Restoring legacy components

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Goh Lip <g.lip at gmx.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:19:55 +0800, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> Liam Proven wrote:
>>>
>>> I know everyone bashed KDE 4.0 and everyone says it's got better -
>>> some say after 4.1, some after 4.2, some after 4.3 and so on. To be
>>> honest, I've looked at every subversion and they are all equally
>>> horrid to me. The pop-up start menu thing with tabs is just
>>> *horrible*.
>>
>> You want the old K menu style from KDE3? Right-click the K menu icon and
>> select "Switch to Classic Menu Style".
>
> Kde is very much customizable and that is what I find personally attractive.
> In every kde application, there are many short-cuts, tricks and custom
> changes etc that is surprising. When you used kde years back, did you
> noticed konqueror has mouse gestures (besides keyboard short-cuts) back
> then?

No, I didn't, but then I tried mouse gestures in Opera many years ago
- probably around 2000 or so - and I didn't like them. I don't use the
mouse as much as many people; I am a keyboard-shortcuts kind of guy.
In MS Word (and OpenOffice Writer), I turn off all the toolbars and
the ruler and even the horizontal scrollbar, for a clean, uncluttered
app. (You can't disable all of these in AbiWord, which is one reason I
don't like it much.)

> However I understand many would want the 'off the package', standard,
> good for all, don't waste my time, windows system.  So, to each his own.

True.

But I think the thing is to strike a balance - try to find something
that works well enough to keep most people happy and allow them to
change that around a bit to their taste. If you try to please everyone
and make absolutely everything customisable in every possible way,
then [1] you end up with a program with so many options and settings
it is cluttered, bewildering and confusing, and [2] because everything
is malleable, less effort goes into making the default settings right
and sensible. Why bother? Encourage the user to pick their own!

Looking at screenshots of Kubuntu 10.10, I don't like the theme much
at all. It resembles the other KDE 4.3/4/5 distros I've looked at. Too
much transparency and too many glow effects, which looks amateurish
and ugly to me. The icons on the panel look too big, so that there
isn't enough clear space around them for visual clarity. The same goes
for the tray icons - there are too many, making it cluttered, they're
not very obvious, and things like the clock are big and blocky and too
bold and overstated. The colour scheme seems to lack coordination -
there is too much spot colour, distracting the eye.

The result looks like it doesn't fit together right, like a piece of
flat-pack furniture assembled wrongly.

There's a strange fuzzy curly thing in the corner of the panel /and/
in the corner of the desktop which is not obvious in function. (OK,
from playing, I *do* know what they do, and the little pair of
scissors - but it's visual clutter. It's not necessary. WTF is with
the scissors? No other GUI in history that I'm aware of needed an
applet to manage the clipboard. *Why?*)

I am mystified as to why this does not get better with time, but it's
not. The rot set in with KDE2 and it's just got steadily worse and
worse since. Every major release brings more clutter, more ugliness,
more confusion.

I guess KDE fans might say that GNOME looks boring and drab, but I
think it's /far/ better to be a bit drab out of the box and make it
possible to spice it up than it is to be too brash and garish and
"noisy" and require users to turn it down.

Playing with KDE 4.4.4 on SUSE, there are no themes in the collection
that it comes with - on its 4.4GB DVD-ROM - that are pleasing to me.
Not one. I can't turn off all the glitter that makes it look cheap and
tacky to me; none of the themes are what I think of as restrained or
elegant.

Overall, KDE *looks* to me like it was designed by a kid of 14 and it
*feels* like it was made by geeks for geeks.

I'd rate the visual attractiveness of some 21st-century GUIs like so:

#3 Mac OS X
#4 GNOME
#5 Windows 2000
#6 Windows ME
#7 Windows 7
#8 Windows XP
#9 Windows Vista
#10 KDE

You might well ask "where are the top 2?" Well, the all-time most
attractive OS for me ever was original NeXTstep. Nothing has ever
looked so good, before or since. Classic MacOS, say 8 or 9, comes
next.

> And if you want to try out some new windows environment, the enlightenment
> package has a vastly improved e17 revision (still in beta though) and very
> much customizable too. You can continue to use ubuntu's repositories for
> your applications.

Thanks - I shall have a look. Enlightenment has been in beta /forever/
though. I wish Rasterman & co would just get on with it and finalise
it.

> Anyway, Liam, this is more than what I wanted to say, as someone put it,
> everybody has an opinion; but you're are entitled to mine.

:¬) Very good!

Well, that is why I responded at some length. I hope it's food for thought.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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