Not minimalism.

Post #105,087

6/6/03 4:17:38 AM

Not minimalism.

I'm not going to rehash the long and circular arguments that Scott and myself have had over this. Suffice to say I'm in agreement with the new philosophy, and Scott isn't.

Scott's got a set of requirements that GNOME1.4—in particular, Sawfish— met. GNOME2 no longer meets those requirements. Windowmaker doesn't meet them; KDE doesn't meet them.

In summary, GNOME2 regards adding preferences for everything as a band-aid. The right thing to do is fix the problem. A side effect of this is that many advanced preferences are stored in the GConf database, which is a pile of human-readable-ish XML files. If you want to use them, fine; but they're out of the way of J. Random User.

To get the whole skinny, read [link|http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html|this].

Post #105,098

by admin

6/6/03 8:51:45 AM

I suspect you're in agreement with them because...

... they fit the way you work. :-P

Now, if suddenly they removed something that you were used to, the story might change.

As Drew and I were talking yesterday, this whole "less is more" philosophy is nothing more than "I don't want to support so many options", and I suspect you'll find an amazing coincidence between the "sane defaults" and each project's main programmer's preferences...

Regards,

-scott anderson

"Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."

Post #105,114

by deSitter

6/6/03 11:17:19 AM

Re: Not minimalism.

I like KDE because you can run individual parts of it semi-standalone - so I can be in Blackbox and fire up Konqueror with no side issues. IOW it's as minimal or maximal as you like. And, it has a very simple programming model. It's Windows done correctly.

There are still issues in 3.1, but every release shows big improvement. ARTs is still lagging in stability.

-drl

Post #105,163

by pwhysall

6/6/03 3:32:03 PM

Ask Scott about panels.

Post #105,284

by pwhysall

6/8/03 8:08:39 AM

On another note.

KDE3.1 is much more usable than 3.0, but there are still two large bones of contention for J. Random Peter.

Firstly, the control centre is, quite frankly, on crack.

Secondly, I can't control font hinting at all. All I can choose is whether or not to use antialiasing, and whether to change the subpixel ordering from RGB to BGR and so on.

Application nits mainly centre on KMail's glacial IMAP speed and inability to create rules that work with IMAP folders.

Post #105,300

by deSitter

6/8/03 11:20:22 AM

Re: On another note.

I agree the Control Center is not that swift - but YaST is vastly improved, and qualifies as a worthwhile piece of software.

I don't understand your issue with font hinting - you can even choose vertical pixel order (my Toshiba has that) and an exclude range for AA (say, you don't want fonts below 6 points to be antialiased). Of course, for this to work, the X server has to be set to the proper DPI - the default seems to be 72 DPI and that is too low. I had hand edit the kde3 Xservers file for that.

And yes, slowness is an issue that is covered up by fast hardware. On my older Toshiba, the performance is marginal and certainly not as good as Windows. That is why I usually run fragmentary KDE - just the apps I need run from Blackbox or Windowmaker (er, GNUStep).

-drl

Post #105,302

by pwhysall

6/8/03 11:27:03 AM

Re: On another note.

I agree the Control Center is not that swift - but YaST is vastly improved, and qualifies as a worthwhile piece of software.

YaST's goodness or otherwise does not ameliorate the utter crackrock nature of the KDE control centre. There are Too Many Damn Options. No-one and I mean NO-ONE needs an option to alter the contrast of the colour scheme. Bin it.

I don't understand your issue with font hinting - you can even choose vertical pixel order (my Toshiba has that) and an exclude range for AA (say, you don't want fonts below 6 points to be antialiased). Of course, for this to work, the X server has to be set to the proper DPI - the default seems to be 72 DPI and that is too low. I had hand edit the kde3 Xservers file for that.

The GNOME2 font control panel allows you to select full, medium, slight or no hinting. You cannot do this in KDE, no way, no how. FWIW, Debian's X setup is 100 DPI by default.

And yes, slowness is an issue that is covered up by fast hardware. On my older Toshiba, the performance is marginal and certainly not as good as Windows. That is why I usually run fragmentary KDE - just the apps I need run from Blackbox or Windowmaker (er, GNUStep).

I don't much care about performance. Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB RAM, 7200RPM ATA133 disk. Everything runs well enough :)

Post #105,325

by deSitter

6/8/03 6:29:08 PM

Neener

I got a new Thinkpad by fortuitous circumstance (I "sacrificed" my old one - gave it to the new sales manager) - P4 2.2, 512 RAM, 40Gb 7200 disk. I also worry not about hardware :)

The GNOME2 thing about fine grained AA is intriguing. I may break down and install it. Dammit Peter!

-drl

Post #105,326

by pwhysall

6/8/03 6:37:10 PM

GNOME font rendering preferences (570x505px PNG image)

Here's a snapshot of the GNOME2 font rendering preferences panel:

[image|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org/pics/tech/screenies/fontprefs.png||GNOME2 Font Rendering Preferences panel||]

Note the ability to switch between None, Slight, Medium and Full.

Post #105,327

by deSitter

6/8/03 6:39:12 PM

Wow, nice

-drl

Post #105,370

by pwhysall

6/9/03 11:13:44 AM

More GNOME2 Font Goodness (273K PNG image)

Fontilus in action on a work PC:

[image|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org/pics/tech/screenies/fontilus.png||Fontilus window and font details pane||]

Fontilus is an extension to the Nautilus file manager that gives you drag and drop font management.

Yes, you can drag new fonts into that window and install them.

A minor nit I have is that the font preview panel doesn't seem to respect my desktop font hinting preferences. This is more than offset by the little bit of history that some fonts have embedded.

Post #105,372

by deSitter

6/9/03 11:27:10 AM

Question

Can you gang the toolbars? i.e. put the location window on the same bar as the menu and/or action button?

You can't with Konqueror, which is a major annoyance. IE has a big plus here from my screen-greedy perspective.

-drl

Post #105,376

by pwhysall

6/9/03 11:59:34 AM

Unfortunately not.

This is, I reckon, down to the layout-oriented design of the GTK2 toolkit.

Post #105,288

by static

6/8/03 9:11:45 AM

I can see arguments for both sides.

Being both a developer of a UIed product and a long-time user of a [link|http://www.opera.com/|very configurable web browser], I can appreciate both sides. Sometimes you just need to add another Preference, but making things Just Work should be the priority.

Reading carefully, the article you linked to seems to agree.

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

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