Well, I havn`t posted here in ages… and Jeff has kinda been hinting that I should… so what to talk about…
Well… how bout the latest Torvalds VS. Gnome incident that took place on a distant mailing list.
Torvalds, as you all better know, is the creator of what is essentially linux. The other day, he stepped into the great desktop debate by responding to a comment about the functionality offered by gnomes print dialog. The comment was as follows:
“I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE,” Torvalds wrote. “This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome (sic) is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE.”
GNOME release manager, Jeff Waugh responded by saying that ‘users are idiots’ was not a point of view which the project held. He further commented that:
“…we’re focused on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don’t talk about ‘dumb users’), but just don’t care about computing technology. We’re just like every other Free Software project – fixing stuff requires the work and attention of people who care about the problem at hand. If you want to chat about what’s missing in GNOME sometime, I’m always available and keen to hear feedback, but I can understand if it’s not of interest to you.”
Torvalds retorted to this blatant use of kindness by responding with:
“I’ve talked to people, and often your ‘fixes’ are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were ‘too confusing to the user’. That’s – not – like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing (sic) something is not ‘it’s too complicated to do’, but ‘it would confuse users’.
Now personally I don`t really care for Gnome or KDE. In my opinion they are both overcomplicated, bloated, resource eating monstrosities. Of the two however, id have to side with Torvalds on this. Gnome seems to make a point of hiding as much from the user as possible by simply not including it, whereas KDE still hides things, but replaces them with easier alternatives.
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