Last week I pissed and moaned about the consistency of the desktop in Xwindows. Granted, it’s not as big a mess as it was a decade ago, but it still has a ways to go to being the intuitive, nicely designed experience you should demand of your desktop.
The biggest issue keeping the X desktop from feeling like a polished system is the presence of multiple desktop environments leads to applications being developed using a wide variety of GUI toolkits. Yes, this also happens in Windows, and to a lesser degree in Mac OS X with designers not adhering to interface design guidelines, but it is still a fairly big problem in X.
Let me state that two of the desktop environments for X, Gnome and KDE, have created pretty cohesive desktops. The problem being, even if you use one or the other, I doubt that all of the applications you choose to use are from one design camp or the other, leading to a mish mash of GUI design on your desktop, and a somewhat bloated system for having to have two extensive sets of libraries to support both types of applications installed.
I know that someone will probably comment that they feel that very freedom of choice provided by X is one of it’s strengths.
Baloney.
Same argument goes for the open PC world vs. the closed world of Apple hardware, and it doesn’t hold water. In the hardware world, all that freedom leads to systems that are much more prone to unreliability due to hardware issues. I was in that camp once, and it didn’t take me long after moving to Mac that I saw that what I had perceived as Apple’s weakness was in fact one of it’s greatest strengths.
The closed nature of Apple hardware ensures that the system works. Apple knows exactly what they are dealing with, and so do Mac application developers. That’s the reason why you normally don’t see the weird kind of behavior on a Mac that PC users have been taking for granted since the transition from MS-DOS, and when you do it usually means that some sort of hardware failure is imminent.
So I have some issues with the interface inconsistencies with the X desktop. I still prefer it to a Windows environment, by a mile.
This week I upgraded my laptop, running Linux Mint 5 to Linux Mint 7. Oops. Mint 7 doesn’t seem to like my hardware for some reason. That led to me searching for a replacement operating system for the laptop, and after two days of experimenting with different distros, I ended up going with the new version of Mandriva running KDE4.
I downloaded KDE when it first came out, ran it for a while, and decided it wasn’t for me. At the time I was a Windowmaker user, but I eventually ended up going to Gnome and sticking with it. I have tried the various versions of KDE through the years, and saw the improvements they were making, but still felt it wasn’t for me and stuck with Gnome, and ultimately Gnome + Compiz, which I thought was as good a desktop as you could have in X. I even tried KDE4, very briefly, and decided that bun needed more time in the oven.
So after looking at several distros that used either KDE 3.5.x or Gnome2.2.x I hadn’t found one that seemed to work with my laptop. No sound, or no 3D accelerated desktop, or some strange behavior present. Yes, I can generally dig around and find solutions to these sorts of problems, but I also have other commitments (read: a life), and I just don’t have the time to tinker with my OS that I used to. PCLinuxOS was very close, and I almost stuck with it, but my mild dislike for KDE 3.x and my brief time with KDE4 on FreeBSD had me intrigued and wanting to see if they had made it more usable.
Enter Mandriva. The new version ships with a KDE4 desktop, and PCLinuxOS is based on Mandriva, so I had high hopes for it working out of the box as it were.
It did, and boy was I surprised with how far KDE4 has come.
KDE4 provides a desktop that combines the good qualities of KDE3 and Vista. The menu and preference configuration isn’t as convoluted and unintuitive as I had always found it to be in KDE 3. Hardware acceleration is now integrated into KDE, and the desktop effects it uses are a combination of what a Compiz user and a Vista user have on their desktops. So far I have had no strange behavior due to the 3D capabilities of KDE4, a pleasant surprise since it would barely run for me when KDE 4 first got released.
The KDE4 panel is a nice upgrade over the previous KDE panel, with thumbnails of apps in the taskbar (ala Vista) and a sleeker overall level of fit and finish. KDE now has widgets/gadgets/whatever you want to call them, but to be correct, in KDE they’re called plasmoids. This allows widgets that normally would reside in the panel to run on the desktop, again ala Vista. As a Mac user, I prefer these sort of micro apps to run in the background, visible only when I choose, but it’s a start.
More than 3D desktop effects and desktop gadgets, KDE4 just provides a desktop that looks good and feels up to speed with modern desktops like OS X and Vista. This is a desktop that, with further refining and availability of more QT applications, could be your mom and dad’s desktop. That’s saying a lot, because I’ve never felt that way about an X desktop environment before.
It will be interesting to see whether KDE keeps heading in the right direction, or they end up dropping the ball and screwing it up. It’s off to a very promising start, and I could foresee KDE becoming the default X desktop if they continue in their present direction.
