OneAndOneIs2

Fri, Dec 22, 2006

Bursting the bubble? You're gonna need a bigger pin!

• Post categories: Omni, FOSS, Rant, In The News

I've been seeing it linked all over the place today: An OSNews piece on the demise of the Linux desktop: Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?

What a load of [Smiley]

Fair enough, Gnome isn't really going anywhere. Gnome lost its main vision when QT was open-sourced and a Free KDE alternative was no longer needed. Ever since, it's struggled to work out what it wants to be and how it wants to be it. No news there.

Let's be honest, KDE is *the* Desktop Environment: When people want to show off an eye-candy-heavy, user-friendly DE, they always haul out KDE (Compiz notwithstanding). QT is a superb toolkit, and KDE started out life with a clear vision and a determination to acheive it. It's done a damn good job of it, too.

If you haven't read about what's coming in the next major release, KDE 4, you're missing out. The new icon theme (Oxygen) alone will be worth upgrading for, to say nothing of the possibility of a really good sound system at last.

But all that's really an utter irrelevance, because as I've said before: Neither Gnome nor KDE are Linux desktops. Not really.

They try to automate everything so your computer Just Works right from the start. They try to put pretty GUI controls in place for every last piece of functionality. They have wizards and help files and you can do everything you need to Out Of The Box without having to so much as have a text editor installed.

Let's be honest, here: Can you put your hand on your heart and say that what I described in that paragraph is what you think of when you hear the word "Linux"?

DEs may be popular. DEs may be pretty. DEs may be user-friendly.

But the true Linux desktop is the WM - the lightweight window manager. FVWM2. Fluxbox. Enlightenment. Et cetera.

When I boot into Ubuntu, I have Gnome installed. Vanilla - I haven't even bothered to change the wallpaper. It works, I have no complaints.

When I boot into Gentoo, the "spiritual home" upon my PC, FVWM2 is the only WM installed. I turn on my monitor, put in my name and password, and FVWM2 is there and waiting before the screen has warmed up enough to disply an image. Neither Gnome nor KDE can do this.

In FVWM2, I can start *any* application I'm likely to want with three keystrokes. In Gnome and KDE? Hah.

In FVWM2, only the applications I want are displayed in the pager. Only the applications I want show up in the menus. Every icon in the menus is there because it is the exact, specific one I chose to use. Each menu has the specific "look" I want it to have - the rainbow-effect main menu, the Tux-sporting plain white sub-menu. The window decorations have the color scheme I want, with the buttons I want in the location I want and performing the tasks I want.

And so on and so forth. To the best of my knowledge, short of hacking the source code, there is no way to make Gnome or KDE function the way I want them to. They're highly-configurable compared to Windows, but compared to the king of customizeability, FVWM2, they're almost primitive.

The typical user of KDE on Linux wouldn't actually notice if he were switched overnight to FreeBSD or Solaris, so long as KDE was set up the same. The OS is an irrelevance, abstracted away by the DE. That's actually a good thing in many ways, but the whole point of Linux and FOSS is that you can get under the hood and tinker with the parts. Hiding everything away from the user to make it easier to use? That's what WINDOWS does! (That's why Windows users are more likely to switch if you show them a screenshot like this than they are a screenshot like this)

KDE and Gnome are, by their very nature, foreign to the spirit of FOSS that made Linux what it is today. If one of them, or even both of them, falls by the wayside, it will not kill Desktop Linux. Neither of them is a Linux desktop: They're desktops that can be run on Linux, but they're not Desktop Linux. That honor goes to the WMs: Long may they reign!

4 comments » •

4 comments

Comment from: hari [Visitor] · http://hari.literaryforums.org

I will take exception to a couple of points.

First, KDE does not *hide* any OS-specific features from the end user. Rather it's a desktop environment that provides a complete suite of applications integrated by common libraries and makes it easier for the end user to be *productive* (and not necessarily something that's user friendly).

KDE *can* also be incredibly confusing, simply because of the sheer variety of apps that are packaged with it. When I was new to Linux and KDE, I had more trouble figuring out KDE than Linux itself. In many ways, the newbie's confusion with Linux is more because of KDE than otherwise. If the new Linux user is introduced to a far less intimidating DE like XFCE or Gnome, they would learn Linux quicker, because the learning curve of KDE is absent.

To be very fair, I think many people make this mistake... KDE is not necessarily user-friendly. It is a productive environment no doubt, but it does have a learning curve and the end user needs to learn quite a bit before becoming productive with KDE and using its feature.

Sure, by *default* many distributions do try and package KDE with the "dumbest" options, but that is just one aspect of KDE. It's not just the DE by itself, but also the applications that come with it and so, learning KDE and figuring out the most productive apps is also a big challenge for the newbie.

I think experienced Linux users *will* prefer KDE because it packages a lot of very useful apps to get *work* done. I think the real reason for using KDE is not user-friendliness or anything like that but the sheer variety (and quality) of programs written for it.

23/12/06 @ 02:54

Comment from: sokuban [Visitor] · http://www.fantasyanime.com

Hmm. isn't the difference between a WM and a DE the fact that DE's add to the desktop as well? Like icons, wallpapers and right clicking? WMs are in all the DEs like xfwm, but they only handle windows, you have other things for panels and all.

At least I always thought so.

I thought that the reason for gnome was the sheer variety of programs for it. I try to have 0 gnome dependancies on my system but a few slipped in. The devil made me do it.

My desktop isn't nearly as cool as that fvwm guy's. I use xfce at the moment.

That screenshot makes me want to try fvwm, but maybe for another day. I'm really busy these days and something easier like xfce is customisable enough for me now.

23/12/06 @ 08:41

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

>First, KDE does not *hide* any OS-specific features from the end user.

Of course it does. Take the volume control: A simple slidy thing that works whether you're using ALSA (Advanced LINUX Sound Architecture) or FreeBSD's sound system: You use KDE's functionality without knowing what the underlying service is.

Are you using xorg or xfree? A KDE user doesn't need to know: He doesn't change resolution in /etc/xorg/xorg.conf, he goes Main Menu->System->Display and changes it in the nice little GUI.

Creating a hardware- and OS-agnostic platform is what DEs do. That's why things like HAL, arts, and esd exist - so a DE application doesn't need to know how to talk to the OS, it just has to talk to the DE. A KDE user with the synaptic package manager can happily switch distro or OS and have an identical experience, because KDE is all about hiding the OS.

>KDE *can* also be incredibly confusing, simply because of the sheer variety of apps that are packaged with it

True, new users will find life a lot simpler if they install KDE-base rather than the complete environment. But then, the same can be said about Gnome and even the CLI: When the full range of apps available to a modern distro is installed, navigation becomes hugely more complex. That's why Ubuntu's philosophy of "One task, one app" makes it so much simpler than a Fedora or Suse "Everything that can be crammed onto a DVD" approach.

>I think the real reason for using KDE is not user-friendliness or anything like that but the sheer variety (and quality) of programs written for it.

Not sure I follow you here: You don't need KDE installed to use the applications. I use Koffice on Gentoo, for example, which only has FVWM2. The only reason to have KDE installed is to use KDE itself.

>I think experienced Linux users *will* prefer KDE

I'm sure many will, and KDE 4 is looking very promising at attracting even more still. If they can deliver wat they're promising, it'll be a hugely impresive DE. Last I heard, even Linus himself used KDE.

But I stand by the distinction that while KDE is an excellent desktop environment that runs on Linux; that's not the same as saying it's a Linux Desktop.

It's somewhat parallel to the way that there's a huge Linux community but only a small portion of it is actually capable of developing FOSS: The minority is the most important part of the scene.

In the same way, more people use DEs like Gnome and KDE than use the light-weight WMs. But the WMs are more important than the DEs: They're where all the real functionality and customizeability are.

23/12/06 @ 09:56

Comment from: hari [Visitor] · http://hari.literaryforums.org

Well, really, I now don't follow the argument. I think we're at cross purposes.

Yes, KDE does abstract some OS-specific features, but does not "hide" them at all. You can still access OS specific features directly from the command line too (or by other non-KDE ways too).

There's a difference between "hiding" things the Microsoft way (as in registry etc. etc.) and merely "abstracting" them as KDE does. KDE obviously doesn't do the best job in "abstracting" and it does have its limitations for OS-specific tasks since it runs on a variety of Unix platforms and not just on Linux. So I think that while a few features are "abstracted" I don't think KDE really hides so much from the end user as you say.

24/12/06 @ 05:11

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