[Gllug] Re: linux on the Desktop

[Nix]

[Cc:ed to the author]

On 12 Feb 2007, Christopher Currie said:
> Agreed. This detailed comparison of desktop productivity, from a user, not a 
> programmer, is devastating. In a similar position myself, I can second most 
> of what he says.

(Pure pedantry: `Chris' is gender-ambiguous. Having said that I'll use
`he' henceforward as well. I suppose even more pure pedantry would
annihilate this objection on the grounds that `he' can be used to refer
to individuals of unknown gender... but then English is a language in
which `woman' is derived from the old word for `wife', and the word
derived from the old word for `woman' is used for only one person in the
entire English-speaking world...)

>                  The title of the essay nicely seduces M$ users into thinking 
> it supports them:

Yeah, it's good stuff and hits the mark most of the time. Shame it's got
a few slight factual inaccuracies. Chris says:

> When you log into KDE, it shows a splash screen that tells you what it
> is doing and roughly how much of the loading is finished. When that
> splash screen disappears, your desktop is ready.

Alas that's not true. When the splash screen disappears, it means that
ksmserver thinks the session is restored. It does *not* mean that the
things that session started are fully up: they're still loading, in
parallel, and the window manager may not have repositioned them to their
final resting places yet.

(e.g. my standard session load includes about ten konsoles running about
thirty shells, an XEmacs, akregator, two konquerors with a dozen or so
tabs right now... and all that takes about half a minute of high load to
come up *after* ksplash goes away. Much of this is due to running my
.profile in parallel about thirty times... but still, the point stands.

(The system is usable --- impressive, given that it's got a load average
of about 40 --- it's just *slow*, and a lot of konsoles are still not
showing the shell prompt. But much the same is true of XP, except that
XP's memory manager and scheduler are so bad the system isn't actually
*responsive*. I'll leave the rant about XP's thrashing at the drop of
a pin for another time.)

> WinXP doesn't seem to have many applets or even panel options.

Does it even *have* a panel? The start bar and quicklaunch area really
don't count.

> Bookmarks
> Access your bookmarks from the panel; very convenient. I assume you
> can do this in WinXP but I haven't found it.

As far as I know you have to dive into the start menu to get at your
bookmarks, sorry, `Favorites' (ick).

KDE's panel is also vastly more flexible than WinXP's in that you can
have multiple panels, they can occupy bits of the screen edge, and they
can be slid out of the way with edge buttons. (I use three panels, two
on autohide and one very small one in the upper right for things like
clocks which should always be visible. XP doesn't allow for that
distinction.)

(I don't have any comments on the pager because I use fvwm's, which is
two-dimensional. I agree with all the file chooser comments, and the
critique of the utter mess which is the XP control panel. It's worse
than he says, becaue half the critical config options are stuck in
various properties dialogs and are not accessible from the control
panel, and all the options get moved around seemingly with every
release. I'm sure Vista's moved them all around again, not that I have
any intention of finding out until forced.)


Chris doesn't flame modal dialogs, either. What horrible design
abominations those are. (I *still* get system-modal dialogs, even in XP,
and application-modal dialogs are incessant. Why stop me searching a
document merely because I'm trying to save it? Maybe I need to look at
its content to be sure of what I want to call it...)

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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