[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Bryce Harrington bryce at linux-foundation.org
Thu Feb 15 11:28:18 PST 2007


On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 07:54:29AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> "ONLY being easy to use" is bad, because it means that once the initial 
> learning curve is over, maybe you know the program, but you can't actually 
> do what you WANT to do. And that's *bad*. That's *really* bad. It's 
> actually much worse than being hard to use to begin with, in many ways.
> 
> Gnome people seem to think that once you "got into it", you never want to 
> do anything more. Not true.

Hi Linus,

I also have long been a fan of KDE for many years, and also for similar
reasons - I knew I had such strong opinions about how the desktop should
work, that I wouldn't be happy with a desktop that didn't have all the
customization capabilities that KDE does.

Last year my girlfriend decided to switch to Linux, and I put Ubuntu on
it.  I figured she wouldn't care about customization as much as me, and
so since GNOME was the default for the install, I left it like that.

But then something odd happened - in using it, I found I actually sort
of liked it.  It was different than KDE, but it was clearly well thought
out, it looked polished, and it felt quite stable.  I installed it at
work, and on my laptop at home.  I did find that some things were
missing that I liked with KDE, but no real showstoppers for me.  

Today I have a mix of computers some with GNOME, and some with KDE.  In
my view they both work just fine.  I still use some KDE software like
Konqueror on the GNOME systems, and GNOME software on the KDE systems.

I should add that I do development of Gtk software (Inkscape), so
probably I should be completely biased for GNOME.  But it seems to me
that judging software based on its widgetset is sort of like judging
them based on the color of their skin.  At the end of the day what
matters is if the software gets the job done.  For example, I often
encouraged graphics arts professionals to consider a workflow involving
both Inkscape (Gtk) for design plus Scribus (Qt) for layout.  As a user,
I mostly just use screenfuls of xterms plus firefox, so the actual
desktop is just sort of background anyway.

I think most of us recognize that as open source projects, we've got
many common interests, and it is much more productive to focus on
them than our differences.

Bryce



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