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The desktop is far from being dead. I run two machines, one with SuSE+ KDE the other with ubuntu+gnome, its a choice i have made. That said, Linux will never
by doron 17y ago
The desktop is far from being dead.
I run two machines, one with SuSE+ KDE the other with
ubuntu+gnome, its a choice i have made.
That said, Linux will never have its "desktop year" at heart i believe the issue is design, the UI in most Linux apps falls far from the closed standard, most probably due to the fact that design decisions are made mostly by developers rather then UI designers.
Be it on a desktop or on the cloud, people will not use badly designed UI.
with very few exceptions, i have not been convinced open source development model makes good design choices. graphic design follows a different path then software.
- timwiseman 17y agowith very few exceptions, i have not been convinced open source development model makes good design choices. I know this is a matter of opinion, but I would beg to differ. I think FireFox is better designed than IE ever was. I think the design for GIMP, OpenOffice, and Pidgin are every bit as good as the comparable closed source offerings. In particular, after the "Ribbon" was introduced I cam to think that OpenOffice had the better design. While it is a niche product by and for developers, I find Spyder to be amazingly well designed and choose it over ever other IDE out there for short, simple scripts (it works less well for large programs for which I pull out Eclipse, which is also OpenSource). And I do all of this on Windows since my primary job is as a SQL Server DBA (I do have Linux at home alongside windows, but even there is a secondary for certain niche tasks). Even in Linux, I think the design is quite good. I do not beleive design is the issue. I think it is a combination of Windows being ubiquitious already so it is easy to get, easy to find help with, and you know it will work with just about all major software. In fact, the only program I can't easily run in Windows really is Sage (a mathematics suite) and that has competitors that run nicely on Windows. You do not have to think about getting Windows, it is the default. Getting Linux or even a Mac requires a deliberate choice.
- krainboltgreene 17y agoPidgin isn't to bad, but OO and GIMP? They're a horrid example of UI. GIMP especially with how clunky everything is layed out.
- aphyr 17y agoI can't speak for OO, but I definitely prefer Gimp's interface to Photoshop. On the other hand, I use weird window managers.
- albemuth 17y ago>>but I definitely prefer Gimp's interface to Photoshop wow, maybe it's just that I got used to PS before using GIMP, but I find GIMP's UI to be nothing short of ghastly.
- aphyr 17y agoYeah, most discussions I've read on this boil down to "it's what I learned first." Seems to be a familiarity thing. What bugged me about PS is that it's really hard to manage all the panels and subwindows. They end up covering what I'm trying to see, and moving them around efficiently took way too long. I prefer the Gimp's docks and tear-off menus, which collapse quickly and respond nicely to my window manager shortcuts. On the other hand, looking at my co-worker's CS2, it looks like photoshop has moved towards that behavior some... so I'm probably out of date. It's been several years since I used CS on a regular basis.
- krainboltgreene 17y agoCheck out some of the screen casts of CS4. It's pretty awesome.
- ido 17y agoI don't mind Gimp either. It just takes a bit of getting used to, but its interface is actually pretty well thought out.