Examining the Usability of Gnome, Unity and KDE 228
gbjbaanb writes "TechRadar has gathered a few users and subjected the 3 main Linux desktops to some usability testing for both experienced users and some new to the whole concept." I'm glad to see such ongoing comparisons; they encourage cross-pollination of the best ideas. On the other hand, it's a little bit like trying to determine the "best" dessert; even the most elaborate attempts to find statistical consensus won't answer the question of what's best for any particular user.
Re:From the website that looks like this (Score:4, Informative)
The site's punishing you for using an ad blocker. I just tested Chrome with adblock, Chrome without adblock, Aurora with adblock, Aurora without adblock, IE9, Opera 11, Safari 5 with adblock, and Safari without adblock. In every case, when adblock was turned off (or not available), the page rendered correctly*. When adlbock was turned on, it rendered like a steaming pile of shit.
The remainder of your points are completely valid. Fixed-width, fixed-font size, ad-spattered, split-for-the-sake-of-page-views "design" doesn't really inspire confidence about their ability to validate usability testing. At least they don't have an always-on-top floating toolbar like so many other sites are doing. But I probably shouldn't be giving them any ideas ...
* It's worth noting that the page is still a steaming pile of shit when rendered "correctly". The only difference is that it's centered.
Re:Configurability (Score:5, Informative)
Configurability is nice, but defaults are very important. A good GUI has good defaults.
You could use GConf to configure ANY aspect of the interface, anything at all.
Not helpful to most users. And in theory you could use the source code to configure any aspect of the interface too.
1) Most people instead of making 1000 decisions to get a GUI that's 99% suitable for them, will make one decision to get a GUI that has defaults that are 80% suitable for them.
2) If you deviate too much from the defaults, you may have difficulty getting support. This may not be a problem for slashdotters but it is a problem for the rest of the world.
Re:Configurability (Score:4, Informative)
one little problem with that, smarty pants, you can't configure GNOME 3 in many cases with or without config file editing. instead, you have to write a fucking app or hire a developer to do simple things that used to be GNOME user configuration actions
Re:Configurability (Score:5, Informative)
That's kind of the route taken by KDE. It's *hugely* configurable. Want a stock ticker widget in your task bar? Fine, just unlock it and drag one in there. Want the task bar on the right side? Just drag it over. Want to make caps an additional control? It's just a checkbox in the preferences. By and large, you don't even have to use obscure registry-style editors either.
KDE 4.7 FTW.
Re:General usability should be one of the choices (Score:5, Informative)
They did fork Gnome, it's called Maté. [wikipedia.org]
Gnome? KDE? Unity? (Score:2, Informative)
Could not care less. WindowMaker is my choice. And that's the reason I don't care much about such 'usibility tests': I don't need to care. On Linux I am not stuck with good, bad, or idiotic design decisions. There are plenty of alternatives for almost everything.
Re:Determining the best turd (Score:4, Informative)
Contrast it with me having problems (on SuSe) mounting a drive last week. Yes - it recognized the drive, but "unable to mount". Yes - eventually I got it to work. But if the solution required opening a shell, calling mount command, figuring out where in command line to say "ntfs" and guessing which /dev/sd? matches the actual flash drive, then I say Linux lost already!
Oh, right. Because Windows will just oh so happily mount an ext4-formatted USB drive?
No-one who cares about interoperability would use a proprietary filesystem like NTFS on a USB drive. Or, at least, they wouldn't go whining about how no other computer can read it.
Re:Configurability (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree completely. KDE's configurability is asinine. When KDE apps run under another WM, they use their own KDE defaults like click-to-activate vs. click-to-select, double-click-to-activate. It's annoying as hell to run K3B under Gnome 2, because it does not behave like anything else on my desktop. The only reason I put up with it is that they did the best job of a burning utility I've seen since Nero, and maybe even better than Nero (note I'm talking the old "advanced" Nero tools, not the shiny crapware wrappers they install be default with the new releases.)
With the way KDE is structured on top of Qt, it should be possible for a KDE app running under Gnome to detect that fact and "import" it's settings and defaults from Gnome's environment. The reverse should also be true.
It's almost to the point of frustration that I prefer applications that just ignore any standards at all and do their own thing entirely. At least they're consistently screwed up, following their programmer's diabolical visions of UI hell imposed on the user community. :p
Heh.. KDE has a checkbox (enabled under Kubuntu, for example) to make Gnome apps behave and look more like KDE ones. I would expect that Gnome users should extend Gnome settings application to just export their settings to KDE, should not be that hard.
Btw, what really annoys me about running Gnome apps (anywhere) is the stupid file selection dialog. It's like somebodies design goal was to prevent users from accessing files, but they did it incompetently.