KDE 4.1 Beta 2 – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? 431
jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield takes a look at the latest KDE beta and finds it wanting: 'Very likely, KDE users will have to wait for another release or two beyond 4.1 before the new version of KDE matches the features of earlier ones, especially in customization.' He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say, 'Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake.' I'm not too sure about that — really, 'everyone?'"
Everyone? Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unexplained Crashes (Score:5, Insightful)
only mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
I certainly don't think KDE 4.0 was a mistake beyond calling it "4.0" which led a bunch of idiots to expect something "finished", and that despite the up-front warnings that it wasn't finished.
It's a clear design improvement on 3.x in every way (though I don't particularly like or use the new desktop with its "plasmoids", I didn't like the 3.x desktop either, and the 4.x desktop can emulate it trivially - desktops widgets are just pointless, you just don't see them or the desktop for 99.9% of the time you're using the computer), it's just not stable yet.
Re:Everyone? Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing KDE 3.5.9 is still available so users have a choice to avoid "failure", unlike XP which will only be available to System Builder Licensees.
Re:Too bad. (Score:1, Insightful)
what aspect of KDE 4.1 seems more like Windows?
It's the Unix GUI LEAST like Windows. Unless "Most like Windows" really means "Has a task bar and launch menu at the bottom of the screen".
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:1, Insightful)
> How is it possible that open source developer
There is a fundemental and fatal flaw with the entire Linux/open source development model where there is no single controlling authority. KDE is built of a million little projects and packages that all are their own boss and answer to no one but themselves. So if there is some poor design decision that is causing stupid and annoying problems in KDE(or other projects) there is no one that can force the project to fix or change their stuff. Sure you can fork and fix the stuff on your own, but you quickly end up taking over the work of all the sub projects you were trying to leverage.
So what happens is things just never get fixed. Instead new shinny things keep getting added and the year of the Desktop Linux gets incremented once again.
Re:Everyone? Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Everyone" agrees that Vista is "a failure", even though it's really not. So why can't dumb generalizations be applied to software that's supposed to be perfect in every way?
The thing though is, I can take KDE 3 and use it till the year 5436656563577 or beyond if I feel like and still patch it. With XP I can't really even get it anymore and I can't patch it and modify it. With KDE 4 I can customize it by customizing the source, with Vista I can't.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
One of reasons may be that they are doing it for free, in their spare time. Not eight hours a day, with their paycheck dependent on the quality of the result and with best professional artists, designers, usability specialists etc hired for big $$$ to decide what is best.
As much as we want to think otherwise, most of open source software is amateur production. Some of it is professional in means of program, but great most is amateur when it comes to UI design, art, and such.
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither is all that happy, both have been looking forward to a fully usable kubuntu with the 4.1 (because it "seems more like windows"), but maybe I should begin looking into E17 for them?
Or perhaps they can stop expecting it to be something it isn't and get used to Linux as a real operating system, not "that shoddy free Windows clone" they expect it to be.
Re:Too bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
People Call It The +5 Insightful Effect (Score:1, Insightful)
Most open source developers have been hanging out and posting here on Slashdot for a very long time and you start to believe your and everyone else's bullshit.
"Did you submit a bug report?"
"All hail choice!"
"You obviously haven't read teh Cathedral and teh Bazaar"
"Well, I LIKE it that way"
and all the rest of the garbage that gets posted and modded up here means nothing ever get fixed. Nothing ever changes. No grown up hard questions or criticisms get asked or considered. Just endless BSOD jokes and self congratulatory mutual masturbation of the glories of open source.
That crap keeps getting modded up and shit never gets fixed. And Microsoft continues to rake in tens of billions and retains their lock on the desktop OS world.
The world is waiting for open source developers to grow the fuck up and start acting like adults. People WANT to use open source software, and yet the juvenile open source developers continue to putz around with spinning 3D accelerated cubes proclaiming how they are 'ahead' of Windows and OS X.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why:
1) NIMBY - If Z is a feature or program I don't use, not only do I not care about it, I don't care about whether or not it can interact properly with programs I do care about.
2) Windows-ism - Many projects now try to replicate the functions of Windows apps. But the clones and work-alikes they produce are not only imperfect, programmers also can't take the same shortcuts that the Windows developers do.
3) Real Programmers - If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing, and if you make it easy for programmers to write for a platform, especially new ones, they will only produce crap that you somehow have to deal with. Compare this with MS's "Developers developer developers" motto, or Apple's excellent dev tools.
4) Esoterism - The command line is better than graphics. Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant. It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
5) Arrogance - (related to 1) There is only one right way to do things, one language, one library, one kernel, one package, one work-flow set-up. If you do it any other way, you're wrong; if you suggest that another way is good, I must shoot you down and insult you because you implicitly threaten the validity of my worldview; if you say that there can be more than one solution to a problem, you are really saying that your solution is right and mine is wrong.
I once listened in on a conversation by some digital typographers about their work set-ups, and unlike linux-heads they were genuinely interested in the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of solving the same problem, instead of arguing over whether which was best.
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Short answer? Mnemonics.
Long version: it's easier for most people to fudge through something they vaguely remember doing by pictures than it is for them to memorize a set of arcane terminal they vaguely remember. People who do things other than program and learn Linux inside and out have all sorts of other random esoteric knowledge buried away, and there's only so much that a single person can keep in their head. These people are called end users, and frankly, if you don't understand why politely asking them to "simply" learn the terminal commands is a mind-numbingly stupid proposition, I seriously recommend staying the hell away from UI design.
Not enough magic ponys yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
4 is almost a complete rewrite. It seems people have the impression that the reason all of the 3.5 desktop features weren't completed in 4.1 is because of a conscious choice. When actually, it is was just limited time. Feature freeze tends to stop the adding of magic ponys.
Re:Unexplained Crashes (Score:5, Insightful)
And it certainly works for that. A released version always gets more widespread testing though, and KDE is not the only project that experiences this effect. After all, how often do you see the advice to not use a .0 release because it's buggy? That's because people don't test alpha, beta, or RC releases.
We delayed the release of KDE 4.0 for two months because it wasn't ready for release, and then debated internally (you can check our public mailing lists) before the release as to whether it should be called 4.0 or another release candidate. In the end it was judged that the known bugs were not serious enough to block release. Keep in mind that there were (and are) a lot of feature regressions which get fixed up over time. But they were not due to us designing them out, it was due to the fact that they did not get ported over in time.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think you really understood the parent. He's talking about the look and feel of the User Interface of Windows 2000 and OSX, and how they are far beyond the mediocre offerings of open source design.
Rather than defend it, you sidestep the argument and mention things not even related to the parent post. Kernels, Drivers, and File Systems? What do those have to do with what the issue is here? Nothing. You are doing your own brand of trolling by beating your chest over the wrong issues.
Short Term and Long Term (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE shot itself in the foot by making the KDE 3.x so polished. KDE 3.5 is essentially 9 years of evolutionary development from KDE 1.0. Unfortunately, its impossible to recreate 9 years of development and polish in only 3. I think that the long term prospects for KDE 4.x are great, but short term I'll continue to use 3.5.
I've tried the first beta of 4.1 and while its much more functional than 4.0, its still not there and probably won't be for a few more releases. On the other hand, I remember that KDE 3.0 was, while more functional than 4.0, also much rougher than 3.5, so I can't complain too much.
Puhleeeze, People ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on folks. This is a Linux desktop. You have a choice. If you like KDE and want stability, stick with KDE 3.x. Want "cutting edge" or want to assist with development? Go with KDE 4.
I suspect that KDE 4 was too ambitious and the developers tried to do too much. Perhaps just moving KDE 3 over to QT4 and _then_ doing a complete redesign of the inner workings. That at least would have had all the developers familiar with QT4 and allowed for an easier migration to the new whiz-bang version of KDE.
I started using KDE in the pre-1.0 days and have participated in some development and documentation and sat some out; you just go with the flow.
TFA seems to misunderstand the Linux culture in general.
Re:Still very disappointed with KDE 4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Aren't you aware of the Linux development paradigm that has been the rule since Linus released Linux? ... "Release Early, release often!" FOSS depends upon the users helping in the development of software, not whining about perceived or real problems.
Bruce Byfield summarized his findings with the following statement:
How stable KDE 4.1 will be when released at the end of this month is anybody's guess. But, judging from its features, the release will be a major milestone in the 4.x series. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly not be the complete answer to user discontent that has been promised. It might even drive large number of users away from KDE altogether.
Such a reaction would be misguided. KDE 4.x has many features, including the use of scalable vector graphics and natural language searches that make it the most innovative free desktop currently in development. Moreover, if you dislike some of its experiments, you can work around them with no more trouble than it takes to change your desktop wallpaper -- for instance, one of the widgets you can add to the desktop is a KDE 3.5.x menu.
That is wise advice.
Troy Unrau introduced KDE4, before the first beta was released, on Jan 1, 2007 with the "Road to KDE4" series at http://dot.kde.org/1167723426 [kde.org]
Before he resigned KDE4 to focus on his Masters in Geology degree, Troy posted the following comments:
We knew there would be some pushback to the major changes in KDE 4.0, because, believe it or not, history is simply repeating itself. KDE 2.0 was met almost exactly the same way, although open source was flying a lot lower under the public radar in those days. It took until KDE 2.2 before distros mostly stopped shipping KDE 1.1.2 and were happy with 2.x.ferent standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.
So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!
The hysteria in some complaints (and deliberate FUDing and astroturfing in others) is misplaced. FOSS software is not static, especially when there is a vibrant body of users CONTRIBUTING to its development (coding, testing, documenting or donations). Users who do not contribute but only complain are "poisonous users". A project grows when it has an amply supply of contributing users. Any project dies when its users are poisonous.
It is also obvious that some "complainers" are not KDE users at all. Their motives are obvious. A lot of this brouhaha has been exploited by a few bloggers trying to increase their page hits by inflammatory comments with little basis in fact.
Re:Too bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the Unix GUI LEAST like Windows.
That's not true. Something like ion3 or wmii is far more different than Windows. Also, what about KDE 4 is so radically different about Windows? Plasma is sort of similar (but a lot more elaborate) to Vista's Gadgets in that they can dock on the panel or be dragged out and float around on the desktop. Some of the compositing effects are similar to what Aero do. The new launcher menu has moved away from the start menu replacement from Windows, but it still feels natural to someone familiar with Windows.
Face it, KDE 4 does have a lot of similarities to Windows (and that isn't necessarily a bad thing).
4) Esoterism (Score:5, Insightful)
It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
On the other hand, there's a pretty strong argument this should always be the case EXCEPT for the tools that build the GUIs themselves.
Consider the standard menu of a program[1] where you'll find the same options from the File menu almost always as buttons in the application right under the file menu and you'll find the edit menu items in the context menu.
Point is, there are plenty of ways to display these UI options to the user. They can and should be separated from their actual implementations. This would ultimately mean that the UI can be generated according to a user's personal preferences and needs (including assistive technologies or device limitations) while the actual guts of the application stays the same.
At least, I believe this is the way forward for GUIs.
[1]
[...]
Terminal Vs. GUI (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing about CLIs is that they do anything you want them to instantly, if you know what you're doing. The disadvantage to CLIs is that, unlike GUIs, they offer absolutely no prompts - in a GUI there's always words or pictures at least labelling the buttons, even if it's just "load". Another "advantage" to GUIs is that they're "safe" - anything you want to do in a GUI requires at least 2 steps, so it's nearly impossible to do something dangerous accidentally (I'm counting loading the application as a step - in a CLI you can almost always open-and-execute-command in one step). This idea has become so deeply ingrained in people regarding computers (see: Any "hacker" in a movie, general societal impressions of 1980s supergeeks, etc). Most people are actually terrified of command prompts for this very reason - although they might describe it more as "it's confusing"/"I don't know what I'm doing here"/"What if I get it wrong and break something?". Hell, I remember being terrified of "breaking windows" the first time I opened command prompt to do something innocuous (maybe it was proper DOS back in those days though..).
/y C:\* for a GUI).
This is basically why most geeks use CLIs when they can - because it's much faster and more efficient to do something you know how to do, while most newbs prefer GUIs - it's safe, easy, faster for doing multiple unrelated things at once, and they're used to it. Personally, I'm glad that there is this mindset - I'm getting a little tired of having to fix my friends' and parents' computers, I hate to think what damage they could accidentally do if they managed to get a dangerous command out in a command line (I can't imagine them accidentally deleting everything with a GUI - there's no one-step rm -rf or del
Re:Not quite what I said (Score:5, Insightful)
The full context in which I call KDE 4 a mistake is: "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was -- and whose -- is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything." In other words, all I'm saying is that it's causing a lot of controversy
Err.. no. That is not at all what you are saying. If everyone is in agreement on a point, there can be no controversy on that point. Anyway, the "everyone agrees ... " statement was the most interesting part of your article and I was displeased to see that it was just grabbed out of the blue. If the KDE core devs feel that 4.0 was a mistake, getting to know why, what they think they should have done different and what they have learned would have been very valuable to know for other developers. If distributors feel that distributing 4.0 was a mistake, then I would like to know what they will do about it? Will they be more strict about upgrading to flaky libraries?
But it is extremely uncommon for developers to admit that they have made a mistake. And I very much doubt that the KDE 4.0 guys think it was a mistake. You definitely made a mistake if you thought that an "everyone agrees" statement would slip. :)
GNOMERS and Windows fanbois..... (Score:0, Insightful)
Now is the time to pile on more complaints, FUD and disinformation against KDE4, and personal attacks against its developers!
Oh, never mind. You already are.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
"If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing"
thats probably the most stupid phrase I have heard all year. A program is worth writing if it gets a job done that you have to do more than once; and whose total time of use and time saved is less than spent writing it. Just because an action might only take a minute doesn't mean I shouldn't have a program that could do it for me in an instant. Further; easy to write for who? the person writing the app or the person using the APP?
2. what the hell is a windows app? (as applied in your usage) I'd like to laugh at an example of a clone and work-alike. If you mention a file system explorer prepare to be slapped over the head.
Along with your whole crud on great developers make great developers. blah blah... have you heard of man pages? make? automake? tools that Visual Studio have been emulating for years; heck mac development relies on unix linux tools.. what compiler do they use? oh gcc right...
The reason windows is polished is because there is a SINGLE standard for the gui's they all have to be the same they all play with the same tool kit; same with mac. Linux gui apps often have to be written to be compatible with one of several.
Furthermore linux gui's can be user customized in a variety of ways which a BASIC user will never do on mac or windows. But more importantly windows and mac both spend a large amount of time and money (more so for mac) on their uniform gui design paradigms. They have a single ethos of how each app is expected to work; linux does not. You are free to do whatever you want. And frankly I think that on a gui side kde and gnome have been on par with linux for awhile; at least since 2005. I'm not going to get into kde4.1 because i havent used it or kde4.0; but as poorly as others have retorted you haven't expressed what about the gui was lacking. what is this mythical 'polish' you speak of?
its as vague as saying "it's not good"; well what is good?
Arrogance? ironically that describes everything that makes windows and osX themselves. there is only one real api set available, and in then end one way to do things. Arrogant people are present everywhere; the OS however is not Arrogant about it which is why you are free to choose whichever gui or lack of one that you want.
which only makes your esoterism line even more pathetic.
"Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant." so basically lets throw out all knowledge and study of human computer interaction, human factors in design and principles of user interfaces.? You just made your whole post meaningless because it contradicts everything that you say.
Interface does matter. And if you don't think so and love command line so much, then uninstall X from your linux machine and go knock yourself out. Too bad you can't do that on a windows machine or a mac. Me I'm going to enjoy the combination of command line and GUI.
There are plenty of nonlinux heads who are arrogant too; lots of OS/2 nuts, windows junkies, etc floating around. They also exist in politics, you have conservatives, christian conservatives, etc. The one thing they tend to have in common is those people all seem to be members of the baby boomer generation.
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
And so does any GUI.. they all have icons, some sort of "OK" buttons, a close button, etc.
KDE 4 is probably more different then Windows then Gnome. Just because Gnome's main "bar" is on the top, doesn't make it somehow completely different than Windows. Move the bar to the bottom, and BAM, you have a Windows-looking UI.
Perfect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista is supposed to be a workstation solution ready for every day production use right now. People are considering that to be a failure in its current state as well, and you are right, these two alleged failures are similar. But one product that is at an early start (4.0 & 4.1 beta, the more mature 3.5+ still seeing a lot of active development and use due to its maturity) and the other has the promise to be mature enough to use right now. You are not forced to upgrade to KDE 4.x, but Vista is required for some of today's games and applications because they don't run in earlier versions. This is the difference.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
You mustn't actually USE any open source software, or have actually contributed to any of it.
I'm not a developer, or a programmer, and I've found that most of these guys working on these projects take a lot of pride in their work. I've sent e-mails to quite a few projects and I almost always get a very favorable response. I've submit bug reports and have had them fixed in the next release.
Where else can you get that kind of user-to-developer connection?
You seem to have a lot of anger towards open source, and you think that everyone doing it is in it for some kind of glory or something. Whatever man. Go work for some slave shop like EA and leave us alone.
Re:Open Source Developers vs Commercial Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that's something I don't care for. Those 3D effects are quite pointless, as far as I could tell. I prefer the way OSX does Exposé/Spaces/Coverflow/Dashboard... enough eye-candy to impress, but always serving a purpose and not going too over-the-top.
Also, you forgot to mention this feature: pretty much every Linux distro out there has virtual desktops, while even Vista needs some add-on for that.
Re:only mistake. (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly don't think KDE 4.0 was a mistake beyond calling it "4.0" which led a bunch of idiots to expect something "finished", and that despite the up-front warnings that it wasn't finished.
A bunch of idiots? Seriously? A release is a version that is complete with no known showstopper bugs. There is absolutely no reasonable excuse for the KDE team to have released what they had. They were nowhere near a release, and apparently still aren't. I don't think this was an eager, early release. I think this was a PR move to bring some attention back to the aging project, and the KDE team should be ashamed for deceiving the community.
We've been waiting for KDE 4 for years, and I think you're way out of line insulting people who were surprised to find that the long-awaited release was still missing many basic components.
Re:Perfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 are not meant to be perfect in every way. They are meant to establish a new scheme of APIs and a new design dynamic. It is a big overhaul that is in its beginnings. Nobody is claiming KDE
I agree. The same could have been said about Mac OS X 10.0. Give it a while to mature, and people will likely be talking about how much better it is than the pre-4.0 days.
Re:Unexplained Crashes (Score:2, Insightful)
Keep in mind that there were (and are) a lot of feature regressions which get fixed up over time. But they were not due to us designing them out, it was due to the fact that they did not get ported over in time.
That's actually what makes it so bad: the regressions aren't unintentional bugs, but anticipated shortcomings.
True. But you gotta release sometime. :-/ KDE 4 is at least sufficient for a large enough set of users that it would be unfair to have held it back until it had enough features for the larger set of users.
Re:Perfect? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've written enough software to realise that an x.0 release comes with new technology that will contain some regressions, but it's really a bad sign when the x.0 is announced as "this is really just a preview" and then the x.1 still isn't meant to be mature.
Well I suppose this is better than when people were saying that KDE claimed that 4.0 would solve world hunger but KDE did not claim that 4.0 was really just a preview: The KDE 4.0 Announcement [kde.org], although I do believe that at some point KDE released a KDE 4 tech preview.
I'm sure that posters on Planet KDE [planetkde.org] tried to warn people not to get *too* excited about KDE 4 but that would have been true of any n+1.0 release I think.
In retrospect I suppose the KDE Marketing Group could have done a better job at expressing clearly about where KDE 4.0 was going to differ from KDE 3.5 though, which probably would have stopped a lot of the confusion early.
As far as KDE 4.1 I'm obviously biased but it's mature enough for me, it feels worlds better than 4.0 (even 4.0.4). There's still KDE 3.5 features I miss and I need to get JuK to crash less still =D. But I never have time... :-/. Either way I would not claim that 4.1 is immature by any means at least.
Re:Everyone? Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's the stupidest comment I've ever seen (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista failed to achieve the goal that MS had when designing and programming it. I'm not sure how that can be anything other than a failure. The fact that they're really having to pull the plug to get people to move on and that people will likely switch directly to Win 7 if they can will prove it. And I see no evidence that that's not going to happen.
As for KDE, make it less bloated, better modularized and make the defaults include fewer programs.
I stopped using Windows because of the bloat and the unwanted features, I'm not about to start using a desktop environment that's as bad. But, really the same could be said for gnome and pretty much every desktop environment.
And for the love of god allow some alternate way of compiling the smaller applications without KDE itself. I hate having to install both the gnome and KDE libs because there's that one program which invariably requires the other set of libraries.
Re:That's the stupidest comment I've ever seen (Score:5, Insightful)
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
Re:Perfect? (Score:2, Insightful)
KDE was probably one of the higher-profile instances of an "x.0" being not-quite-ready. On the surface it seems screwy but if you looked at the discussions leading up to the release, then you knew what to expect. I think their hands were kind of tied, since it's different enough to warrant the new version number, but not quite complete. There were also the accusations of them leveraging the point release as a way to drum up interest and motivation so that 4.1 would come that much quicker. I dunno. I do know that everyone who asked for a refund got one, for the full amount
Re:only mistake. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Everyone? Why not? (Score:1, Insightful)
With KDE 4 I can customize it by customizing the source, with Vista I can't
Sure, you can... but somehow I doubt you ever will.
Re:Unexplained Crashes (Score:3, Insightful)
Just don't overdo it. Few things are as aggravating as "smart" software that isn't - and software that autoconfigures itself for the most common use case when I want to use it differently falls under that category.
In general, I like the idea of smart programs only when you can disable the "smart" logic. Otherwise you risk ending up with software like Word/OOo Writer that can't be used without sitting down and learning all about its "smart" features beforehand or risk the program "helpfully" destroying the formatting or even contents of your text.
Re:Too bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
For end-user applications, even complex technical ones like CAD systems, there's no reason at all that a UI can't be easy for a new or occasional user to navigate and simultaneously efficient and powerful for expert users.
The old "serious software for serious users" mantra is rarely anything more than excuse making by programmers who have either too much arrogance or too little skill to design a decent UI.
Re:Too bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
An ideal interface is one that a novice can just sit down to and automatically "know" how to use it.
Wrong. That makes it discoverable, perhaps even intuitive -- but it is not always desirable.
For me, the ideal interface is one which requires training on the order of no more than a few days (I won't take a month-long course in Vim) -- and, of course, it should be productive enough, and used enough, to pay for the learning curve.
So for me, the ideal file-management UI is a Unix commandline, because I'm faster there than anywhere else, and I already learned it out of curiosity.
The way people automatically "know" how to use a comb or automatically "know" how to drive a car (even if they aren't good at it).
Neither is true.
We know how to drive a car because we've ridden in cars our whole lives, and we've watched our parents do it. And there's still a dozen things you don't necessarily know -- like how to shift gears, or make a turn signal.
A comb is even moreso -- if you saw a comb, having never had it demonstrated to you before, how would you know it had anything at all to do with hair, let alone how to use it?
So, you know how to use your GUI because you learned how to use similar GUIs before. No UI would ever meet your criteria without also being similar to something the user has used before -- and given that every user is coming from a different background, there is no universal standard for "good" or "bad" UIs.
The best we could do is follow a majority vote -- which means the worth of a UI is based on how close it is to Windows.
Re:Terminal Vs. GUI (Score:3, Insightful)
What you are saying amounts to this: speaking a language is more flexible than communicating by drawing pictures. That much should be obvious. What isn't so obvious is this is what makes being able to communicate in pictures so useful in many situations. The flexibility that gives language is power is sometimes a burden, particularly when communicating about simple concrete things (or in the case of computers things that can be represented by metaphors embodied in representations of such).
If you were dropped in a country where you didn't speak the language, you'd find the ability to draw or to mime concrete things or simple metaphors extremely valuable. One of the consequences of the power of language is that it takes a long time to figure out which of the infinite variety of equally good, arbitrarily chosen constructs do what. At the other extreme, when speaking with other fluent speakers of a language, pictures are still sometimes very helpful in clearing things up, although given a choice you'd give up drawing before you gave up speaking.
Years ago, when people were seriously debating which were better, GUIs or CLIs, I used to give this counterexample to the idea that this a reasonable dichotomy to even consider. Suppose you have a folder full of files, and you want to make a copy all the ones starting with "85TAX", because that's how you named your 1985 tax documents. This is very simple to do with a CLI, but quite tedious with a GUI if there are more than a handful of them. On the other hand, suppose you didn't have the good fortune to have such a linguistic handle on the files you wanted. You just wanted to grab a dozen or so files that in your mind you knew were relevant to some task. In that case dealing with the expressive power of language is a hindrance. The simplicity of the atomic operation of shift clicking each file beats the power of language to express infinite kinds of relationships, because there is nothing manifest to exercise that power upon.