Mon, 19 Dec 2005
Usability of modern desktops?
There has been recently a lot of noise about the desktop environment configurability versus usability. It was started by rather inflammatory Linus' message. There were lots of interesting followups, such as Jakub's blog post about remote controls, and this reply, or this suggested improvement of GNOME UI:
I recommend to read the whole thread - because the rest of Linus' messages are quite serious and insightful (unlike the first one). I can understand that news sites like Slashdot or El Reg report only the first (and the most heated) message, but - for example - this one (go read it, now!) nicely summarizes what is wrong with the current direction of GNOME development.
I think everyone of us (maybe except GNOME developers, who set up the defaults) have features, which we want to have set up differently from the defaults. I surely have a few, and even my parents wanted to do some customization of their GNOME. I am not planning to move away from GNOME now - lots of GNOME apps are perfectly OK, but I have found that they are those which are more configurable (gnome-terminal, Galeon, Sawfish, etc).
I hope I will find time to summarize the shortcomings of the current desktop environments in another post soon.