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KDE GUI Software Programming IT Technology

KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation 218

Posted by CowboyNeal from the getting-together dept.
sultanoslack writes "Over at NewsForge a story just popped up on the usability experts from OpenUsability and some of the issues on working with KDE development teams, specifically the KDE PIM team. There's some interesting content on the different working styles of the two groups as well as a little bit on some of the improvements that were part of the recent KDE 3.4 release."
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KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation More

KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation

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  • That's Kooperation (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This post made with KFirstPost (TM).

  • Some KDE Screenshots from SVN TRUNK (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Compiled 12.05.2005. They are customized for my own needs and are not representative.

    Promotion as a happy KDE user. Proving that KDE is quite usable for me as is. See it as a gesture of friendly offering from my side. People interested to know how KDE from SVN TRUNK looks like can have a free peek.

    Screenshot1 [img99.echo.cx]
    Screenshot2 [img102.echo.cx]
    Screenshot3 [img99.echo.cx]
    Screenshot4 [img241.echo.cx]
    • I truly apologize for the incoherency of this, but I am a programmer and user interface designer from way back, so my posts are going to be simultaneously deeply structured and totally gnarly...

      BLEAH. Positively BLEAH. Compared to regular Windows, it's more chromey, more toyish...the equivelent of eating ballpark sushi. Honestly, after a total of 3.4 versions, can't you usability rebels possibly come up with some good ideas, or at least copy some? User Interface is like enlightenment...you have to commit me

      • Speaking of enlightenment, have you seen Enlightenment 0.17?

        Now that's new, different, powerful, and I can't wait until its done.

        Raydude
        • What's funny is that people have been saying that for YEARS.

          I used to use Enlightenment back in the day (and loved it) and even looked into helping out on the E17 effort several years ago. The problem is that they are a VERY tight nit group of developers and the way they completely throw out portions of their code (including core libraries) and refactor them at will makes it REALLY tough to get into the code.

          I am not trying to put them down in any way. They are doing awesome work... just doing it slowly
      • Are you aware of the fact that you can configure almost every aspect of KDE - including colors, icons, style? Also, KDE doesn't have its own distribution - so it is up to distro makers to change the default look to whatever they like.

        ...but I am a programmer and user interface designer Yeah, sure, and you have a degree in communication as well I assume? (BLEAH. Positively BLEAH.). (Come on mods, who modded that post interesting?)

      • I was going to say that I thought Windows wasn't particularly bad...but...you're RIGHT. BLEAH! Look at that crappy interface. You can't even tell what's supposed to go where and what button starts which program!

        There's generic icons -- lots of them -- hardly any space for the task part of the taskbar (FADING IS NOT AN EXCUSE FOR A USELESS, IF SOMEWHAT PRETTY, TASKBAR!), the weird bottom arrow for the scrollbar is confusing (I'll move my mouse to the top or use my mousewheel, thank you), and there's a bunc
        • The default taskbar looks nothing like his... he has a quicklaunch filling almost the entire thing.

          And how is KDE anything except consistent?? Practically everything is a part of the core KDE packages, and they're very well integrated. Gnome pales in comparison!

        • Those screenshots reflect a failing of open-source: their design is inconsistent, self-absorbed, cluttered, and useless.

          The screenshots do not show the default desktop, it show how this particular user has set up his desktop. So it merely shows that you can customize KDE to your exact liking. And I don't see how that is a "failing of open source".

          FWIW, my KDE-desktop looks like this [www.nbl.fi]. Quite a difference, no?

          Please: if you want to complain about KDE, do not use some heavily modified desktop as your basi

    • OMG!!! Where's your taskbar? I don't understand how people operate with so little taskbar room. I need at least 2 rows. That way you can actually see which programs are running, and don't have to resort to grouping, which hides stuff and makes it take more clicks to actually find stuff. Here is a screenshot [kibbee.ca] from my screen. Sorry, about the bad jpegness, but I do have bandwidth limitations.
      • Ageed. Oddly enough, that's very much like what my panel layout looked like when I used to use KDE. Of course, I don't have a taskbar anymore, as I'm a happy Ion user now.

        I didn't start to appreciate KDE's flexibility until I made my custom panel layout, which, as I said, was very similar to yours. There are a few differences (the biggest one being that my side panel was top-aligned, not bottom-aligned), but the basic idea is the same.
      • You have two rows too?

        Seems like it's just me but I don't like the way KDE orders the tasks when there's more than one row- from top to bottom, then only left to right.

        I prefer the windows style - left to right, then top to bottom.

        With MS Window's style when I close/remove a task, the tasks to the right do not all get shuffled vertically, only the leftmost and rightmost tasks are affected.

        With KDE, ALL tasks to the right of the removed tasks end up on a diffent row. IMO that's bad useability.

        So I submi

  • Ignore the expert behind the curtain. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:32PM (#12514202)
    "Open Usability - Mission Statement

    OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together.

    The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who want to contribute to software projects. And there are many developers who want to make their software more usable, and - as a consequence - more successful. "

    I'm going to ask because no one else will. How do you know they're usability experts? Who's doing the vetting?

  • Great! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:38PM (#12514234)
    Just wanted to share my excitement about this.

    I think it's great that the KDE Devs have no problem acknowledging that KDE could even be better if it focuses more on usability.

    Don't get me wrong, KDE is far from the usability nightmare some folks want to make it, however it certainly has issues and it certainly can use some polish. (As can probably any other environment out there for that matter)

    Now getting usability expert on board to solve these issues sure is the right way and if KDE 3.4 is anything to judge from, there are great things to come for KDE.

    Rock on!

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MemoryDragon ( 544441 )
      Every desktops has major usability problems. Apple for instance has the dreadful finder, and some UI functions are still so slow, that I constantly want to bang my head in between. And there is no clean installation tracker for programs which like to install themselves not cleanly the package way, but clutter themselves all over the system.

      KDE has the configuration console, although it has become much better with the new icon view mode which basically cleans some a major point (option clutter in the tre

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)

      by 6Yankee ( 597075 )

      it certainly can use some polish

      No way! It's unusable enough in English!

  • Nice KPilot Screenshot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lakcaj ( 811907 )
    Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't have the only screenshot on the whole kpilot page making it look like the thing barely works:

    KPilot has been reported to cause data loss

    Starting KPilot daemon ...
    Daemon status is 'not running'

    Pilot device /dev/pilot does not exist
    Trying to open /dev/pilot
    Could not open device /dev/pilot

    The thing might work great, but that screeny certainly isn't confidence instilling.

    http://pim.kde.org/components/kpilot.php [kde.org]

  • A little GNOME rant besides. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Before some people start jumping up and mention how great GNOME is and how clean everything is and that they have usability and whatever, better get a look a this screenshot [img234.echo.cx].

    As you can see, and I know GNOME people are highly interested to bash this article down to nirvana, you figure out that GNOME itself is far from perfect and needs some huge usability studies on their own.

    So comparing KDE with Windows (as some GNOME people did above) will get you nowhere. Before ranting about other Environments start l

    • Re:A little GNOME rant besides. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      News flash:

      both GNOME and KDE suck big fat balls when it comes to the user experience.

    • Re:A little GNOME rant besides. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What a worthless test of usability...

      You should take note of several things about that screenshot.

      First, EasyTAG isn't a Gnome app, it's a GTK app. It doesn't use the GStreamer framework, or GnomeVFS, or GnomeUI, or GConf, so including it is incorrect.

      Similarly for Abiword, that project has consistancy across platforms as a goal, and is also not a gnome project. It does go reasonably out of it's way to play nice with a Gnome environment, however. It should also be pointed out that the toolbar requirem
    • I can make any Desktop environment look like crap by putting thousands of icons and applets on every panel, and leaving no room for things like the actual task bar. Which should be about 2 levels high anyway, if you want to have that many windows open. Check out my screenshot [kibbee.ca]
    • Wow, GNOME really is messy when you open up 9 programs, arrange them deliberately so that their toolbars waste the maximum amount of space and cover their panels with every icon that they can find. Clearly this is incontrovertible evidence that GNOME is utterly worthless.

  • How about working together with GNOME? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mpontes ( 878663 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:43PM (#12514263)
    Am I the only one who hates the way the whole GNU/Linux community is split up? There are already few apps (with a GUI) compared to Windows applications, if the community keeps splitting up, Linux will never pose a real threat to Windows in the desktop world. Your average PC user doesn't want to have to deal with a different look-and-feel every time he boots an application, so he'll be stuck with the apps that were developed for his desktop environment. Heck, I stick with Kopete because Gaim looks so damned ugly under KDE.

    Sure, I have a lot of choices under GNU/Linux. Too bad that for every choice I make I become more and more limited.

    • I like moves and deletes that don't take several minutes showing only "flying folders", and I like the fact that such operations don't completely abort the instant they hit a permissions error. I like having a decent command shell that isn't a slow emulated hack. I like being able to drag windows around with alt-drag and resize them with alt-rightdrag. I like virtual desktops even though I rarely ever use them. I like xkill.

      I like software that doesn't suck. I don't care about threatening windows, bec
    • Am I the only one who hates the way the whole GNU/Linux community is split up?

      Unfortunately, no, you are not alone with this opinion. What you fail to see is that there developers are not droids. In other words, you can't think of them as a pool that you can shape into whatever form you like. You can't tell a GNOME developer to work for KDE because the latter has a better chance of success (as it seems now). The GNOME developer works on GNOME because that is what he wants to work on. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: competition between the two major desktop environments might be considered as a driving force behind the rapid growth of linux DEs actually.

      For instance GNOME and KDE have incompatible aims - they approach usability from different perspectives ("less is more" vs. "more and more, better organized" to put it very simply). On the other hand, standardization of low level services/components might be a good thing, and work is already in progress (albeit I have to admit it is slow) to achieve that via freedesktop.org. Also, you have to be aware of the contradiction of your post: your problem is that there is too much and too few choice at the same time. You'd prefer to use GAIM instead of kopete (you have a choice) but because you choose KDE, you have to use Kopete for a consistent look (no choice). The question you need to ask is this: what is the problem with Kopete? What I'm trying to say is that KDE's application stack becomes more and more complete. They have their own, well integrated office suite (koffice). They have kopete, music players, webbrowser, even a viable gimp replacement for average needs (have you seen krita in koffice 1.4beta? - it is absolutely fascinating!) - and so on.

      What needs to be done is to improve that application stack. So if Kopete is not fully satisfactory (you would like to use GAIM, don't you?) - than you should specify the problems. If a number of users agree with your claim - and that's the point of this article - you would be able to communicate your needs/problems to the developers, helping them improve the app you are currently 'forced' to use.

      • You seem to be arguing that real 'granular' choice will never really exist in our bi-polar DE world. If you choose KDE you will have to use Kopete and if you find Kopete unsatisfactory, the right thing is to help improve Kopete.

        This is distinctly different from Windows where, having chosen my DE (lets just call it that) I then have a *very* wide range of apps to choose from all fitting in well with the look and feel (etc) of the enviroment.

        Maybe I interpreted you wrong ...
        • No, your interpretation is right ... more or less. There are some instances where there is a single application that blends in nicely (fitting in well with the look and feel) of the environment - kopete is one of those instances. It is also a pretty good IM, so I feel that there is little or few reasons one might be clamoring for alternatives. In other instances, there are multiple applications performing the same function, the same way as there are multiple apps for certain tasks in Windows. Music players
    • if the community keeps splitting up, Linux will never pose a real threat to Windows in the desktop world.

      The trouble with this kind of assessment is that not everyone in "the community" cares if Linux poses a threat to Windows. They just want to build what they think is great software.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • My wish for KDE apps (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:49PM (#12514302)
    My wish for KDE applications, in addition to supporting all that the usability guys are doing, is to be able to re-order all icons on the menu bar. It is some what possible now, but in many cases, you fire-up your application and find that the menu bar is disorganized! Re-ordering at this moment becomes impossible! After restarting the app, re-ordering may be possible.

    I can think of MS-Office, whose menu bar icons can be re-ordered in any way wanted. When one "squeezes" or forces another menu bar to share the same area with another, this is possible with arrows indicating the availability of other items beyond the arrow.

    That's my wish.

  • /.ers, what's wrong with you? (Score:5, Informative)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:53PM (#12514328) Homepage
    Usability (intuitiveness and "just works"-ness) is precisely what's keeping Linux from being adopted by the masses.

    This is one of the best news I've heard in years.

    • You're not toe-ing the party line here!

      You really mean:

      "Microsoft's monopoly power/software patents/SCO/Darl/Anti-open source zealots are precisely what's keeping Linux from being adopted by the masses." ;)

    • Re:/.ers, what's wrong with you? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @07:11PM (#12514434)
      and before people say "but windows sucks too!", linux and the desktop environment have to be a LOT better to win people over.

      kioslaves is a major improvement. I plug a drive in, and an icon appears on the desktop. A thing I noticed randomly was if I scroll over the JuK tray icon, it skips to the next song. If I scroll over the speaker tray icon, the volume increases or decreases. When you go to rename a file, it highlights the name but not the extension because you rarely change the extension of a file. These of course are little things, but they do make a difference. There are also countless usability improvements that I can't think of right now.

      KDE has come along way since the days of 1.0 and I'm sure the pace is going to increase as more people get involved.

      So yeah, KDE is improving and at this pace, it may be a LOT better than windows. Of course that's before longhorn comes out and I'm sure a bunch of people are trying to get linux adoption up before that hype takes over.
      • Just a little tip: if you really want to see an inprovement, change juk for amarok. Nowadays its not just my favorite music player, but my favorite open source application.
        • Yeah every post that mentions JuK has somebody saying amarok is better. I've used both and I prefer juk for it's simplicity and overall feel. Nothing other than opinion really. However, since both are qt apps, they both look nice.
    • Here's what I did today. I went to CompUSA and bought a 160GB Ultra ATA Drive. I popped open my Mac G4 and installed it. Then I partitioned the drive and installed OSX. Next I installed Ubuntu. Awesome distro. First time I've ever installed Linux on any machine anywhere. First thing I noticed: the email setup was different from standard practices. Next thing I noticed: Open menus and screens left trails on the monitor. Third thing: Gimp locked and the usual keyboard combinations to force quite didn'
      • You'll find that most people who are doing programming work for free don't give a flying fuck about 'consumer behavior.'
        • IFF they want consumers to use and appreciate their work, they need to.

          Not saying they should or they shouldn't: But that attitude is why the usability on Linux is so bad.
        • Really? then why are they spending so much time on usability? What about OSS developers who do not work for free? If that attitude was really as prevalant as you claim no one other than a few geeks would use OSS and Linux would be about as widely used as BSD on the desktop. (Yes I know BSD is widely used on serves but thats a different market).
      • It doesn't even have to be standardized from one desktop to the next, other than for the basics. It only has to be standardized within a given desktop, so once the user becomes accustomed *to that desktop*, they don't get any rude behavioural surprises.

        Sortof like how I don't expect Win3.1 and Win9* to behave alike, other than in the most broadly used functions (like copy and paste, ALT-F4 to close apps, etc). But I do expect the desktop and apps *within each OS* to behave consistently, so I'm not unexpect
    • Usability is also what helped a lot the gnome project.
      Compare the different growth they had in user market share while KDE wasnt helped by usability experts and gnome was.
      Oh! Wait ....

  • Congrats (Score:4, Interesting)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:55PM (#12514337) Homepage Journal
    Hmmm... that's very nice. KDE can learn a lot from the pitfalls GNOME went through in their quest for usability. I'm thinking of the failure to provide facilities to establish communications between developers, users, and usability experts. This was one of the gripes of Eugenia not so long ago (and as much as I hate to admit it, she was right!). It seemed to me that the main problem was that usability changes was decided by fiat - spatial browsing as the default, reverse button order, and a few years ago, the file selector - there was and still is a sense that some of these are 'forced' down the users throat by developers who like to cite their HIG (yet they violate it in the next turn by frustrating user-expectations). Anyway, the sign that KDE is heading towards the right direction is the effort they put into providing a framework with the purpose of faciliating communication between users, experts and developers. What I have in mind is the bugzilla equivalent for usability suggestions/comments that the article mentions.

    The work they have done with KDE 3.4 speaks volumes about the success and the potential of these efforts. If you had problems with the 'clutter' of KDE before (I never had I might add) and haven't tried KDE 3.4... you should. And they did it without frustrating their present userbase: no features were removed, they were just reorganized. This seems to be the difference between gnome and kde approach to usability. GNOME seems to have the 'less is more' mantra, while KDE has the 'more, better organized' mantra. Both have its merits btw - I can very well imagine that GNOME's approach suits some user's taste better, so no flames please. Me, I love every feature, and those that I don't use can be easily removed (more easily than in previous KDE iterations).

    It is also interesting to see how developers had to be "converted" to cooperate with openusability folks - and it is really nice to hear that this has been a success story so far (11 KDE projects already work closely with openusability - and what's more, they enjoy it :) For instance:

    "The reports produced by OpenUsability are, according to Adam, "full of clear, concrete ideas that are well-reasoned, that have an overall vision, and that follow principles. They are also an appropriate length, without being too long or vague."

    Nice!

  • KDE Print (Score:3, Informative)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Thursday May 12, 2005 @06:57PM (#12514344)
    Is it only me who finds that KDE Print just has too many icons, buttons and configuration options? Just take a look at this: http://printing.kde.org/screenshots/ [kde.org]. Without intimately knowing the system/environment you are working at, it might be impossible to setup a printer. It happened to me once...and I am not that much of a newbie. Or is it that I am not that bright?
    • lol I find EVERYTHING in KDE has too many damn buttons... That's JMO... It's that whole "Less is more" vs "more and more"... I'm not fond of it... others have a much different take...

    • Re:KDE Print (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Darth_Burrito ( 227272 )
      I'm not a usability expert, but looking at the basic print dialogue [kde.org], I see a number of things that could be done differently. Ok, there's three main control areas on the page. The top one is labelled "Printer", the middle section can have different contents depending on which tab you are in, and the bottom area consists mostly of buttons.

      In the top area, there is a preview checkbox. Presumably this means print preview. But why is it in the printer control group? Is it previewing the printer? Why is

      • I'm not a usability expert

        Maybe not, but give yourself a little credit, you're close. You already have a big mouth of cause, but don't we all when we get onto a forum. Your ability and willingness to disguise opinions as facts is also showing great promise, with a little work it could be up to professional standards. I also see in you the ability to make it seem that your personal opinions about different things is actually well thought out and objectively reasoned design rules, this is always an impor

      • no, the basic print dialog looks like this [img157.echo.cx]

        You show the already expanded version. (And afaik it's not KDE 3.4 either. Seems like the screens are outdated)

        Most of your "problems" sounds like minor nitpicking of someone desperate to find faults or someone who has never even used the program but finds that he can't figure out a complex tool (ais, it's the advanced dialog and the printing subsystem is complex on all systems) by just looking at a screenshot. The one problem you mentioned that I can agree with

  • No matter what I say I'll get blasted per usual so here goes, sure kde "seems" more consistent & integrated than gnome but personally it seems like nothing but a windows ui hack, looks just like it dont it? I'm all for choice but after hearing so much about how crappy the win interface is what do we get in kde, same old thing. I use xfce4 exclusively and will never change. Let's hear from some programmers/designers on what constitutes a good albeit (subjective) interface help me bring my karma back to p
    • but after hearing so much about how crappy the win interface is what do we get in kde, same old thing.

      Let's think about "them" (the OSS programmers) for a second. Obviously, they're copying Windows. Obviously they are NOT producing consumer products for sale. And obviously they are NOT trying to somehow jump past Windows into the new paradigm.

      I would say that they're doing something quite different and interesting: they're purging Windows from their souls. Like when a veteran visits Io Jima. To sum

    • to paraphrase:

      "...sure xfce4 "seems" more consistent & integrated than kde but personally it seems like nothing but a Mac OS X ui hack, looks just like it dont it? I'm all for choice but after hearing so much about how crappy the Mac interface is what do we get in xfce4, same old thing. I use kde exclusively and will never change..."

      - just pointing out what has to be said: there's only so many ways to go in UI without a radical redesign of the computing world in general, and either you're going to loo
      • I haven't looked at KDE in a while, but when I've messed with linux, KDE has been my preferred desktop. Anyway... last time around, I tweaked this and twiddled that until everything worked nicely, and was rather amused to realize that my "most usable" KDE configuration looked and behaved almost exactly like Win95. This certainly wasn't intentional on my part (I'm an old DOS-head, and my WinBoxen don't look much alike, so why would I expect an unrelated OS/desktop to look or act like Windows?) but did go to
    • How exactly is KDE a "Windows UI hack"? Please provide some examples. It has a taskbar? Gnome has that as well. "Start"-menu? Again: Gnome has that as well. It has windows? All GUI's have that. So why is KDE a "Windows UI hack", whereas Gnome (for example) is not?

      What you seem to be thinking is that KDE should be different from Windows for the sole reason of being different. If it has some similarities to the way Windows works (all GUI's look more or less similar), it's automatically a bad thing. You don't
  • Here's what I did today. I went to CompUSA and bought a 160GB Ultra ATA Drive. I popped open my Mac G4 and installed it. Then I partitioned the drive and installed OSX. Next I installed Ubuntu. Awesome distro and the first time I've ever installed Linux on any machine anywhere. First thing I noticed: the email setup was different from standard practices. Next thing I noticed: Open menus and screens left trails on the monitor. Third thing: Gimp locked and the usual keyboard combinations to force quite
  • The *first* thing these teams need to do is fix bugs! I've never seen a bug-free installation of any flavor of Linux (assuming the installation works at all), and most of those bugs are GUI related. Usability should be right up there, but after bug fixes. Personally, I think that the KDE and Gnome teams should work on 1. Fixing bugs 2. Usability and THEN 3. New features. Usability isn't particulaly useful if the basics still don't work properly.
    • Don't agree. Switch usability and bugs. The whole point of building a useable app is to put usability in from the start and then take out the bugs. Putting bugs first won't get you a better app in the long run.
      Apple is a good example, their point releases fix the bugs but the apps are useable from day one.
      To get there, the priority list should be:
      1. Usability
      2. Testing
      3. Bug fixing
      4. New features

  • Gnome has better apps (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alucinor ( 849600 )
    I'm really a KDE fan, for the most part. Gnome does have its strengths, though -- like, the gnome panel is more flexible and robust, and gapplets seem a better concept than the system tray. But KDE is far more integrated and feature-rich, by light-years. However, Gnome's strength is in the apps that run on GTK: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Evolution, Beagle, OpenOffice, Eclipse, and well -- Gnome's games kick the shit out of KDE's shoddy selection. Why do developers choose to write these great apps with
    • You mentioned the games on GNOME, something I know a little about [rahga.com]... ;)

      My problem with the Qt toolkit is about TrollTech and their dual license. The GNOME platform is far more free as beer and freedom goes. KDE is restricted to either GPL applications or TrollTech licensed applications, and quite honestly, I see no reason to give TrollTech that type of control over the platform I would chose to work on...

      Fortunately, I don't even like the KDE desktop and platform in the first place, so this is a win-win i
      • So what's wrong with GPL? Seriously? And you are NOT limited to either the GPL or "TT licensed applications". You are completely free to buy a commercial license of Qt and license your apps in any way you wish! I mean, if you are planning to write commercial apps, then surely you can afford the license? If you can't afford it, may I suggest a alternative career? If you can't make enough money from your apps in order to pay for quality set of tools, then I think you are in the wrong line of business.

        In shor
        • "If you can't make enough money from your apps in order to pay for quality set of tools, then I think you are in the wrong line of business."

          How about this.... If you force people to pay money to make software based on what is touted as a free software platform, you are in the wrong line of culture.

          "Why whine about Qt/TT?"

          Because the grandparent asked for my point of view, and because there's way too many irrational KDE cheerleaders on Slashdot that take every oppritunity to protect their platform and

          • How about this.... If you force people to pay money to make software based on what is touted as a free software platform, you are in the wrong line of culture.

            I'm sorry to tell you this, but.... That's the way it works in just about ALL GPL-based software! You can't take GPL'ed software and start selling it in a way Microsoft does for example. And last time I checked, most software on Linux seems to be GPL'ed.

            Of course you are free to do as you please. Feel free to NOT use Qt (as you have done). No-one

            • "I wonder who is "irrational" here?" ....
              "Do as I say! Not as I do!". Just how hypocritical can people be?

              Hypocrite? Geez... of all the words to pick.

              Either you are stupid or forgetful. [rahga.com] I don't care which. :)
              • If your games are licenced under the GPL (like most Linux-apps are), then what's the problem with Qt? You could use it just fine.

                Yes, the word I used was "hypocritical". Reason being that people like you whined when Qt wasn't free software. And now you whine when they licensed it under the GPL, and that means that it requires you to license your code under the GPL as well. So you guys kept on insisting that Qt must be free software. But when Qt insists (through it's license) that your software must be free
                • Okay, since you explained why you used "hypocritical"....

                  The thing is, I'm not being a hypocrite. Though I've only got my name to one ChangeLog entry in Gtk+, I'm more than happy to see people use Gtk+ in non-free software. I want everyone to be able to use the toolkits and libraries I use and occassionally fix bugs on, not just the people who want to develop free software. RMS and GNU use the term "lesser" because of the non-viral freedom, but personally, I think it's far more free.

                  • I'm more than happy to see people use Gtk+ in non-free software

                    And Qt is widely used in non-free software, so I fail to see the point. It merely encourages people to write GPL'ed software, and that is a good thing in my book.

                    Starting with Qt4, it will be GPL'ed in Windows as well, so it will encourage people to write ree software for Windows as well. Again: a good thing, IMO. But you CAN still ue it for commercial apps if you so desire. But you have to pay for Qt one way or the other: either through so

    • OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird can all run using Qt. None of them was natively a GTK application, they are as much GTK as they are Qt.

      Gaim and Evolution have very good counterparts at Kopete and Kontact.

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Eclipse a Java application?
    • I have the exact opposite feeling. For years people thought that KDE had the better desktop, while Gnome had the better apps. But it seems to me that over the past few years KDE has really catched up as far as apps are concerned.

      Before, everyone used XMMS for their music. Then we got Juk and Amarok, both kick-ass apps. Gnome had Evolution for their PIM, while KDE has nothing. Then we got Kontact. CD-Burning? K3B, the best app of it's kind on Linux. Editors? Kate. Konqueror got really good really fast. Ther

  • It pays off (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @03:36AM (#12517292)
    KPDF has seen such major improvements in usability in 3.4 that I was amazed, it is one of the best if not the best PDF readers in existence currently. Adobe could learn a lesson from KPDF. I really hope they wont follow the same approach as Gnome, just dumbing everything down and leaving the users who really need features like SCP over VFS, Tabbing and Splitting in Konqueror etc.. standing in the rain. But so far it looks very good. They did not dumb anything down, but understood usability to make a better ui but leave the power functions in (which can be locked out via kiosk if needed) One of the biggest problems Gnome had, was that they went the usability for idiots way and left their main base, which mostly are power users standing in the rain, the way, we take it out you will never have it in again.
  • I don't mind if someone, anyone, everyone or noone wants KDE focusing more on usabilty issues (although my currently configured KDE desktop is the best desktop I've ever used), just please promise me something: please don't let any of the Gnome HIG people around. I don't want no more desktop4dumbs around.

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