Comment by Triumvark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Triumvark | Hacker News Reader

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The full history:

Dec 13, 2005: "I encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease." - http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00...

Jan 26, 2009: "I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do... the whole 'break everything' model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else." - http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012209-open-source-ide...

Jul 26, 2011: "I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was "too complicated" for the user to remap some mouse buttons. In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's "too complicated" to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do.

I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really."

Linus has always endorsed being pissed off at your interface and ditching it for something radically different. The current move, as you can read, is not one of satisfaction with XFCE. Clearly Linus just thinks all UIs are shit, and maybe that's a signal no one has figured this out yet, or maybe it's just a signal he's a curmudgeon.

(Edited for typos - I kept swapping 'Linux' and 'Linus.')

You've got this backward. His aim is not to switch to something radically different. When he switches, he's looking for something more like what he once had. Linus endorses stability in UIs, and the thing that drives him away is senseless novelty-driven churn.

Here's the signal that UI geeks miss with regard to Linus and DEs: His goals are utterly utilitarian; he wants the UI to save him time. That's it, nothing more. He uses Fedora because of its mostly OK out-of-the box functionality, and he picks from among the canned UIs offered at installation. He doesn't dick around with installing and configuring desktop environments, because he's not a fucking UI fetishist, as the gnome and KDE folks evidently are. He wants to press a button and have it work.

It's a simple and noble goal.

I somehow wish Linus would be so pissed off at these interfaces for linux that he goes out and writes something totally awesome like he did with git.

I dunno. Git did not leave me with the impression that Linus is really good at making user interfaces.

A javascript, DOM-based window manager would be a worthy project for someone with the skills to do so. All prefs stored in JSON or somesuch. Separate from a browser to avoid frame-busting-busting-busting. Leave (and encourage) the styling and hacka-clicka-bility the users themselves. Twill happen eventually ... I'd just like it now :(

Isn't that HP webOS?

I haven't had a device yet to try that. They're supposedly coming out with a desktop version of "webOS". Will keep an eye out for an early release. I think they'll initially have that for Windows (whatever that means). Would love to try booting into the general concept from a shell on Debian.

> A javascript, DOM-based window manager would be a worthy project for someone with the skills to do so

You mean like GNOME shell?

A month or two back I started glueing XCB and spidermonkey together. The thought of DOM-based window management crossed my mind but I never saw the point of it. It makes sense in HTML where elements are nested inside one another, but in X, windows are seldomly nested - unless the application was designed that way. The heirarchy would be rather flat in a window manager.

  % git push
  fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got '

Yes, this is an actual "helpful" error message.

Considering his ability to write OS kernels and RCSs, I'm guessing that his user interface design abilities are not very strong. Yes, it's a generalization, and maybe he's awesome at it, but they are very different skills.

Yes, considering the git UI I'm sure a window manager following the same principles would be... fantastic.

Well there is Awesome. Dwm is also quite nice

Awesome has been working very nicely for me [1], but I wouldn't use it as an example of a {usable, intuitive, user friendly, magical} user interface. If a friend of mine shows the slightest interest for Linux and I want to show them just how easy it is, I tend to use KDE or GNOME for the showcase.

[1] Well maybe it comes a bit too pre-customised, which (to me) is worse than not customised and without sensible defaults. Then again, I may the one to blame here, for using a package rather than building from scratch.

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