If it’s good enough for Linus…
On the Gnome Usability mailing list, Linus Torvalds replied to a mail from Till Kamppeter asking about PPD options removed from the printing dialog, by actively saying that he (Linus) encourages everyone to switch or use KDE. He then goes to criticize Gnome developers as ‘interface Nazis’, which care more about dumbing down the user interface than they care about implementing new features.
I personally have been using KDE since 1.x, and I’ve always preferred it to Gnome, but time to time I come in contact with Gnome, mainly because the distribution I’m testing comes with Gnome by default (like Ubuntu, which I tested last month). And I’ve seen how features that were in one release suddenly disappear in the following one. And I don’t mean the are hidden in an ‘advanced’ mode. They simply just aren’t there anymore. It is really a shame that many popular projects are using Gnome (or GTK+, rather) as their windows toolkit, like Firefox (which by the way, just released 1.5) or even Eclipse.
It’s good to hear other people say they prefer KDE, but when it comes from the guy who invented the Linux kernel, my respect for KDE just went up a couple of notches (My respect for Gnome is already too low to lose points). I saw this story at OSNews (sent to me by a friend).
icoloma
Gnome indeed has all the tweaks I need (and I have no simple needs), and if I had advanced issues, I would just edit the text files. The personal taste of Linus does not have too much credibility here, IMHO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy/Appeal_to_Authority
Anyway, calling them “interface nazis” is asking for Godwin’s law to be applied.
As I said, I don’t see arguments here (not that I have a favorite desktop, anyway 🙂
Anonymous
I personally could not care less what Linus thinks of the Desktop, especially if his gripes are related to programming on it.
Stop this ridiculous cult of personality, for chissake, the guys just another developer.
Anonymous
I used to be on KDE but switched to Gnome. I found KDE too bulky and slow compare to Gnome. I prefer simplicity. Sometimes too many exposed features is too much.
Linus is a developer/programmer. I find these types of people like to have all the features and bells and whistles they can get.
The linux kernel has nothing to do with the graphical user interface. I don’t see why Linus’ opinion should matter.
Look at the leap of popularity in Ubuntu use from distrowatch. I think it’s grown faster and stronger than any other distro since the redhat days. Kubuntu doesn’t seem to be growing as fast.