Re: Running KDE or Gnome? <ebqucb$26g$1@nemesis.news.tpi.pl> <ygahd0eo197.fsf@panther.akutech-local.de> <ac0ba$44e1c53a$404a99a1$2290@news.news-service.com> <688af$44e1d94d$404a99a1$3900@news.news-service.com>
- From: Robert Heller <heller@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 18:42:55 +0200
At Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:57:38 -0400 Kevin Walzer <kw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Do dedicated users of X11 (Linux/Unix/whatever) simply have a greater
tolerance for the kind of interface inconsistency that we are seeing
here? Unless you target a specific DE (i.e. KDE or Gnome), it just seems
impossible, from a developer standpoint, to deliver a consistent user
experience on X11.
The usually way this is handled is to let the user handle it, usually
with a user preference. It is really that simple. And this is
entirely cross-platform as well. It may be that MS-Windows and MacOS
people will never have to mess with some par titular application
preferences, since both seem to have a system-wide setting for certain
preferences as part of their operating system's GUI sub-system. The
only real difference is where the preference DB is managed -- system
level or application level. This is generally the way things are under
UNIX/Linux. For the most part *user* preferences are handled by the
individual applications and each application does whatever it needs to
do. So things are really simple from a developer point of view. You
create a preference for each of these sorts of things, eg theme,
browser, text editor, image viewer, whatever. At build time you create
some reasonable default value, which is used in the absence of a user
setting. Or maybe you don't have a default and ask the user the first
time it is needed or generate a warning that the preference needs to be
set to use the feature or function that needs it. Generally, this an
excellent use of the option database (man n option).
The whole idea of a 'unified desktop environment' as something
'delivered on high', was one of the not really so good ideas of the
people at Apple and (mindlessly) copied by the people at Microsoft (and
more recently in the Linux world with GNome and KDE -- both of which I
find to be excessive in terms of bloat and eye candy). It is one thing
to talk about basic interface standards (like what menus and menu
items), it is something else to make everything have some 'theme' and
piling extraneous 'junk' on the desktop and all sorts of auto-magical
things (I hate it when I dealing with someone's machine remotely or via
a different console and the desktop grabs the CD-ROM drive and mounts
the CD I might have stuck in their drive and I have to 'fight' the
system for use of the CD.)
--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software -- Linux Installation and Administration
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Web Hosting, with CGI and Database
heller@xxxxxxxxxxxx -- Contract Programming: C/C++, Tcl/Tk
.
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