Default Ubuntu applications

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Tero Pesonen <tero at tpesonen.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 15:36 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 3:21 PM, David Sanders <dsuzukisanders at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> If good applications are the issue, then a better, or more profitable,
>> >> question in my opinion is why is Ubuntu using GNOME to begin with. New
>> >> users do not install kubuntu.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Because KDE looks like it was designed by monkeys banging on
>> > typewriters? /me ducks
>>
>> Well, I wouldn't have put it /quite/ like that, but I'd basically have to agree.
>>
>> More generally, apart from the pervading ugliness, KDE is full of
>> thousands of little options to twiddle. GNOME keeps it simple. Simple
>> is better for beginners. This is not really contentious or
>> controversial.
>
> That is true. But simple also means it is difficult, and in most cases
> impossible, to make Gnome work for you. Unless you happen to think/act
> the way gnome developers do, you are toast, so to say -- You have to
> work for Gnome. What I expect from Linux is that the computer works for
> me. When I use Gnome I always feel someone else knows better than me how
> I should work. Last time I had that feeling was when I used Windows XP
> in 2002.

I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X daily. I never feel that any of them
force me to work in any particular way. Windows Vista & 7 come
closest, hiding away actual disk drives and real folders and instead
showing me virtual "libraries" of content the system automatically
compiles. I really quite dislike that, but it is 100% possible to just
ignore it and with 1 or 2 extra mouse-clicks get through to the real
things.

What do you mean that GNOME forces you to do anything? They are all
just desktops. Icons on the desktop, a panel thing for switching apps,
some handy quick-launch icons, maybe a menu for launching them. They
are all basically the same.

> And Gnome *is* ugly.

Well, this is your opinion, and of course you are welcome to it, but I
think it says a lot that Ubuntu with GNOME is now the most-used Linux
desktop in the world, by a large margin, and that GNOME is also the
default desktop of Fedora & OpenSolaris, not to mention Mint. It is
clearly not *that* bad!

I find every KDE theme out there really unpleasant to look at with one
real exception: Red Hat 9's Bluecurve theme looked good.

I used Caldera as my main OS from about 1997 to 1999, then SuSE from
about 1999 to 2004, but I have also used Corel LinuxOS (all versions),
Xandros 1, 2 & 3, Stormix, Lindows, Linspire, Freespire, Mandrake,
Mandriva, Suse 6, 7 ,8, 9, 10 & 11, Debian, Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9,
Slackware, Vector Linux, DSL, Puppy, MEPIS, PCLinuxOS and Knoppix. And
 FreeBSD.

I think, from memory! I never got Gentoo to boot, I've never tried
Sabayon, Yoper, Arch, ZenWalk, or a few other of the bigger minority
respins.

So I think I can fairly say that I have given KDE more than a fair
try, and I've seen just about every theme for it that any commercial
vendor or mainline distributor has shipped. It was my default desktop
for years on end. 1.x was quite pleasant, I found 2.x to be cluttered,
3.x to be a mess and 4.x completely unusable.

>> Personally, I found KDE 3 to be vastly complex, bloated and quite hard
>> to fathom, with 2 web browsers, one of which was also a file manager,
>> document viewer, download handler, email viewer and who knows what
>> else.
>
> Which was/is great. I always used Konqueror for both web and quick and
> simple file management, and even for FTP. I found it refreshing after
> Windows that my desktop treated these similar data streams similarly,
> with similar UI.

Maybe for you. Not, I would argue, for a beginner, nor for someone
busy who just wants to get a job done.

> The major plus in KDE was that you could run the same session for as
> long as you wanted (a day, a month, a year) without having to log out ->
> startx. with Gnome, I now log out once a week to keep it running
> smoothly, a la Windows 98. Still, for some reason, my panel lost after a
> security-update-provoked reboot the quick menu which allowed me to log
> out, suspend, reboot etc. effortlessly, and that menu has not come back,
> nor can I make it come back. And I don't even want to start with how
> buggy some Gnome applications are.

I must take issue with this. I have been running Ubuntu since the
first version. OK, I concede, I have skipped a few; I ran 6.06 until
7.10, then 8.04 'til 9.04, for example.  I have never experienced
problems with stability, reliability or robustness. I find no
difference in reliability between KDE or GNOME. In both I have
occasionally screwed it up so much that I have had to Ctrl-Alt-F2 to a
text console and do ``telinit 6'' and a few times I've just given up,
wiped & reinstalled. On both GUIs, on various distros.

> This is why my home system still runs SUSE Linux with KDE 3.5. It just
> works. It is that good old Linux still breathing -- a stable desktop
> environment where the computer works for me. I guess that Linux is
> slowly evaporating with the need to coax Windows users as the main motif
> for building distributions now.

I'm glad you found something that works for you. For me, GNOME is now
my preferred interface; I like it better than Windows.

My personal hierarchy is this, where ">" means "is more pleasant than":

OS X > GNOME > Win2K > XP > Win7 > Vista > KDE 1.

Obsolete interfaces I liked included Windows NT 3, classic MacOS &
Acorn RISC OS. Ones I disliked were OS/2 Workplace Shell, KDE 2 & KDE
3 except the Xandros versions, which were streamlined and usable.
Xandros got rid of Konqueror and provided the Xandros File Manager and
Firefox, which for me are far more usable tools.

*All* of them have things wrong with them. Windows 3 was supremely
keyboard-controllable. Windows 95 was pretty good but not as good.
Since then, it's deteriorated with every version.

Classic MacOS was lovely but barely used the keyboard at all. OS X is
nearly as good and the Dock is handy, but not as smoothly-integrated
and polished. GNOME I really quite like, but the handling of panel
resizing and repositioning is lousy. KDE 4 is bizarre and cluttered,
KDE 3 is OK but very *very* cluttered,  and all KDE versions have a
selection of really-bad-for-the-eyes themes. Plastik is one of the
least offensive but still cheap & nasty; the Crystal icons were OK for
1996 but are laughable now. Generally the themes are full of nasty,
badly-done shading, transitions and blends that are jarring on the
eye, icons are blocky, overly-colourful, and inconsistent.

I find Konqui's vertical tabs with colour highlights visually very distracting.

Generally, too many colours and textures and blends. It is too busy,
too cluttered, too garish. I prefer a simple, plain GUI with no
textures and no blends, just subtle flat shading. Attempts at
pseudo-3D are generally ugly and distracting to me.

For example: the most beautiful GUI in the world so far, to me, is
original NeXTstep. It's all black and grey. It is soothing and
refined, pleasingly minimal, with nothing to distract the eye from the
actual text or pictures one is working on. No colours at all, which is
a good thing.

I'd like examples. I've tried to illustrate what I mean, with examples
and citations to demonstrate that I am not basing my opinions on a
5min play but on serious use. Not a brilliant job but this is just an
email, not Wikipedia!

What do you find ugly about GNOME? In what ways does it restrict or hinder you?

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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