Via the WebWord mailing list, I discovered the article “Bringing KDE Closer to Joe User’s Desktop”. It offers many suggestions on improving KDE’s UI, and I found it to be fascinating. For instance:
As for the “Configure Desktop...” itself, it should have been called “Desktop Properties” or “Desktop Settings”. “Configure” is a verb. Configure implies that the user knows how to “configure” something. Believe me, for a Unix newcomer, “configure” is a dreadful verb. It is a scary command. It might sound funny to you, but never underestimate the psychology of the user. UI is all about psychology. It is all about shapes, colors, pictures, words... Picking the right elements each time is the right way of creating a comfortable desktop environment. […]
It reminds me in some ways of this usability report on GNOME by the Sun GNOME Human Computer Interaction staff. And, man, Linux sure is pretty. I’ll have to give that another try once I have lesser things to worry about.
Ugh…another person who wants Linux to look and feel link Windows. Actually – at this point, I haven’t found anything that I actually like the look and feel of. Even looking at that fancy screenshot of KDE3 (and seeing how much it’s made-up to resemble the screenshot of MACOS-X that I was looking at this morning) I cringe – being reminded of the pain and horror I suffered at the hands of KDE in the past. What a DOG!
About the only desktop environment that I remember fondly is SGI IRIX’s default window manager/desktop UI. Things looked SO cool. Now, granted, this was my very first UNIX box that I logged into by any means other than ‘telnet’ from my 9600 baud modem, but it was fucking cool! I even remember the ‘Dumpster’. :)
Alas – I’m now relegated to tweaking IceWM incessantly to make it as mouse-friendly as I’ve been wanting lately. It does most stuff I want, but one thing I can’t stand (and this seems to be true of most window managers) is the window placement policies (or lack-thereof). I finally disassemble by Xinerama dual-head display and went back to a single monitor because of all the time I spent moving windows that pop up right in the center of my logical display and get split between my 2 monitors.
Anyway – I wanna try MacOS X. It looks nice but I wanna see how it really drives. I’m sick of half-assed UI’s in UNIX. Sure – I often just use X so I can bring up 6 xterms on my screen – but sometimes I want more. Is that so much to ask?