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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Styles and CO (was: (offtopic) My mom is a born hacker)
From:       David Johnson <david () usermode ! org>
Date:       2003-04-25 3:23:09
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On Thursday 24 April 2003 03:33 am, Gerold J. Wucherpfennig wrote:

> Windows "has" more applications. Many aren't very good either, but a
> few are better than any OSS tool out there. (Sure, they have the
> money to dev. such killer apps...)

That certainly makes Windows an attractive choice for many users, but it 
has nothing to do with usability, ease-of-use, etc.

> That's nice and some of it is better than Windows (the Win32 api is a
> mess), but the glue to the underlying system is missing. Another
> problem is bad interoperability among toolkits. Windows has many
> toolkits, too but they work together nicely.

I'm not really sure what you mean by interoperability among toolkits. 
Drag and Drop under UNIX still has some snags, but on the whole it 
works very well and it is improving fast. I wish I could drag an audio 
file out of Xmms and onto Noatun, but then I again, I wish I could also 
do the same thing between MediaPlayer and WinAmp.

> Windows is an OS, but KDE is only a DE. So you seem to be talking
> about the DE, but that's only one part of a system. And you can't
> just stay on the KDE island. There are so many toolkits and useful
> apps that use them. Or do you want to reengineer everything in
> QT+KDELIBS?

The desktop is the only domain in which KDE resides. There's no way 
around that fact. There will never be a Bill Gates to decree that there 
shall be but one printing subsystem and but one printing dialog. UNIX 
is not a monolithic welded mass, but a layered system with the desktop 
very near the top. We must treat it as such.

We have to stay on that KDE island otherwise we will drown in the ocean. 
But just because we aren't part of a monolithic welded mass does not 
mean we are helpless. It just means that we cannot (and should not) 
blindly copy the Windows way of doing things. The gross architectures 
of Windows and UNIX are too wildly divergent to even try.

> Brand new users don't matter. If they like and want to use something
> they will have to investigate some time, no matter if it's Windows,
> KDE or something else. (We don't need "Click here to start"
> tooltips). It's just about making life easier for everybody.

Thank you thank you thank you!

> IMO some parts are better, but the overall experience
> for average users is worse.
> I like to do KDE hacking, use my custom build Linux / KDE HEAD system
> as my prime time, daily, many hours a day desktop system.
> But I can't recomment it to average users yet.

For the desktop I have no hesitations in recommending KDE. But I might 
have some hesitations in recommending an underlying OS, depending upon 
the user.

-- 
David Johnson
___________________
http://www.usermode.org
 
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