Which GUI?

For the purposes of discussion, I am lumping the desktop manager in to the general catagory of "The GUI".

.........

First GUI zealot: "The Task bar should be at the top! And it should be a neutral color"

Second GUI zealot: "No! You're a dummy! It should be at the bottom, and hot pink!"

Third GZ: "That is so last year. All the cool kids put the task bar on the side. And it is translucent and has a sort of inner glow."

Forth GZ: "It does not matter where they are or what color, as long as you can choose where they go, and the desktop manager doesn't force you into one paradigm or the other."

Fifth GZ: "NO! We have to be standard about these things or no one will be able to write any doc about how to use it!"

Forth GZ: "If we don't allow the user interface to evolve, we'll never get any innovation! Lack of change is the same thing as death. You want Apple and Google to beat us to everything?"

Third GZ: "What she said. But with Inner Glow (TM)."

First GZ: "If we change anything, everyone that was using our last release will hate us and run to other places! We'll be alone and bereft!"

Second GZ: "We have to change everything, or we'll be viewed as sticks in the mud, unadaptable, caught in the past, and everyone will run to other places. We'll be alone and bereft!"

Fifth GZ: "If we don't have standards, no one will be able to figure out how to use it!"

Third GZ: "If we don't use the cool standards, everyone will think we are so yesterday. They'll go to where the other cool kids hang out. We'll be alone and bereft!"

Another person at the table (who is just tired, and is doodling on a piece of paper): "I don't care. Just tell me how to use it and leave me alone. If it turns out I can't use it, whatever! I can't use anyone elses either. I hate computers anyway. All you people and your laptops and your PDA's and your handhelds... get a life. Whens Lunch?"

....

Those people might have a few issues outside the GUI to resolve. Scott Isensee needs to be running that meeting.

Four and Five above both have points of course. I was in a usability study for some new BMC software a number of years back, and I kept poking at the unfamiliar screens trying to make the software do what I thought it should do, and afterwords when we talked about it for the debrief, it was always things like: "Why were you looking under that menu/option for the thing you were trying to do?" and the answer was either "Well, that was just where is seemed it should be (intuition), or that is where every other product like this I have ever used puts it.(rote learning)". Intuition is based in this case on experience, and there was some emotion when things didn't work the way I thought they should too. It is hard to separate technical from emotional.

Gnome and / or KDE

KDE or Gnome, the two biggies. I have no more idea about how many people use either than I have how many total Linux systems there are currently in use today. My WAG on that is back in "Linux Inflection Point ". I am pretty sure no one really knows directly. We all seem to agree these are the big two though. Even though Linux has more than a dozen GUI's available. No even counting themes.

Untestable assertion: The big two classical choices seem to align such that technical people prefer Gnome, whereas ease of use or less experienced people go for KDE. I do not mean this is a hard a fast rule. It is at best a tendency. And this is not a scientific study: just my personal observation of the way it seems to line up.

The interface I normally use is KDE, and I am moderately technical. Already I am breaking my own observed behavioral 'rule'. I get along in Gnome just fine, but at the end of the day I appear to prefer KDE. I do not 100% know why. I think it might be the colors though. And the icons. And the way Konqueror works as a file manager.

Emotions and Reason: Kirk and Spock

The technical part of me wants to say that all I really need is simple clear concise information, cleanly presented without a lot of decorations, so my PDA for example has a black and white screen. My PDA is a Sony SJ20. I went with it because it has a 320x320 screen, and being a rational purchase, I did without the more expensive color screen of the next model up. My wife got that one... wow does hers look better. Now I'm thinking I might get the Treo 700p or its successor someday soon, just to get to a color PDA, and reduce the things I carry around. And it has to be a 'P', not a 'W', since I need to sync it to Linux and OS.X.

The rational purchase...

I must also digress and say my MacBook was in part an emotional purchase. I could have assembled, out of parts off eBay, a Linux laptop. Or I could have caught a back to school laptop sale like I did for the HP a while back (now off at college with my son, running MS Windows...) and spent a great deal less. But... even when the Mac is off it looks so cool that I do not regret the pile of money I spent on it. In the end it was no more than any one elses high end laptop (I rationalized: I am of course a rational person 8)  ) And I wanted the backlit keyboard. That has been amazing. College? Bah. Let the kids get scholarships... :). I point this out to say that the GUI choice on Linux is no doubt the same kind of thing: An emotional response and / or a rational set of choices.

No accounting for taste

The wild card is that there is also just no accounting for taste. My wife often holds up bits of jewelry or china or wallpaper, and says "Isn't this beautiful?" And I have to think about my response very carefully because... well... it's often not beautiful (And this it is the key part) to me. I'll hold up a different thing, say "Now this is beautiful" and she'll pause a sec before she responds. I know she is thinking "That boy's taste is in his mouth" but she'll say "Well... it's kinda ... plain.". Therein lies that thing called taste: I like simple and call it elegant. She likes complex and I call it crusty. Don't get me started about the Rose Chintz....

What rules preferences?

Wondering what drove others preferences, I asked a few other folks I knew, all very technical: more so than I. And they preferred Gnome, although one said that they had not even tried KDE so they did not know if they would like it or not. And one of the reasons that they liked Gnome is that they keyboard shortcuts they liked to use in MS Windows worked in Gnome the same way: That was something I did not know. I have used KDE so long that I don't really know the keyboard short cuts of MS Windows or Gnome all that well, other than cntrl-C, V, and X of course. Quick aside here: The Gnome user in question is a Java programmer, one of the best technical guys I know, and one of the reasons he switched to Linux was that his builds ran literally ten times faster there. Wow...

It is a hard fact to miss that the Distros oriented towards ease of use for the consumer: Distros like Linspire/Freespire, and Xandros, are KDE based.

My working theory then again is this: Gnome leans towards being a rational choice and KDE more towards being an emotional one. Xandros and Linspire both had things out after MS announced they were really truly killing Win98 this time. Really. Honest. If you were to decide that meant you were free to look at other OS's, it would be but a baby step from Win98 (or NT4, or 2000, or XP) to either of those Distros. The main difference would be that much newer hardware would suddenly be supported. But that it rational. Their point was an emotional appeal: Come here, we want you, and it already looks like what you know and love.

But what about ease of use? Gnome isn't that hard to use these days, but KDE looks more (to me) like MS Windows 98's old desktop or XP in 'classical' mode, albeit with nicer colors, smoother fonts, and tons of other tweaks and updates. But it is not hard to see how someone coming from an MS Windows desktop that did not use the keyboard shortcuts, just the mouse, might feel very at home in KDE. And for all I know, much of the keyboard works the same too. Humm... Yep. I type a 'a', I get an 'a' there on the screen... :)

Testing the right brain / left brain theory

I decided to test that theory. See if Gnome tickled my rational side. See if I could adapt to Gnome better than I have. See if my rational self could overrule my emotional self.

When I was debugging the gmail issue (noted in may last post) one of the things I tried was loading up Gnome 2.14 under FC5. I have actually stayed on it for a couple of days now. There a zillion cool applets here. I love the sensor readouts on the T41. Eight monitored temperature zones! I can use Gkrellm to see them under KDE, but Gnome as them in the app bar. Two sensors on the battery alone (no wonder IBM / Lenovo is not worried about the Sony battery recall: my battery stays at 34 C.). There are more colors to various things like icons than I remember. The icons are less plain, but still very obvious and visually descriptive). And the T41 seems a little faster. This makes a bit of sense: For the Fedora proejct, KDE is not their primary GUI. Gnome is.

As I use Gnome more under Fedora I am starting to notice a few subtle things about it. Evolution behaves better it seems: for one thing, when I first start Evo, the password prompt stays on top where I can see it. That undoes one of the annoyances I documented about FC5 in part two of my FC5 install post. Evolution also seems cleaner about startup and shutdown. When running KDE, I had a script called 'killevo' that I ran after leaving Evolution to make it totally go away and not leave stuff laying about. That looks like this:

[steve@lambic ~]$ more ./killevo
#! /bin/bash
echo "Here is the evo stuff still running"
ps -ef | grep -i evolution
ps -ef | grep -i bonobo
for x in 1 2 3 

do
 echo $x
 echo "Killing Evo with gconftool"
 gconftool-2 --shutdown
 echo "Kill Evo with evo-force"
 evolution --force-shutdown
 echo "killing spamd"
 pkill spamd
 echo "Killing Bonbobo, since it likes to hang around"
 pkill bonobo
 echo "Killing Bonbobo AS, since it likes to hang around"
 pkill bonobo-activation-server
 echo "syncing disks"
 sync
 sleep 1
done
echo "Evo should be dead, Jim"
echo "If anything shows up after this line, somethings horked
ps -ef | grep -i evolution
ps -ef | grep -i bonobo

I know. Nasty. A combo burrito of things that worked once and superstition. I have not had to run that since flipping over to Gnome. I am guessing that not everything works as well across desktop managers as we would like. I am going to see if I can run Konqueror as the file manager under Gnome for a while and see how that works: That is another thing I prefer about KDE. Oh, and Konsole. And Kate. So far in my limited tests they load and run under Gnome as well or better than Evolution did under KDE, at least in FC5.

I have to wear reading glasses now, the assigned burden of all who reach their mid-life without having died first. This means I need big screen fonts if I don't want to wear the dreaded glasses. I don't. Complicating this somewhat is the interactions between the monitors DPI (124 in the case of the T41: 11.25 inches, 1400 pixels), the default dpi (72 or 96, I can't recall which) the default font sizes and shapes, sub pixel hinting, and the fact that not all applications derive their fonts from the system settings. Firefox for example requires tweaking out once you get 'gnome-font-properties' dialed in the way you want it. It is *easy* to get yourself twisted around the axle with all the settings at hand! In KDE I had to also deal with KDE app fonts as a separate thing, so running Evolution meant running 'gnome-font-properties' from the KDE task bar first to get it readable to my old eyes. KDE apps under Gnome look fine in this regard, but that may be because I have them all set up under KDE already, and they do a better job reading their settings under Gnome than Evolution did under KDE.

I also like that when an app wants attention in Gnome it throbs its icon on the task bar. Very Mac like. I wish MS Windows would learn this.

Gnome is actually more Mac like (at least as shipped with FC5) in another way, with the task bar on the bottom, and the applications menu at the top. I wonder if there is a kxdocker like app for Gnome. Kxdocker adds an OS.X looking dock bar to KDE. With that and a few theme changes, I think this could be a pretty fair duplicate of how a Mac works.

This is not to say there is 100% alignment in the user community on either Gnome or KDE. There are tons of other desktop managers available, and many people here at BMC use one of the others. There are some that I can not even read, with all sorts of special effects and transparent, glowing, throbbing things like terminal windows with text and objects and obscure icons that bleed through from other desktop layers and I can not tell what it what. I like transparencies on some things (like the KDE menu bar), but not terminal windows. Call me old fashioned. Or at least old eyed.

Other GUI's and no GUI's

There is also a set of folks here that use FVWM with the Win95 look and feel. Nice thing about that combo is that it runs well on absolutely ancient hardware. We have some NEC Versa laptops with 128 MB RAM, 233 Mhz processors, and they work fine this way. Actually feel fairly crisp for most things.

We recently decommissioned a RedHat 5.2 system (still) running on a 486-33 with no GUI at all. The funny thing about that was that I started in computers back on TRSDOS and CP/M and such so being at a command line is not all that scary. And without the GUI, even that old system was pretty fast. You can do alot with Curses based interfaces. WordPerfect 5 for DOS used to be fine for me, and I could produce manuals hundreds of pages in length on systems so tiny by todays standards it makes one wonder what the current computer is *doing* with all this RAM I have in it.

Choice

That is one thing about Linux: No matter what your technical comfort zone, or your emotional need for your computer to look good, you can put it together to suit your needs. You can spend hours tweaking it out however you like. The documentation department would hate to follow along behind you though. Other bad news is that it is easy to fall into patterns of usage, such as my near exclusive use of KDE in the past, and there are a lot of things one can miss out on that way. Last time I checked out Gnome, it was not nearly this nice. In fact, as I wrote this, I flipped the FC4 system over to Gnome to see what its version (2.10) looked like. FC5 has 2.14... I have to say, it is a big difference, but in many subtle ways. And, for what it is worth, Evolution under Gnome under FC4 works the same as Evolution under KDE under FC4. The difference I am seeing in FC5 is not obvious in FC4. I don't feel like I have been quite so asleep at the wheel now....