GNOME very much to spend all your time on GNOME threads, complaining about every pixel that is misplaced and trolling in bugzilla (first in history, he he he he).
Why don’t you spend your time and do something _USEFUL_. Like, concentrate and finish your studies — you know, convert some of those F’s into C’s or if you can’t manage it D’s. Or maybe school is too boring then you could instead do something beneficial for your favorite DE !
I have a suggestion: make a CVSKDEBuild script and release it under a closed license? Or better, get a Girlfriend/wife (poor lady).
—WARNING—WARNING—
This message is for TROLLS only. Don’t respond to it if you are not a TROLL.
This is another reason why I don’t suggest people using GNOME or develop for it. Don’t you people think that it is not a waste of time writing software for people such as minkwe (who is a GNOME user). Basically he reflects 1/3 of the entire GNOME community. Full of people like him who blame others for their opinion, who libel, slander and namecalling people on open lists such as this one and various (if not a lot of other) places only for expressing their very own opinion. During the years I hit to many of these kind of people which made me upset writing any shit for them. Anyways they can blame me and others as much they like but it doesn’t take me the right to say and write what I personally think about GNOME or not. It’s the freedom of every individual deciding wether I make a point or not.
So now you understand why I wrote ‘GNOME is a kidstoy’ 2 comments earlier. Someone still belive it’s a lie ?
Danni Coy,
you are dead on!
Funny that when I started to read this article, and the comments, I wanted to post what you wrote, so thanks, I’ll just quote you:
“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.
”
So basically, without these features a DE is not my piece of pie. At work I sometimes have to move things from my NT pc to the unix realm and edit files/data etc through reflection where I can have the window behaviour that I require to do my work in an efficient way.
The fact that none of this shows up in the review, that kde scores much lower on usability whereas it is the only DE/wm that you can set up to have this behaviour (without crazy hacks, as are required for gnome) is very telling about how personal the outcome of the review is.
(Bloat doesn’t bother me as long as I can set things up the way I want; if the handles, levers etc in your car are many but they allow you to drive a long time without getting too tired, in the end you win… btw you only set things up once.)
This review is one persons opinion and should be respected as such. Thanks go to the author for writing it, and thanks also to others like Daan for writing their take on things.
Instead of whining about that XP should not win because whatever, or that KDE merits more points here and there, or that OSX is or isn’t much better than OS9, I think it would be much more interesting to see what everybody likes about their own favourite DE, and what they don’t like about it.
I like KDE the most, but things are not perfect. They are maybe close, as far as the KDE people can do things about it, but some things are annoying. For instance: I’d like to be able to drop a file (image) from konqueror onto the gimp icon on my panel, or on gimp. Once works, but the second time opens a new gimp, and dropping onto gimp does not work…
But I prefer this than to have to miss the useful window behaviour that Danni mentioned. Also I realise this is the result of the whole gtk/qt stuff but that doesn’t interest me.
Aside that, I will personally not touch an MS product if I can help it, and not spend any money to a convicted fellon. I also don’t believe it’s right to steal from a thief, so I just don’t buy or use MS win. Add to that the virus problems, spyware, unacceptable (unlawful where I live) EULAs, etcetc…
So I go OSS all the way, the only thing that I don’t like is what I mentioned above, and that’s minor.
Your talking about looking like. Yes Gnome has some things that look like < os9. But API wise it is a total different , horse. I programmed on them too (Siemens used them with some of there medical equipment).
The rest of what you’re talking about is FUD. Gconf isn’t the windows registry or clone. Fighting against it on that grounds is dishonest when you claim you know how gconf works.
I’m still amazed by the fact that you ignore the contents of my posts which points too your FUD claims and only talk about ‘looking like’: Gnome ‘looks like’ <=OS9, gconf ‘looks like’ Windows registry. But if you’re so knowlegdable as you claim, then you also know that the comparison stops by ‘looking like’. This means your are FUDDING and suppressing information to make a point which you’re not able to make when you were completely honest about the subject.
Now tell me in your Amiga days how many solution for toolbars did you count? How many solution for the file-selector? How many different approaches for buttons (skinnable and not), dropdown-combo boxen? How many API for this. Do you want to talk about that? Claiming that the Amiga delivered a one API solution is lying, Commodore delivered something but the community delivered a lot what made the Amiga and its package of components (just like Gnome) or are you ignoring Miami (TCP/IP stack), MUI (widget set), Dopus (workbench/filemanager replacement) etc. No, the Amiga was like Gnome now, compenents could (and would) be replaced, it sure wasn’t a KDE windows clone. how dare you critizing gconf on false grounds, that is on grounds of windows hate and the same time promote the windows API cloning approach of KDE. This is called double standards! Disclaimer I’ve nothing against KDE, I’m questioning oGALAXYo in his FUDDING.
You wrote “GNOME is a kidstoy” because you are a common forum troll. I’ve read lots of your work, and can completely understand why it gets deleted. This argument (that you’ve lost) is great based on it’s exposure alone. LOL
Can you honestly say that the simularities between inclusion of libegg things (toolbar) into gtk+2 and the adoption of widgetsets and other libraries developed by the community by AmigaOS is not comparable. There was no ‘one right way’ in AmigaOS it was a box of tools were you could pick and build on every level, just like Gnome.
The defintitive real experience of those using MS products is one inherent queasiness and irritation associated with Spyware, Pop-up ads, Nags and the “cross your fingers” install/uninstall process of third party commercial programs.
Excuse me but you are cutting things out of context here:
To answer your question about this ‘looks like’. I thought you were follwing all sorts of GNOME threads here so I was in the assumtion that you know the issues about GConf that I have brought up. I expressed many times that GConf for example caused a lot of problems for various developers specially the installation and use of Schema files caused a lot of problems. I have a good example of that still visible infront of me where some Galeon developers had hard and nasty times getting their stuff running and all sorts of people came into the channel and where complaining about GConf and Schema files issue. Even today there are a lot of Programs within GNOME (and I speak about the core itself) that has issues with installing Schema files correctly or crash when started up the first time because of not being able to find any configurations and so on. Theoretical techtalk about how advanced something is and then the practical use of it are two different things. And going one step further, what was wrong with the old way of storing configurations ? Nothing. the lame excuse that Administrators can use GConf to set global values is more a technological idea than something that has been proven to work in the practice. And to top all this it’s also a matter of personal taste that I don’t want to deny here.
The Amiga concern, yes you are not untrue with what you say. Multiple Toolbars made on their own or simulated by putting pushbuttons on the Top, MUI, GadTools, Reactive, ASL, ReqTools sure, all this is right but you forget how old AmigaOS, Kickstart and Workbench is, since early ’90 there are no real enchancements for these things. Only some lame updates AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 but nothing API wise. I don’t need to tell you about memoryprotection and other stuff. I think you are well aware of all this. But during that time (and even today in certain situations) AmigaOS is still supperior to anything similar. Specially the 512kb ROM (an entire Operating System), the Workbench. With 15-20 Mb you have a full working System anything similar these days that can beat it ? Regardless the fact of multiple Toolbars, MUI, GadTools, Reactive and whats else, there are usually Documentations for developers to work with that.
From todays perspective I would criticise many of these standalone solutions myself. And MorphOS for Pegasos solves many of the old issues e.g. Memoryprotection for new Programms, Control-Center like Preferences, MUI as standard Widgetset and so on, still lacks some stuff but all in all it’s getting in the right direction and faster with fewer developers than GNOME offers for their public.
Do you want to compare the good old DirectoryOpus 4.1x, DiskMaster or DOpus Magellan II with Nautilus ? Nautilus won’t even touch or sniff the ass of those applications offered on Amiga during these days. Do you wan’t to measure how Icons is being placed on the Desktop or in an own Window with the way Nautilus does it nowadays on GNOME ? Yet again Nautilus won’t even be able to do half what the normal Workbench was able to do, e.g. Layouting Icons in the Window, saving their state and so on. I think you have forget a lot after you left Amiga 1998 because of the death of the A4K. I did not forget all this.
Now let’s get back to GNOME and KDE for the last moment before I discontinue this conversation. Today 2003, march, 19th I’m sitting here infront of Linux box, my only box, my only Operating System that I have decided for. Linux on the bottom layer is perfect here, has everything to offer for me, from customizability, logical installation of stuff and I’m really happy with it and not wanting to change it for anything else because from the console point of view it’s perfect and I can do all I like (Vim, LaTeX and so on).
But I’m also used to use a Desktop Environment and as many other people here I’am not illiterate about Windows. To say I have nothing against Windows and if I wasn’t used so much to Linux I would switch to it anytime just to get over this sad sad sad situation with Linux Desktop alternatives. In all the semesters I have studied Computer and Economics Science I was missing a lot of stuff on Linux like standard applications to get my work done. Work that brings me forward in my studies, work that makes me earn money, work that is relevant for business and customers that pay millions for an IT project. These apps are only available on Windows. That’s a fact and can’t be denied. Now I as many others try to find opensource counterparts for these applications, who are able to import and export the informations required. Now, what does GNOME offer ? and what does KDE offer ? Do you see something ? KDE offers most of the apps to do exactly this kind of task. UML with Umbrello (they work on import and export Rational Rose files), Visio (Kivio as counterpart to do DIN 60001 (?) EDV Diagramms for Work), KPresenter to do Powerpoint like presentations. That’s relevant for me. That’s what I need and I don’t plan to wait another 5 years for someone to bring up the same apps for GNOME while KDE offers them already. I’m also quite sure that many other good applications are being offered on KDE really soon and I’m also sure that writing good importers and exporters and enchance the app in general will be easier on KDE than on GNOME.
I don’t need yet another MP3 player or other fancy mediaplayer. I need tools that does the work and using the good parts from Windows (as used in KDE) is nothing bad and it’s easier for Windows users to get familar with KDE from easy play than with GNOME.
First of all, learn the difference between a GTK+ and a GNOME app before calling someone a Troll (specially someone who at least contributed to GNOME, that’s more than you actually did).
Hei FUDmaster, you’re a moving target. I said that Gnome was like the Amiga, you said there is no comparison (well you said such a comparison was stupid). Now you’ve to admit I’m right and promptly switch to ‘but I would critize the Amiga too if it was now’. Strange coming from someone who said he would take the Amiga API above everything. I’m glad I took the time to reply to your FUD, so everybody can see what arguments you have (none).
Second, I don’t compare nautilus to dopus, I compare the ability of gnome and the amiga setup to replace on every level every core element (building block). You’re trying to distract from the point a made which are:
Gnome == Amiga approach to DE
KDE == Windows approach to DE
Thirth you’re starting to loose ground in the API discussion and promptly switch to application comparison. I could start all over with you about applications (yes I prefer gnome applications) but what is the point. All you whining and gnashing of teeth about API’s and libraries boiled down to preference of applications, which you are saying Gnome is lacking, which is very disputable of course.
Sorry my friend but you are getting to far here. If you think I made mistakes in my reply then it’s because you didn’t clearly stated what you want to ask. You brought in the Amiga in this conversation and not me and you feel upset now just because my reply doesn’t fit into your picture ?
Take my reply as is. If you don’t like it it’s your problem. If it doesn’t fit in the answer you expect then be precise next time. Now I hope you decide for the first one and take my reply as is so we can close this conversation. And no GNOME is definately NOT moving the AMIGA way. This is blasphemy to the good old Amiga.
Every introduction of new technology has his problems. Gconf is no acception. This happens in every DE, well except KDE and Windows which always work perfect in the current setup and the problems ly in the past in a version number lower then the current (look up in google dcop in KDE 2.x, worked flawlessy when KDE 2.x was current and had a lot of problems when KDE 2.x was old and not the current version).
But tell me I’m running a gnome only DE (USE=-arts -kde in gentoo if this says something to you). Which application (who are not extremely apha) have trouble with there schema’sand gconf? Because the only applications crashing on a regular basis on me at the moment are the beta ones like epiphany and totem and not on gconf. I thought I kept up with all the newest in Gnome but if I’ve to believe you, I miss a whole lot of applications (the ones crashing on gconf or with gconf schema problems).
Not much to say about what I wrote didn’t you! And talking about blasphemy to the good old Amiga, what a remark is that? Is the only right way to talk about the Amiga your way? I made my points clear why it was (API wise) like Gnome, you didn’t have anything to refute that, except shifting the focus to some claims I didn’t make, like comparing nautilus with dopus. You’re more at home in flamewar speach (mine is better and bigger then yours) then in technical discussions aren’t you (well except if you count words like retarded and stupid as technical, you use them a lot when you discuss GNome building stones)
Some of your technical highlights:
Enlightment is like the AmigaDE (Well if you strip all and == equals ‘look like’. )
OS X is like Gnome (Yeah if we forget that it is based on object C. Try OS X == GNUStep or more cacao == GNUSTEP to be more on the spot)
Excuse me but you should do some homework. You said:
GNOME is similar to AMIGA because of C
I said GNOME is more directing into OSX (from look than Amiga) and then you said:
OSX is based on objective C therefore is not compareable to GNOME which is C therefore similar to Amiga.
But you forget that LARGE parts of Kickstart and Workbench (refering to 3.1 here) are written in Assembly language and assembled on a Unix Mainframe. Due the time I can’t remember which parts are Assembly but I have parts of the original Kickstart sourcecode somewhere on my archives and can for sure tell that Exec is 100% pure MC680x0 Assembly.
Nice day!
Still grabbing everything except the point.
AmigaOS and Gnome both had the ability to replace every core element on every level by something else as proven over and over again by it faithfull community. This makes it exciting technology.
How egotistical to say “Definitive”.
Will the reviewer clarify the confusing conclusion. The same line states “I much prefer overall the Windows XP experience ” then states “a close second the ones of MacOSX and BeOS”.
One cannot like one *much* more then say others were close.
This is a contradiction in terms.
Original post:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3064&limit=no#82663
Eugenia, I have the same experience as suka. Can it be that you count blender start up time only until the greeter window comes up and the UI is displayed? Measured like this, I can follow you. But measuring it like this is wrong, because, of course stuff still goes on behind the scenes in blender, and it is not usable until the greeter goes away.
bah. the greeter goes away when you move the mouse. I have to agree with Eugenia
Nope, no the greeter. The whole thing comes up immediately and there is a good reason for this, despite Blender being much more big than the small Calculator Gnome app: library dependancies. Gnome apps are crazy on their dependancies and that slows down extremely their loading times.
“Gnome apps are crazy on their dependancies and that slows down extremely their loading times.”
Uhh no.
[xxxxxxx@wyatta xxxxxxx]$ date;/usr/bin/gnome-calculator;date
Wed Mar 19 14:49:39 EST 2003
Wed Mar 19 14:49:40 EST 2003
[xxxxxxx@wyatta xxxxxxx]$
[xxxxxxx@wyatta xxxxxxx]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 598.691
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov
pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1196.03
[xxxxxxx@wyatta xxxxxxx]$uptime
2:50pm up 156 days, 4:37, 2 users, load average: 0.11, 0.11, 0.09
[xxxxxxx@wyatta xxxxxxx]$
Please note that I also had to take the time to alt-f4 gcalc when it came up to return control to the shell.
“Slow”, gimme a break already.
Just press ctrl-U in Blender and the splash window will never bother you again.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2003-March/msg00116.html
Yes, Havoc is 100% correct over there, again.
Stupid people don’t use Linux or never heard of it.
>Stupid people don’t use Linux or never heard of it.
This is true only for today. But what we see today is a large effort on making the public aware of Linux. In other words, steps should be taken to make Linux READY for these “stupid” people.
Please retain the “RE: <Subject>” in your replies.
don’t worry! just keep calling them “stupid” and they stay on whatever platform they are right now.
Eugenia,
I have one disagreement with this article, and it is with this quote:
“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).”
That KDE and Gnome were not meant to solve the problem IS relevant. They are meant to be part of a total solution, not to be a total solution in themselves, and there are distros that use them properly. An example would be SuSE with KDE; Control Center is the one stop shop for ALL your configuration needs, including all the KDE config stuff plus all the YaST modules. You do a disservice to your readers, and damage to your credibility, by ignoring this (and don’t try to tell me you’re unfamiliar with SuSE’s KDE implementation). I realize you were trying to stick with KDE 3.1, but with so few distros shipping 3.1 at this point, I would hardly say it’s a fair representation of the default KDE a user is likely to encounter.
Also, I realize you have a bone to pick with X, but you keep blaming it for things that aren’t it’s fault. Most people who claim X is slow or unstable have only used KDE or Gnome. When you try something like WindowMaker it quickly becomes apparent that X is very fast and very stable, and it is in fact KDE and Gnome that are slow and unstable.
Finally, you really should have had an editor read this before you posted it. The last few pages were very difficult to read.
Well, the thing with this very article is that it should have started with words like “This is how me, Eugenia, tried to use various desktops and how I (dis)liked each and every of them in various ways”. It is obvious that the author is used to using one of the tested environments on a daily basis and the rest simply does not meet her personal criteria – this is what is commonly called to be biased.
While there surely are certain valid points in the article, the overall result is just a sum of personal tastes and preferences, based more on random experience of one person rather than specific UI usability tests with a group of randomly selected users. It has the same level of importance to me as saying that when I first tried to use WinXP, it choked up while transferring a file via FTP and became totally unresponsible (even the cursor refused to move smoother than one jump in a second), which is a behaviour I have never experienced using any other desktop, thus rendering WinXP the least stable of all for me. But is it valid to claim my experience is a general rule for judging and that my preferences are anything important to finding out which desktop is better for anyone? Of course not! There are many happy users of WinXP, just as there are of KDE, Gnome, MacOS or BeOS. And I am biased myself so it would take at least a dozen of various people to get any usable review of the pros and cons of the various desktops!
Therefore I guess the issue is mainly in article claiming to be something it in fact is not. It is not about overall user experience. At least not of users of the very desktops nor of a wider audience.
Then there are other more or less important details, such as that WinXP does not come with any programming framework itself (unless purchased separately) so it should have received much less points than it did (not mentioning MFC being a pain to work with due to its inherently bad architecture). Then, the proposed modified menu for Gnome mis-aligns the texts vs. icons and arrows (arrows become base aligned instead of centered) and makes it harder to read at higher resolutions (compared to the original) etc. But again, all of this is a matter of personal tastes…
So, why does this article deserve such attention? It does not! It just starts another useless flamewar – which is what only the author can profit from. The best we can do is to call for real comparisons, more in-depth reviews and given rules of testing – and for articles of value – such ones that really help spot the weaknesses and care more about usability rather than eye candy!
So much of the comments in this thread really end up referring to Eugenia’s use of the word “definitive” in the title. Almost all of us know Eugenia is not a native speaker of English and words and terms in a different language are often difficult to pinpoint as to what situations you use them in, etc.
Most of us who natively speak English know that “definitive” means “the standard”, “the ultimate”, “the agreed upon”, etc. This is obviously not what Eugenia meant as she began the article apologizing for not including more OSes and then going on to say, “Also note that this is a quick overview. We can’t possibly cover these environments in-depth, as that would take not five pages…”.
So, it is obvious she used the word in an incorrect fashion. However, in English (and I’m sure there are equivalents in other languages) there is a saying regarding this kind of thing. It’s called “correcting the obvious”. And it means that there is no point or use in correcting the person’s mistake over and over again. The term is clear – the correction that is being made is something that is obvious…like calling an evergreen tree a Maple tree. It’s in obvious mistake. It can happen to anyone. And it’s so obvious that “correcting the obvious” is worse than the initial mistake. So, unfortunately, many, many of these posts in this thread were posted for only one reason – to correct the obvious.
if one doesn’t like any of the DE available, is it possible to write your own? and if so, how/what is needed?. . .or is this not the place to ask that, even though it is topic of desktop environments?
i use aqua on os x and find it works just fine for me. i use windows sparingly at work and when i do it makes my eyes hurt (that and it doesn’t do what i want it to do the way i want it to do and makes sense to me. . .of course that could just be because i was not raised on the windows motif). and i have tried gnome and kde (still trying to figure out how to use others availabe under x11) and find them too-windozy for my taste. . .if i were to have time and talent is what is needed for a de to work/code req’d? or is it possible to look at some of the opensource one’s available to figure that out? smile
My personal ratings would be as follows:
KDE 3.1 – 9.0
– Fast, efficiant, doesn’t get in my way, allows me change almost everything, not bloated (using apt-get install kdm kdebase kdelibs in debian sid)
—————-
Windows XP – 6.5
– Slow, integration not consistant, bloated, only able to delete curtain apps via 3rd party applications
—————-
MacOS X – 6.5
– Looks great, good integration, perhaps the slowest GUI I have used though
—————-
Gnome 2.2 – 5.0
– I have yet to see a nice destop using Gnome 2.2, its slow, apps really don’t seem to follow any UI rules.
—————-
BeOS – Not applicable due to lack of experiance with OS…
_______________________________________________
Although my ratings probably don’t seem very unbiased, I assure you they are. I am currently using XP due to school needs, I use MacOS X alot at school, and used Gnome prior to 2.x … Most of my system maintenence is done using the Terminal however, so perhaps that could be a reason KDE and Gnome got a bad rap in the article.
Its impossible to please everyone with any one UI, however KDE works best for me personally.
So sad you all have such low standards but any OS that isn’t snappy with 30 mhz and 4 meg ram is crap IMO! ie. AmigaOS.. Ahh those were the days.
MaxAuthority:
Have you EVER used Linux? Here you really can’t say where things are installed, and I hate it.
Seriously have you ever used linux? I would love to see you post that same comment on a linux users forum. Plus the fact that this is about GUI’s not OS’s. If you want to get into the XP vs. Linux vs. OSX vs. ??? I dont think any of us would make it out alive of that battle.
“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.”
Well then I guess none of my computers are actually used by anyone, including myself. It has been since late 2000, and still is my primary OS. I’ve tried Gnome, KDE, and I use Windows XP here at work. I can’t stand them. I am spolied.