Linus Torvalds Tries KDE, Likes It So Far 289
sfcrazy writes "Linus Torvalds has never been a big fan of Gnome owing [to] its extreme simplicity. Even Gnome 3.x failed to impress the father of the Linux kernel. He has now given KDE a try after a long time. Linus using your software is double edged sword, especially if Linus doesn't like it — get ready for the harshest, yet the most honest and useful criticism. Interestingly, Linus has so far liked KDE, and for one simple reason: 'But ah, the ability to configure things. And I have wobbly windows again.' This should make KDE developers a bit happier." Evidently, Linus didn't get the message that desktop UIs for Linux don't matter any more, since he keeps acting like they do.
Yakuake (Score:5, Informative)
On the Google+ thread there are some recommendations for Yakuake [kde.org], which Linus might find useful since I'm sure he does quite a bit of work from the terminal.
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I find it easier to just keep a virtual desktop with 4 consoles open, and just switch with a hotkey.
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Why? It's fine for Quake, but a video game command console doesn't help me get work done. It's more meant for typing a quick command then dismissing to get back to your game (or work in this case). I couldn't use that as an interactive terminal emulator.
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
He likes it! Hey Linus!
He speaks for millions of others. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point. This is important because Linus is expressing an idea that millions of other Linux users are thinking. Unlike him, they don't have a large audience, so their thoughts mostly go unnoticed. But these thoughts nevertheless have a huge impact on the entire Open Source ecosystem.
More and more people are realizing that GNOME is on its way out. Alternate desktops, like KDE and XFCE, are clearly the sensible way to go these days. Unlike GNOME, they don't treat their users like rubbish. They provide an enjoyable experience, without stupid UI shenanigans. Linus has come to realize this, as have millions of other Linux users.
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mfw he hasn't ever given KDE much as a sideways glance after all these years.
Incorrect. IIRC he praised KDE over Gnome a few years ago and admitted he used KDE and disliked the direction Gnome was taking, pretty sure it was on /. I thought I must have been looking at an old post at first.
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He liked KDE 3, but when KDE 4 came out he got poxed off with it. I can't say I blame him, KDE 4 was silly when it first came out. Non configurable, awkward, bloated bullshit.
But KDE 4 has come a long way since then and is a very nice desktop (I don't use it myself, but I do have it. I tend to keep a KDE environment around for some of the apps, like K3B for example, which is my favourite burning front end, and "kpdf" now built in to "Okular"
Re:He speaks for millions of others. (Score:4, Informative)
Gnome used to be a desktop solution of Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Gnome used to be a desktop solution of Linux. But like Hurd it never really "got it".
KDE was the first but since it, at the time, was closed source Gnome was created as an alternative, even if it ended up as 2nd rate citizen, always choking in the dust.
Gnome had it its purpose up until KDE went GPL, i.e. more than 10 years ago. Now it is time to move on, with KDE or xfce.
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Gnome has become the bearded lady in the corner (Score:4, Interesting)
Gnome stopped be a point of disatisfaction for me and became a part of history about six months ago. It would take a massive reinvention and a reason from some other cause to ever get me to look at it again. Gnome has microsofted itself for me and while perhaps Wayland can help it, I doubt it. It's going down Nokia Alley on the greater stage too, becoming the bearded lady in the corner when it used to be centre stage.
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but there is the kde window sitter. amor or something like this, i cannot remember the full name.
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ah yeah, its really "amor" just like the love god.
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I thought it more interesting that he likes wobbly windows. I've seen for a long time Linux elitists deride those of us who like a little eye candy on the desktop, calling it useless and suggesting that eye candy is just for simpleton Windows or Mac users. It's kind of nice to see that someone of Linus's stature will openly say that he likes a little candy, too.
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Troll bite detected.
I agree with Linus (Score:5, Insightful)
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All the desktop UI need to start focusing on what users need, not flashy features that aren't really useful.
I'm not one to disagree, but when did a a desktop have to be boring. My onboard graphics card has been delivering wobbly windows and spinning cubes since intel i815, and anything less simply.
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... and anything less simply
... allows you to finish your posts? :)
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All the desktop UI need to start focusing on what users need, not flashy features that aren't really useful.
Wait... Linus' main point was that he liked his wobbly windows. How is that a need, and not just some stupid flashy feature?
To think that thousands of dedicated engineers worked for years on awesome high-performance graphics hardware, only to have it wasted on this.....
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At least it's not wasted on such ridiculous things as Crysis, Call of Duty, Battlefield and all the other high budget game productions out there - oh, wait... the money they make is actually why you have that nice hardware *at all*.
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It's still a little bloaty, but what isn't, honestly.
Plain X or Xmonad.
Re:Same here, and besides.. (Score:4, Informative)
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One thing I really dislike about KDE4 is the way icons flash up to a huge size when you get near them. It often hides things I want to see. It's not like it's hard to click on an icon at it's normal size.
N.B.: I do realize that this might be a positive feature on a palmtop, but I don't think it would even be useful on a tablet. I haven't yet found a way to turn it off. (And I still prefer KDE3. For that matter I also prefer Gnome2, though KDE3 was better.)
Xfce and LXDE are also reasonable choices. KD
Why not... (Score:2)
...make submissions about RMS, then? Are we waiting for HURD to ride his every sentence?
KDE is keeping the configurability torch alive (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like every other environment has decided that letting the user configure things how they want them to be is "too hard". Thus, they figure, it's better to remove every shred of choice. Because, you know, choice is hard and confusing.
KDE is one of the only environments left that doesn't treat its users like morons. It isn't a perfect piece of software, but it's one of the only remaining things that isn't after the "dumb everything down!!" mantra. The others: Windows, Gnome, Unity, OSX, IOS, Android, all seem to be chasing the other roads.
For that reason alone, I've found it worth giving them money, which you can do here: http://www.kde.org/community/donations/ - I've given them about euros 100 over the last year.
Disclaimer: I have no association with KDE except for being a user of their desktop environment.
Re:KDE is keeping the configurability torch alive (Score:5, Interesting)
KDE is one of the only environments left that doesn't treat its users like morons.
This can't be said enough. But not only that, there seems to be a fad in the other direction to be as user-hostile as possible in the name of extensibility. Dwm doesn't even have a config file, you are expected to edit the source and compile it, because a dwmrc would be "bloat." Another window manager requires you to learn haskell. GUI based configs like those found under WindowMaker are eschewed as "bloat." Well, damn, if I'm going to have to learn a whole new programming language just to change the background color, I may as well go back to twm and write a twmrc on clay tablets or write my window manager.
I don't get it. I don't understand the goals of the above. On one hand we have "the user is stupid, don't let him configure anything" and the other is "let the user configure anything, but make it artificially difficult."
KDE is a sane middle ground between the two paradigms.
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BMO
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I don't get it. I don't understand the goals of the above. On one hand we have "the user is stupid, don't let him configure anything" and the other is "let the user configure anything, but make it artificially difficult."
Never used XFCE, or Enlightenment, have you? They both put KDE to shame, on the configurability side of things, yet both have a plethora of GUI tools to make said configuration easy.
Re:KDE is keeping the configurability torch alive (Score:5, Interesting)
>Never used XFCE
I have actually. I even used it back when it was a clone of CDE.
>or Enlightenment
Enlightenment is one of those things that you wished worked, but I installed it the other day via a PPA because of the Enlightenment article here, and I couldn't even get the Debian applications menu to show up. Nor could I quit normally, I had to go to a terminal and kill X. It was worse than it was 10 years ago, when I had it as a window manager with the waves plugin to "impress" passers-by.
> They both put KDE to shame\
No they don't. Neither has kioslaves and neither has dolphin or konqueror. Those two reasons alone are enough to use KDE.
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BMO
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Thus, they figure, it's better to remove every shred of choice. Because, you know, choice is hard and confusing.
People continue to repeat this reasoning, attributed to various developers, but that doesn't make it true. The guiding thought is not that users cannot make choices. It is that every option MULTIPLIES code complexity. Options tend to interact with other options, and testing is required to verify that all options work together, or that the system provides a means of preventing options that don't from being used together. The drive to simplify interfaces is intended to reduce the number of bugs present in
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How do you explain that gnome is actually more configurable than it presents itself? There are vastly more options in the gconf database than in the GUI. By your logic, these shouldn't exist.
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A lot of the libraries are actually loaded dynamically for certain tasks, so they never show up in ldd. But they are surely used. I'd wager that just viewing an HTML mail with an embedded image in kmail uses more of those plugins than you would believe. The beauty of it isn't that KDE apps have lots of features. It's in the fact that most of the features are in a shared framework, which ideally isn't even loaded into memory once per running program.
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... which ideally is loaded into memory only once, even for multiple programs. Sorry, posted too early.
Re:KDE is keeping the configurability torch alive (Score:4, Insightful)
i havent used/tried KDE in over a decade, mostly because all its apps are tied to kde base packages; which is/was hundreds of extra Mb more than should be needed.
In an age where the smallest hard drives you can get new are hundreds of gigabytes and even the smallest SSDs you can get new are dozens of gigabytes, what's a few hundred megabytes?
GNOME 3: the most disastrous OSS project ever. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we can all finally admit that GNOME 3 has become the most significant OSS project disaster to have ever occurred. It has been worse than the XFree86 licensing debacle. It is much worse than pre-EGCS GCC strife, or the Perl 6 inaction.
Never before have we seen an open source project drive away some of its most valuable users (including Linus) so quickly and so efficiently. It's like everything that possibly could have gone wrong with GNOME 3 did go excruciatingly wrong.
The user experience is absolutely terrible. GNOME Shell is universally hated. And even now, 1.5 years since GNOME 3 was first released, it isn't getting any better. In fact, it may be getting worse, as many developers and potential developers are now repulsed by it, and want nothing to do with it.
The rest of us who lead or are otherwise involved with OSS projects can learn a lot from the GNOME 3 disaster. They've made it very obvious what not to do. First of all, do not buy into hype. The hype around tablets, which are now obviously an outgoing fad, is the force behind many of the horrible UI decisions that were made. Second, don't be afraid to reject stupid UI ideas coming from failed "web designers". Third, at least have the courtesy of listening to what existing users are saying about your application or system. Fourth, don't shit down the throats of your existing users.
There absolutely no need for a GNOME 3-style debacle to take place. It can be easily avoided by just thinking a little bit, and acting sensibly. It worked well for KDE, XFCE, and the multitude of other open source desktop environment projects that are out there.
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I think we can all finally admit that GNOME 3 has become the most significant OSS project disaster to have ever occurred.
Here is the thing Gnome 3 Apps are still great, and I'm currently I'm using cinnamon with which I'm sure you are aware is just Gnome 3 with a more sensible Desktop. They are looking to be making good and bad choices with nautilus too, renaming it files wasn't one of them.
Its Gnome Shell and nothing else.
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The problem for me is that Unity uses Gnome Shell. I am working on a java app which I start from a terminal. When the app starts, the gnome shell puts it in a different workspace from the shell. I debug by watching the UI and the terminal at the same time. Needless to say this pisses me off greatly. All I want is an option in unity to turn workspaces off completely. Compared to workspaces in (say) fvwm they are completely useless anyway.
Re:GNOME 3: the most disastrous OSS project ever. (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME Shell is universally hated.
No, it isn't. I have a number of non-tech friends (and my mom) who use Fedora with GNOME Shell. I use Fedora with GNOME Shell. I know a fairly large number of GNU/Linux users, and very few of them actually hate GNOME Shell. Not none, but few. For my part, I think notifications aren't very good, but otherwise the system does what it's supposed to. It stays out of my way. It isn't distracting and it uses minimal screen space. I like those things quite a lot.
KDE looks like ass (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the functionality of KDE, and I like the configurability, but it looks terrible. Nothing quite "fits". All the buttons look like they aren't placed/sized *quite* correctly, and the button labels look like they are just a *little* off-center.
Basically, all of the window decorations/elements aren't sized right. Still. That is apparently the "KDE look", but I can't stand it. And yes, I've tried to tweak it to my liking, but it's impossible.
By contrast, Gnome and Unity are very well put together. They look nice and clean.
Re:KDE looks like ass (Score:5, Interesting)
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the default theme is just a bad choice. That's nothing new, there were many releases with bad default themes.
Oxygen window decorations are just ugly. Keramik widgets are just awful.
But you CAN configure it to look nice. Try using Plastik widgets, maybe with Plastik or even Keramik window decorations. Just start by configuring the look and feel, then continue with the behaviour, step by step, change one thing when its annoying you, keep it, if you like it.
In the end you get a nice desktop.
That's what gnome i
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I've always had this feeling about KDE, since the KDE 2 days. It's so hard to quantify exactly what is off about the interface, or what is wrong. It is a matter of spacing. Maybe it's also that the fonts are the wrong size (always too large, too heavy, or too small), especially when displaying next to a Gnome app. I have the GTK theme on for my Qt and KDE apps, but it still just isn't there. I don't think it's a Qt problem because I've used Qt apps on Windows and they look just fine, spacing wise.
Reall
"looks a bit too cartoony"...."annoys the hell"... (Score:5, Insightful)
more accurate to say he liked the ability to configure every little thing, but has many gripes too about overall look & feel and defaults
I'd say his post overall is why many people still go to things like xfce4, mate, cinnamon, LXDE, etc.
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more accurate to say he liked the ability to configure every little thing, but has many gripes too about overall look & feel and defaults
I'd say his post overall is why many people still go to things like xfce4, mate, cinnamon, LXDE, etc.
IIRC Linus switched *from* XFCE.
Re:"looks a bit too cartoony"...."annoys the hell" (Score:5, Informative)
switched? No, he is USING xfce. he posts "I'm trying out KDE after a long absense." that's called "giving it a whirl".
Me too (Score:3)
I agree with Linus, I'm back to KDE after the Gnome2 to Gnome3 transisiton. While the default KDE settings may not be optimal, some distros (such as Mint) have chosen more sane defaults for THEIR implementation of KDE. I'd suggest that Linus try Mint 13 KDE, but since he probably knows how to tweak things to his liking he can use any distro he likes. I've also tried Kubuntu, but Mint is closer to my desired configuration out of the box.
Quality Assurance (Score:3)
Harshest, yet most honest, useful... (Score:2)
Linus using your software is double edged sword, especially if Linus doesn't like it — get ready for the harshest, yet the most honest and useful criticism.
Smooch Linus' ass much 'sfcrazy' ?
Can somebody care to explain? (Score:2)
In other news (Score:2)
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
KDE developers, just don't screw it up! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear KDE developers, please learn the lesson from Unity and Gnome 3 (and Windows 8). You will win, and win big, if you don't screw up. Keep your desktop environment the same and let people use it to get their work done. Don't change paradigms or get user interface designers involved. Just provide what you're already providing without radical changes. People are migrating off of these broken, unusable environments en masse.
Re:KDE developers, just don't screw it up! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think what KDE has really done right is branch their various paradigms into separate, connected projects. There's KDE's regular desktop environment and there is the Active environment and.... What's the other one? Netbook? Anyway, they realize different devices require different approaches and have kept each sub-project separate, but using the same stable base. I think that is really a good way to go. GNOME, Unity and Win8 are all trying to make every device use the same interface and the result is a watered down desktop that works okay in most places, but doesn't excel anywhere.
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That's what the change into KDE 4 was all about. They added a layer that makes it possible to fork the interface without forking most of the code, gaining the flexibility required for creating all those projects.
Do you remember when they were promissing that KDE 4 would be set for the future (before the release of 4.0)? That was what they were talking about.
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And I guess that there are enough incompatibilities that it wouldn't have made sense to call it KDE3.99.01, which would have warned people.
Perhaps just calling it 4.0 alpha 1, alpha 2, etc., would have been the best approach. The numbering had to be changed to 4, though, based on the standard development library numbering conventions -- major numbers change when forward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the old lib cease working with the new lib; minor numbers change when backward compatibility is broken, meaning that apps compiled against the new lib won't work with the old one. Sub-minor changes are expected to be
Should ask Lady Gaga too (Score:3)
article a wrapper for G+? (Score:2)
Are we looking for developers or for mass adoption (Score:3)
Re:Grammer... (Score:5, Funny)
First sentence is fail...
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Grammar:
The first sentence is a fail.
See me after class.
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Re:Grammer... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry for you, The Urban Dictionary is actually available free online.
Re:Grammer... (Score:5, Funny)
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I wonder whether anyone else will actually get your joke?
Is that a question or a statement?
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Spelling... (Score:3)
Comment the subject fail is.
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Re:Just who is Brian Proffitt? (Score:4, Funny)
2. ?
3. Proffitt
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He's the owner/editor of LinuxToday e-zine
http://www.linuxtoday.com/ [linuxtoday.com]
They've been around since about as long as slashdot.
.
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I respect Linus in his kernel development effort. But why should I give a rats ass about his view on a UI. He is a kernel guy not a GUI expert. It is like careing what the latest tv star likes on her pizza.
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Evidently, Linus didn't get the message that desktop UIs for Linux don't matter any more, since he keeps acting like they do.
How far and fast this site has fallen that they mock their creator
Re:Our Dear Leader Is Happy Today (Score:4, Funny)
You are speaking of a pagan religion. Those of us with the True Faith have received our OpenBSD 5.2 CDs and T-Shirt in the mail, and give thanks to our Lord Theo, even though he's a total prick.
Bullshit. This is very important and relevant. (Score:2, Interesting)
People need to know just how fucking horrible GNOME 3 is. People also need to know that there are alternatives. KDE is a good once, as Linus is finding out.
I think the revolution happening within the open source desktop environment space is massive news, and very worthy of Slashdot. Within the past year, we've seen GNOME go from being the most widely-used open source desktop to being utterly disgraced. Users are flocking to KDE, Xfce and other environments very rapidly.
It's not often that we see such a sign
Re:Bullshit. This is very important and relevant. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not that hard, they only need to add an option to filter the news by tags.
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It would absolutely matter. Look at what happened with FreeBSD over the past ten years; it went from being the backbone of the internet (Juniper, Yahoo, Hotmail, Netcraft all used it) to a has-been operating system that can't even properly suspend/hibernate and doesn't support video cards newer than 2007. What was the culprit? Apple bought out the development team, either through direct-hires, or by graciously dropping MacBook Pros their way. The result: a core OS development team that primarily inter
Neat troll, here's what's really up (Score:5, Insightful)
That was a neat troll! You did a very good job with the BSD is dying, even throwing in references to Netcraft for confirmation.
But I figured that -- you know, since people might otherwise make the mistake of believing you -- that we should clear up a few things:
1) FreeBSD is less widely used in some areas now not because it sucks more, but because Linux sucks less. Linux getting better is a good thing for all of us (BSD and Linux users alike.) And FreeBSD has never (AFAIK) been about a mad dash to get as much marketshare as possible -- so who cares how many machines it's installed on?
2) FreeBSD is workstation/server oriented. Suspend/hibernate support isn't crucial for these machines. Sorry. It's just not a high priority. FreeBSD doesn't prioritize supporting laptops, and AFAIK and as far as I've been using it (10+ years) never has. OSs have their specialties: FreeBSD is good on things like a high-end file server, Linux is a better choice for laptops. That's all there is to it, mate.
3) Interesting theory about Apple. They must be stingy though: I, and others, are still waiting for my MacBook! Perhaps we should e-mail Tim! What you were referencing is that Apple did exactly the sort of thing that RedHat's done: hired developers of a project to improve the aspects of the project that are important to them. Most of Apple's contributions have even made it back into the OSS world, despite the BSD license not forcing them to. (Take a look at Grand Central Dispatch sometime.)
4) We in the FreeBSD world don't see binary blobs as the great Satan that must be destroyed. Sorry. In fact, part of the reason that we spend so much time providing stable interfaces and working on backwards compatibility is it makes it less like that we'll alienate companies that might otherwise help us. NVIDIA's a good example. So they don't provide an open source driver. And? So what? They ship drivers that work, and they support new hardware very quickly.
5) HAL was deprecated in the Linux world because udev, DeviceKit, etc. looked sexier. FreeBSD uses HAL because it works, is well-documented, well-tested, and now well-understood. Sorry that we haven't adopted the API flavor-of-the-week, but the game's not always played that way.
I'm pleased that you like Linux. By all means, use it. Diversity is good. I'll continue to make sure that the software I write is portable to both the BSDs and Linux. But please don't try to spread FUD about other OSs, no matter how satisfying it may be to build yourself up by knocking others down.
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Servers schmervers. I keep all my data in the cloud, that's where it's at.
Get with the program, daddy-o.
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In the wise words of Joe Biden, "I'm sorry, but that's a bunch of malarkey." I've got PC-BSD running on desktop hardware only a year or two old (Intel integrated video chip, if you care: it's an AOPEN PC I bought a system76.com), and every useful internet-facing server I've built since 2008 is running FreeBSD flawlessly. You are conflating desktop systems and servers, and my servers need neither KMS, suspend/hibernate, or HAL. FreeBSD has been perfect for what they do.
I'm not a developer, so couldn't tel
Re:Linus's preferences are irrelevant. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Configuring/tweaking (Score:5, Interesting)
It is because many IT-types got into computers because they couldn't stop messing with the settings. Tweaking a computer to (personal) perfection is something many Slashdot-readers can relate to.
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Or at least tweaking it to the point where it does what you want how you want it. Then it can go untouched forever.
As for gnome/kde:
apt-get install e17 ecomp
(oh look, wobbly windows:)
I mention above bec enlightenment_remote is/was the one best feature gnome/kde lacks.
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But in the end I agree, it's easier just to upgrade or switch seldomly, then give up a re-learn the habits.
Re:Configuring/tweaking (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Configuring/tweaking (Score:5, Interesting)
If you rent a ready-furnished flat, you don't move any piece of furniture? If I use a workbench for a longer time, I arrange the tools for my convenient use. Doing otherwise, accepting a choice of someone who knows nothing about me and my work, would be insane. All people are different so elevate "one size fits all" to a dogma like gnome is doing amounts to ignoring reality.
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I guess I would say in answer; this is the tool I use 6 to 8 hours a day. It really should work the way I want it to do so. I don't need to cycle between windows in general, I need to be able to cycle between two very specific applications; that does not mean I don't want my mail client open, just that I go to the dock when I want it for example.
Now yes If you are spending a great deal of time customizing around your applications that exist purely for entertainment in the first place fine, that might be m
Re:Configuring/tweaking (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's more that developers can't stop futzing around with it. Unlike many things were you can run a benchmark, how people like to organize things is largely a matter of habit. For example I like the "Windows" style of single-click to select, double-click to open/launch. It drives me nuts if I have to work on a single-click to open/launch system because I keep doing lots of things I didn't mean to do. It's one of those "I don't care if DVORAK is in theory 1% better than QWERTY, give me what I'm used to" situations. It drives me crazy every time someone wants to reinvent the start menu or file dialog or whatever, the old one worked just fine. Maybe it's 50% old fart who won't try anything new, but it's also 50% don't break what works perfectly good enough.
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It's about optimizing your workflow. Make the applications you actually use accessible through the hotkeys that make sense to you. Use the focus model that you have to think about the least. Force file dialogs to "detailed" as one dimensional lists are quicker to look through than 2d tables.
Try building a desktop yourself sometime. Start with a bare bones window manager and try doing some work. Every time you think you need a feature, add it yourself in the most convenient possible way for you. The ti
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The reason configurability matters so much isn't that we want to change a million pointless bits of eyecandy.
It's because there are certain features we want that not everyone else does.
Simple example: When I Alt-Tab to a different window, I *require* my mouse pointer to be moved to that window as well. This is a feature whose absence drives me *nuts* - It's literally a deal-breaker for me not to have this feature available.
Other people hate their mouse being moved by a keyboard shortcut. I can understand th
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Re:What people say... (Score:5, Funny)
Is not always correct.
"People" keep saying Google+ is a ghost town.
"People" keep saying Linus is doomed on the UI.
"People" kept saying Linux was too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room
Common for all is that they were mostly wrong.
I think you made a very common confusion. People say Linux is doomed on the UI, and that Linus is too hard to use and would never make it outside the server room.
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Same here. I helped get KDE 1.2 running on Solaris in order to replace their horrible CDE desktop (I added Solaris support to ARTS and fixed numerous issues). I stayed with KDE 3.x for quite a while until KDE 4.x was mature though.