[Foss-cafe] NI: OfB.biz: I GNU It!

[Fred Smith]

On 7/12/05, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> you mention that Qt wasn't good enough for Sun, Real, etc, etc... well, let me
> offer some perspective here for you: for many it had nothing to do with the
> license. nothing.

Including me, but I'm not a desktop developer, just a user.  I
personally can't stand KDE and QT, and it's got nothing to do with
licensing, the developer community, Sun, Trolltech or any of it.  QT
applications just feel about 10 years out of date compared to GTK
apps. They're ugly and slow, and they make me feel like I'm constantly
waiting on my computer. GTK apps, while probably not any quicker doing
actual work, get stuff up on screen in a timely fashion and therefore
feel more responsive.  QT also makes me feel like I'm using an XBox or
something, with all the plasticy looking ugly-ass widgets that glow
and pulsate.  GTK apps don't make me aware of the toolkit that was
used, because I'm not even aware of the widgets. They're just there,
and I use them without them standing out and punching me in the face.

The underlying Kparts technology is really kinda nice, but I won't
touch it until it looks as clean and elegant as GNOME does, and
doesn't make me think I need to buy a new computer because the 6 month
old machine sitting on my desk is too slow to render the taskbar
without me watching it go pixel by pixel.

A lot of the decisions made by the KDE people, however, are keeping me
(and others) away too.  I remember the last time I fired up konqueror,
in KDE 3.3; In web browser mode, there had to be about 25 buttons
along the top of the window for various things like splitting the
window horizontally, splitting it vertically, printing it, going back,
going forward, going up, going down, refreshing, stopping, copying,
cutting, pasting, zooming in, zooming out, showing the sidebar, hiding
the sidebar, searching and tons of other stuff.  In contrast, the top
of my firefox window has 4 icons, for back, forward, stop and reload. 
Much cleaner, much more usable.   The rest of KDE is very similarly
cluttered and annoying.

I think all of these things together are part of what's chasing
companies like Sun away;  KDE and QT just doesn't present a
professional, cohesive, usable desktop interface.  GTK and Gnome does.

-- 
Fred Smith <fred.smith at gmail.com>