Yes, misleading, but rather typical of the general misunderstanding that is prevalent. But then again, what value is a kernel to the average joe? So its just easier then trying to explain how it all fits together to a non techie. ( kernel, X, desktop, etc.. )

Even with BSD where it IS the sum of its ( official ) parts, the explanation still gets messy.

This is very true. Having worked at a large software company writing developer tools, we had HIE (Human Interface Engineering) people evaluate everything with a GUI that was shipped to customers. Mind you, this was software written by and for developers so the rules were a bit relaxed but, I have never been so close to committing homicide as I was when I would get e-mails like this in my inbox:

- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be 1 pixel closer to widget foo.
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be color #111111 instead of #000000
- The splitpane between widgets foo and bar should default to 437 pixels wide and not 450 pixels wide
- The vertical scrollbar should scroll 5% slower
- The hotkey for menu item foo should be Ctrl-baz and not Ctrl-bar
Etc, etc, etc.

It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.

To summarize: Developers shouldn't be in charge of GUIs. Even if those GUIs are only intended for other developers.

There are critics and pundits on any side (Mac OS X, Linux and Windows) but of all of them, Linux has the lowest position and therefore has the shortest distance to fall. This gives Linux a unique "coming from behind" perspective and gives it a unique ability to fail without serious consequence. We all see what happens when Windows fails (Vista?) but what happens when Linux fails? Little to nothing really.

The reasons for this fact are various but it is rather undeniable. So is all the innovation bad for Linux? Nope. If there is failure, then the portion of the failure is discarded and hopefully a lesson was learned. And the value of failure is also tremendous when it comes to Linux. Linux gets the value of all failures in all three OSes if the developers involved are observant. And recovery time from failure? Almost zero in the case of Linux. People just keep on keepin' on.

It is a problem when the developers are trying to make a consumer desktop, however; last I checked, many big Linux-related projects (including both Gnome and KDE) are gunning just for that; so no, your statements are not valid here.

There are, of course, exceptions: but none of those are what this is talking about.

Just out of curiosity did you notice that the product was lacking some polish before you made the changes?

For a long time, SUSE was KDE centric, but since Novell took over they started forcing Gnome onto their SLED (Enterprise Desktop).

And no sooner had they done this than the KDE team decided to trash everything and start from scratch which set that desktop back 3 years in terms of functionality. They "pulled a Microsoft" and put look and feel years ahead of functionality.

Novell sent out this horribly broken version of KDE in their community opensuse product and destroyed their own credibility and that of KDE.

It is doubtful that Opensuse will ever regain the popularity it once had even tho it is technically superior to Ubuntu.

So at this juncture, NO DISTRO TRUSTS KDE anymore, as they have burned the distros so badly.

It will take KDE two more releases to get back to where they were with KDE 3.5, but no one will be waiting at the station by the time that happens.

See foot, shoot foot.

Honestly, I don't think that kind of UI design is all that critical. If it'd been a few steps higher up like workflow design, then I'm all with you. Like if a user wants to do this, he should [click a button/use a menu/write a command line], after which he should get a [dialog/wizard/use defaults] which should contain [basic options/all options/preview]. Often it gets so complex because geeks design it with a million things to tweak underways from A to B, when most people want the simplest straightest route. Particularly I've noticed that geeks are much better at visualizing certain kinds of results, so they understand what they're doing while others don't. Often what's needed are simple tools to show "where am I in the process?" or "what will the effect of this be?" to go from zero to hero.

No, the product seemed pleasant looking and very usable from my standpoint. After implementing the changes HIE suggested I was blown away at how great the shipping product was. In fact, that single experience probably changed the way I write GUI applications and, 10 years later, I think if I were to write a GUI application for the same company, HIE would be sending me far fewer e-mails about mundane details.

"Human Interface Engineer" sounds like a bullshit title but, if you get one that actually knows what they are talking about and you listen to them, it can drastically improve the quality of your software. I think the point of the GP was that open source software often doesn't have the level of strictness where a non-programmer can say, "No, it's not polished enough to ship". When you know that the final judge of whether your software will ship or not comes from someone that cares more about presentation/interface/usability than the technology behind it, you write your software differently.

I think the real point of the submission is that If "WE" the community want to code, volunteer to test "as I did here" [launchpad.net] and think about the whole just a little more, then we'd all be better off for it. I wish I knew how to code, and perhaps I would lend a hand. (Anyone can suggest were to start? I am a fast learner who understands scripting/html and did a little Basic in school +10 years ago.)

For some reason (maybe because I watched it last night?) this reminds me of that line in the movie The Devil Wears Prada where she laughs and Meryl Streep lays into her about fashion and how the color sweater she was wearing was decided in that room. To her it didn't matter, but it is still important, otherwise we'd all look like fools. Remember the 70's?

I kid, but consider this article (Scienticfic American, "The Sorriest Animal") [scientificamerican.com] about what separates us from other animals. Part of the article talks about self esteem and needing to feel accepted. That is why we do just about anything we do outside of survival, because on some level it is. What I do not understand is why we can't wake up as a species and think seriously about the collective and what is best for all. We could build starships in 20-30 years, IF we looked for and purposely exploited our talent and treated each other with respect. But I truly believe we must first respect ourselves in order to respect others. But how can we do that, when we do not even consider that to be accepted, we need to accept others and assist, as they will be better to do for us.

To put another way, you have to think about yourself many times. Being quote selfish can be the most unselfish thing you do at times. If you aren't there, then things are completely out of your control. It may smell of It's a Wonderful Life, but if you truly think about the influences that we all have, that you yourself has, then you may understand my point.

No, I don't think there's too much innovation... but it is in the wrong places.

Why no innovate solutions to the long-running problems that have been there for years?

For example, the the demented belief that everything should be configured by editing poorly- or un-commented text files. Or the related godawful mess that linux pretends is "documentation".

Various people in this thread have brought up a wide variety of basic functions that linux has had deep issues with for years, but that work well enough tat the dedicated few can get around.

Any linux distrobution that is being aimed at the average user, as opposed to the existing linux crowd NEEDS to focus more on the basics. Especially the under-the-hood stuff that nobody really sees when it's working right, but is a catastrophic mess for a normal user when it goes wrong.

I'll dive right in because this story popped right after I've reinstalled my main console, and I had to reinstall exactly because of my desktop getting "innovated" so much it was crippled. Maybe all these complaints of mine have already been covered elsewhere. But Linux GUI desktop developers had better get their stuff together and start thinking about how to make the GUI desktop quickly navigable for the full range of everyday work. (Not just for simple tasks, and not the new interface idea the GUI developers invent each month after a round of 'shrooms.) Between the Gnome Project's obsession with castrating its core programs' options, and KDE's obsession with making a new KDE app for every single type of application yet not being able to get its desktop and window decorations to be intuitive, I'm looking back at svgalib days with fondness. Or maybe Windows 3.1 days. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I used to have more time for this kind of involuntary "adventure" than I do now. Right-clicks and resizing task bars should not have to be treated as uncharted waters for a user at this point.

On my main console machine, I've had Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months, "upgraded" from 7.04. It was clear that 8.10 had damaged the configs unsalvagably - it still refused to mount USB drives so that the normal user could read them. I always had to remount manually on the command line. Yesterday I just wiped the whole OS off my machine (except for moving my old home directory out of the way) and installed Kubuntu 9.04 clean. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't behave like something other than a damaged system within the next couple weeks, I'm switching to Xubuntu or something - at least it resizes and moves almost anything when you click on the edge, instead of having windows do one thing, tool bars do another, the "desktop" box another. I switched away from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because I couldn't stand Gnome apps censoring any option that didn't fit an 8-year-old kid's reading level. (Fortunately Gimp and Pidgin ignored the the rules. They were hard to learn for their own reasons anyway, so what did they care? At least they could be learned though - Pidgin only played moving-target once when it switched from Gaim.) Now I'm thinking of dumping Kubuntu because there are hundreds of options somewhere, but I can't find them. Xubuntu (what little I've used it) seems to behave very politely on my dual-boot laptop.

Kubuntu 8.10 should never have happened. KDE 4.0 should never have happened. KDE 4.1 shouldn't have even happened. Plasma (KDE's new desktop interface) is too clever by half. It is extremely non-intuitive. I've dealt with Apple II Plus system monitor prompts through ProDOS with AppleWorks, through years of custom BBS menus in ANSI, then Windows 3.1 through 95, 2000, XP, and Vista, with a liberal helping full-screen DOS apps, OS/2, and old X display managers whose menus only appear when you hold down Ctrl or Alt. Yet I still can't figure out how to get the KDE 4 taskbar to form 2 rows of tasks instead of just growing enormous icons for no reason when I change the size.

Anything non-KDE inside KDE is, of course, not quite equal. Firefox has "nice" rounded GUI element emulation in Kubuntu 8.10 but hides things like window tabs under other things (like the web page) when I launch it directly from the menus - but has simpler buttons and works fine when I run it from a shell prompt inside Konsole! How come Firefox has a different skin from Konsole than directly from the KDE menus?!

P.S. while I'm ranting: Why does the KDE "Utilities" menu have an icon that looks like a console prompt, then Konsole isn't in that menu?! Konsole is hiding in System, among the control panels. And how come KDE 4 sometimes does the same thing with right click as left click? If I right-click, it's because I didn't like what the left click did and I'm looking for some other option! Argh!

...what? Microsoft put their networking on top of the display, not beneath it. Windows' display layer doesn't operate with a client/server framework as far as I understand... it's just simpler between the graphics card and display, where it really matters for desktop machines.

In fact, when has X ever surpassed Windows or Mac in the ability to actually draw windows and graphics... especially in the case of rich graphics? There's a good reason Flash will always run faster on Windows and Java FX came out on Windows and Mac long before anything X-based. Why, with the way modern X works with the DRI/Mesa GLX framework, they can never have a full GL stack because the DRM's way of handling graphics memory is flawed. They would have to rewrite the server to do what is and has been fairly simple in Windows, Mac, or BeOS in terms of direct graphics access.

I am not sure what you're talking about when you say X is "superior", but I am talking about desktop use... read: GRAPHICS. Not being a client/server/unixy mess. The average desktop user needs a fast, accurate, and consistent interface to their graphics card, not endless possibilities of socket magic that they can vomit all over the network... it's just not practical or accessible to regular users on desktop systems.

You've come full circle. Read my original comment.