I picked up two magazines to bring home: one is a boring business magazine (ok, I don't find it boring, but I'm pretty sure most people reading this blog would ;) and the other is Linux Magazine. On the cover is Tux the penguin with a superman cape and a KDE logo in a shield on his chest. The title: The Next-Generation Desktop: A Hard Look At KDE4.
I had to buy it, right? =)
I got home, sat down with my coffee and a cranberry muffin and opened the magainze to page 34 to read Joe Brockmeier's article. After reading it I smiled and fired up blogger to write this. In his article, Joe hit the following points that we've really been trying hard to both achieve in our software as well as our messaging:
- KDE 4.0 is a development / technical preview release. 4.1 is where rubber hits road for more work-a-day users. Joe notes that he can already get a full day's work done, but still...
- The roadmap for 4.1 (and beyond) was clearly enunciated
- The interface is very beautiful (huzzah Oxygen and huzzah application devs for streamlining the interfaces)
- KDE is about applications too, not "just" a desktop shell (and Joe hits on several of the cool new features; hard to do in just 3 pages of space)
- KDE is about portability: it may be a Linux focussed magazine, but the Windows and MacOS efforts got their own sub-heading and 3 paragraphs of copy to go with it.
Joe's conclusion boils down to this: there's work left to do, but it already shines in many places and is set to surpass all comers as long asthe KDE contributors keep up the pace.
Joe really enunciated all the points we've been trying to get out there: portability, roadmap, goals, etc. So we're obviously communicating clearly enough for the likes of Joe to understand it, and thanks to people like Joe who can reach a broad audience with skilled and clear writing even more people will be able to understand what we've accomplished and where we are going from here. Cool.
While at the magazine store I also glanced through PC Mag because they had an article comparing Vista, XP, MacOS and Ubuntu (remember the days when "Linux == Red Hat"? *sigh*) in an "OS shoot out". Usually such articles are really difficult to get right (how many good writers actually have enough data and experience on all those systems?) and there were points I'd quibble with (you can read it for yourself here if you wish), but what really got me was this:
Ubuntu did great when it came to Linux's (and F/OSS in general's) strenths: cost and security. It also did pretty good on application availability and installation, but fell on its face when it came to networking, hardware support and ... interface.
Networking lost points due to a combination of hardware and user interface issues. So we can put the dead last placing down to hardware support and user interface both coming up really short. The article was actually pretty positive about Linux in general, but they didn't pull punches either. It's really frustrating to watch F/OSS get panned (and come in dead last) because of the same two old issues: user interface and hardware support. (At the same time: it's awesome to see Linux be compared to the competition in a mainstream magazine.)
So what can we do about this?
Hardware support is difficult, but that takes care of itself as volume ramps up and more commercially successful client side hardware products using Linux emerge. The UMPC movement is probably helping quite a bit a here, actually. As more vendors perceive a market for their hardware, the number of drivers and their quality will generally increase.
Unfortunately, it's hard to ramp up volume when the interface is deemed inferior. Which brings me back to the Joe's article in Linux Magazine: he was able to recognize even in the 4.0 incarnation that what we are doing is not just keeping on the same line of reason and trajectory but making decisions and writing code to that will enable us to address this deficiency.
We are nearly a dozen years into this whole "F/OSS desktop" thing now and it's no secret that we're serious about being the best by, you know, actually being the best. That's not easy nor does it happen over night ... but the path is cleared and we're marching on towards the light.
In five years time I don't want to read about the F/OSS user interface coming in last compared to Microsoft and Apple. I don't think any of us do, to be honest. Many of us believe that it's precisely the kind of hard work (and at times, daring) that is going into the various aspects of KDE4 (and I'm thinking of a lot more than just plasma here) that is required for that to happen.
10 comments:
@anonymous
Gnome has nothing to do with Linux hardware-support. Only the criticism concerning userinterface is relevant. And that is where personal taste comes in.
It seems as if many people go very well with gnome. Even with Gentoo - where people really have a choice which DE to use as there is no default - there are REALLY many Gnome-Users.
And as Hardware-support is the killer N° 1 even kde(4) would not have done better in this test.
But i have to say i have no problem with hardware, as i bought any part on my own with regard on linux-support. But when people have their first contact with linux they wont buy a new PC (though with windows they would :D -> forced to...).
about the above comment removal: i really don't like censorship, but i also really don't want this to devolve into an ubuntu or gnome bashing exercise. that's not really the point of the blog entry.
if there are interesting/constructive comments in that direction, ok. but straight out content-less flames about other projects will be removed, simply out of respect for others and a desire not to whip up pointless arguments.
as a side note: i've only deleted a (non-spam) comment once before from my blog. in that case it was a pretty ugly, baseless and personal attack.
The article give me more reason to say that 4.0 should be called 4.0-dev or 3.9, as most wnated *before* 4.0 release because.. well we did tested the betas and release candidates, didn't we? ;)
Aside for the dot-zero release, KDE4 seems to be really getting on the rails and future releases will eventually catch 3.X and later surpass it (I belive in 4.2 and 4.3).
But I'm a bit worried about apps. It seems like third parties (amarok, k3b) are a bit slow into porting, but as even the KDE team was unable to port a lot of apps (pim for example) or port stable ones (kopete, dolphin) we can't bash them for taking their time.
The thing is that without all those apps, KDE4 experience is incomplete. It's very strange to have to launch a kde3 app inside kde4 to burn a DVD or play music :-P
As far as the perceived Linux shortcomings in those articles go...if I never again see a comment that it is necessary to be a competent CLI user it will be too soon.
Sure, it depends on what you do with the computer (and what distro you use...I've never used Gentoo but I assume it is more necessary there than in more newbie-geared variants such as Ubuntu or Mepis. And LFS even more so.) but it's not 1990 anymore.
Is it good to know your way around a bash-prompt? Certainly. Necessary for a, to use a cliche, standard user? Doubtful. Personally, I can't recall the last time I really had to. I do it anyway, but that's for other reasons than necessity.
Hello Aaron!
From my point of view is FLOSS community far ahead in desktop related stuff than MS. Apple brings also revolutionary ideas as Plasma do (yeah, dashboard.. ;) ), but you (Plasma devs) realized, that WIMP sucks.. And that is revolution. And I want thank you for that.. ;)
Hi Aaron!
Just a comment about "interfaces" (I take issue with PCMag's getting at Linux and its interfaces... :) )
My comments here are about apps (rather than the OS itself), but apps have interfaces too.
Anyway - has anyone at PC Mag looked at (say) IE lately? Or Outlook Express?
Both of them have (imo) butt-ugly interfaces. Far too cluttered and "busy", and I'm sure that people can mention other MS apps which also have really ugly interfaces.
I often think that when it comes to interfaces, MS is OSS' best friend, as the more that it tries to cram into apps and the OS, the uglier that app and OS will be, and the nicer that OSS looks in comparison.
Imo, the tide is turning. Look at the *hugely* increasing usage of Firefox, for example. Used by around 35% of people in Europe, and close to 20% elsewhere.
My mother is in her 80s, and I've converted her to Linux! She is absolutely sold on it now, and would *never* go back to Windows now, having seen how good Linux is!
Keep up the great work, man! "If you build it, they will come..."..... ;-)
- Andy
Bit unfortunate that the PC mag is so light on the details.
Seems the only complaint about the interface is having to use the CLI... I don't recall needing to use that during normal usage. I find it easier, but that is different. I use a different distro though, so perhaps more of either an Ubuntu problem or that gnome-system-tools doesn't allow enough.
Hardware issues with Linux: I don't think this is mainly a driver issue. I have seen many times that the driver worked perfectly but the person nonetheless claimed that it was not recognized. The cause? Poor hardware integration in the desktop. What can an average person do with a WiFi card that is recognised but needs "iwconfig" to work? Remember the days when WiFi configuration was such a pain (before NetwokManager)? Even I had problems, and I consider myself an expert. Who cries when I say: The good old days of hand-editing /etc/network/interfaces? Oh, well. It has come a long way. But not long enough.
Hey Aaron :)
Nice to see SOME level of response from a "mainstream" mag at least. At the same hand, I think part of the issue _is_ the distributions. While I'm not one to comment on matters regarding distributions (as I'm a developer for two different distributions, one at work, and one for end users) I do think that at times the ISVs developing the flavours of Linux don't a) hammer QA hard enough and b) don't have interface design engineers once-over their vendor tools for usability and aesthetics issues.
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