Pinderkent

Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they're actually trying to accomplish.

Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the "Philosophy" section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend's house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

Why do I need to imagine that sort of an operating system? I've had that for years now. It's really quite simple: I have a system at my house running Solaris, connected to a broadband Internet connection. Using SSH, I can connect to it from virtually any other network-enabled computer. And over that secure connection I can run X-based applications quite well. All I need to bring with me is a USB key with an X server installed. Since most UNIX or UNIX-like systems, like Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X often already have an X server present, it's really only a matter of using Xming on Windows.

Best of all, I get to use real desktop applications. I don't have to bother with lousy JavaScript-based web apps, and I have full access to all of my data. Also very important, I have much more control over how my data is stored, copied and backed up. Yes, it's a little bit more effort on my part, but I think it's well worth it to know how my private files are being stored and used.

So I find it difficult to understand what exactly the GNOME developers here are trying to accomplish. Using my setup, it's already possible to use the existing GNOME applications from other computers quite comfortably. We get the benefits of web apps, without what is often the poor quality they exhibit, and without having to worry about who else has access to our information.

Now is major turning point for the GNOME project. KDE 4.0 is coming soon. GNOME isn't prepared. We may very well see a mass exodus of users from GNOME to KDE, just because KDE 4.0 will be so far ahead of GNOME. It's doubtful that this GNOME Online Desktop idea will bring any benefit.

I'm very happy to see that Ubuntu has been a major force in bringing Linux to the masses. Those users get a better desktop experience that they would likely have gotten using a different operating system, while also benefitting from the low cost and the better security Linux offers. Unfortunately, I see a bothersome trend forming: Ubuntu users who seem to be under the impression that GNOME is the only desktop for Linux.

It is in the second last paragraph of that blog entry that I see this problem manifesting itself. The first example is in the sentence that begins: I don't like the way Ubuntu handles network drives (even Puppy Linux does a better job, in my view) ..... The second example is later on: .... and Ubuntu still looks very average - aesthetically - compared to XP, let alone OSX.

As a commenter to that blog article pointed out, those are not problems with Ubuntu or Linux, specifically. Those complains involve GNOME. Now, Ubuntu does ship with GNOME as its default desktop, so most first-time Linux users may come to think that it is the only software there is. Of course, there are many alternatives, including KDE and XFCE, among a wide variety of plain window managers. Luckily, Ubuntu allows for such software to be installed easily and painlessly.

It becomes a situation of advising new Ubuntu users that they do have a lot of choice available to them. If they don't like certain aspects of the default GNOME desktop, it is very easy for them to replace it with KDE. Another option is, of course, to recommend the use of a distro like Kubuntu, which combines the benefits of Ubuntu with those of KDE.

So if you're a Linux user who is setting up an Ubuntu system for a friend or relative, be sure to install at least KDE in addition to the GNOME environment that is already present. You may just make their experience a lot more flexible, and hence enjoyable.

As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there's a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.

While I find myself using Solaris and NetBSD more often these days, I do like to keep up with what is happening in the Linux world. So today I decided to download and install the newly-released Kubuntu 7.04. After installing it and using it for a little while, I am very impressed. Dare I say it, I think Kubuntu puts up quite a challenge for Windows Vista to face.

Installation
The installation is, of course, the first part of Kubuntu that many users will experience. Being quite used to the text-based installer of a system like NetBSD, I do not think that I'm a good judge of how easy or difficult a typical individual would find it to install Kubuntu. But I will say that for my installation attempt, it went flawlessly. Each step to be performed was explained in a clear and concise manner. The progression was sensible, and in the end I got a system that was working. I have no complaints here.

KDE
Although KDE 3.5.6 isn't a new release by any means (it was released at the end of January 2007), it's a very enjoyable desktop environment to use, and the Kubuntu developers do a really good job of integrating it with the rest of the GNU/Linux system. My one main complaint has to do with the default theme. Namely, I dislike the use of the 3D gradient sort of effect used in the window title bars. The grey area, which intersects the lower half of the window title, is distracting and pointless. Of course, the theme can be quite easily changed, so this is not a major problem by any means.

Usability
I have found the usability of Kubuntu 6.10 to be excellent. As always, KDE provides a very clean, integrated and effective desktop environment. All of the major types of applications are present for starters. Konqueror provides a fast, memory-efficient and standards-compliant web browser. Although I prefer mutt, KMail is truly a very powerful email client. Kopete is a complete instant messenging solution. Of course, there are many, many other useful KDE applications to choose from. And beyond that, there are the thousands of other open source applications that are so easily installed.

Kubuntu does a great job at showing off the maturity of today's open source software. More importantly, I think it shows how the commercial offerings from various other companies are facing some very stiff competition from their open source counterparts. In terms of usability, Kubuntu is more than ready for the corporate desktop. As mentioned earlier, it provides essentially all of the basic applications needed to run a business, all without the cost and licensing hassle of many of the commercial offerings. And I do not doubt for a moment that many home users would find it to be a practical, high-quality system, as well. In many cases, I think Kubuntu would render Windows Vista sufficiently useless, or at least not worth the cost of using it.

Performance
Although I have not performed any benchmarking, I do get the impression that this release of Kubuntu is more efficient and responsive than the last release of Kubuntu that I tried on this test computer, Kubuntu 6.10. Applications seem quicker to start up, and even when using them they feel much more responsive. Switching between tabs in the Konqueror web browser, which was noticeably slow under the installation of Kubuntu 6.10, happens almost instantaneously now. The application menu on the taskbar also seems a whole lot more responsive, with the list of applications being displayed virtually instantaneously. I don't know if this possible performance improvement is due to the use of GCC 4.1.2, Glibc 2.5, or the Linux kernel 2.6.20. Regardless, I am always pleased to find software getting faster as time goes on, rather than getting more bloated and inefficient as is often the case with many of the commercial desktop OS offerings.

Conclusions
Kubuntu 7.04 is the real deal. The installation was easy and successful. In terms of usability, everything is there: KDE offers all of the necessary applications, and Kubuntu offers the integration. The performance is suitable. And unlike Windows Vista, Kubuntu 7.04 is a pleasure to use. So I'd suggest that you try it out.

The actual benefits of 3D computer desktops is a topic I have written about in the past. And today I'd like to revisit it, specifically after seeing an article linking to a YouTube video of Beryl in action. In short, the title of the article challenges Bill Gates and Microsoft to exceed what is shown in the video. Except I don't think that there video really shows anything remarkable.

Shimmering windows and traditional 2D desktops placed around the faces of a cube may look pretty and be eye-catching, but I don't think they really offer any real benefits. There's a definite productivity decrease while waiting for the windows to stop jiggling after minimizing or maximizing them, for instance. Placing your 2D desktops around a cube limits you to only six virtual workspaces, while it's often convenient to have many more than that. It may look impressive to rotate a window into the screen at an angle, but beyond that, there's really no benefit to being able to do something like that.

While open source developers are free to work on whatever they wish, I would have to hope that more effort is instead put towards improving the existing X11 desktop environments. I am without doubt that the memory consumption of KDE and GNOME could be reduced a great deal, for instance. There are likely some performance enhancements that could be made. Doing such work, while not always exciting or fun, would surely lead to more enjoyable and productive desktop environments.

My last article was about the performance and memory consumption of the popular open source KDE and GNOME desktops. Well, it seems that that particular article was submitted to Digg. I looked at some of the comments that people posted, and I specifically wanted to address this one comment in particular.

The comment suggested that it is improper to compare desktop environments based on qualitative, rather than quantitative, measures. That attitude is, of course, incorrect. Open source software may not have been adopted as quickly as it could have been because many developers likely do ignore qualitative data, and thus did not get an adequate idea of what the users liked or disliked.

I understand why many developers would feel more comfortable dealing with numerical data. It is, in many cases, a lot easier to work with and analyze than qualitative data. We can easily calculate various statistics and measures from that data. We can plot graphs. But we have to remember that this is of little concern to many computer and software users, especially those who are relatively non-technical.

We can only play the numbers game up to a point. Suppose for a moment that it typically takes a KDE application running on a particular system 0.5 seconds to draw a menu. It takes a GNOME application on the same system 2.0 seconds to perform a similar operation. Windows Vista takes 1.0 seconds. We could go around playing number games all we want, saying things like KDE is four times faster than GNOME when it comes to drawing menus, and GNOME is twice as slow as Windows Vista. We could even say that Windows Vista's menu drawing is twice as slow as KDE's. Regardless, such data and claims are quite meaningless.

What matters is how users find the system to work. And this will likely involve qualitative, rather than quantitative, information. For the aforementioned example, they will say things like "KDE and Windows Vista feel quick", or "GNOME's menu redrawing seems a lot slower than KDE's". Non-technical users, who tend to be the majority of computer users these days, do not sit there with a stopwatch timing how long it takes for a menu to redraw, or for some other action to be performed.

This is something that I think a lot of developers have missed, both those working on open source projects and closed source commercial developments. For the users' experience to be enjoyable, we as developers do need to pay a lot of attention to their qualitative assessments of our software. When they say it feels slow, we damn well better look into what they're talking about, even if our benchmarking data may suggest we're faster than our competitors' systems.

Furthermore, we need to use such data when deciding what to improve. If our menu drawing speed is twice as slow as that of our competitors' systems, but the users in general don't seem to mind, then it's likely not something we should bother improving. There are no doubt other features that we could better put our attention and efforts towards working on.

But I suspect that the person who posted that comment at Digg did not actually read my article, because he or she further requests some "charts and numbers". Anyone who had read my article would have been directed to this page with desktop environment memory usage data. Instead of just providing the numbers, that site also describes the methodology used to obtain such data. So I did provide some numerical data to back up my claims regarding KDE. I invite you to check out that data, and the way it was collected, for yourself. Then you can see how it correlates to my qualitative analysis of the memory usage and responsiveness of GNOME and KDE.

When we as developers are working on software, we need to consider both quantitative benchmark data, and qualitative user analysis. Only when considering both of these data sources can we truly begin to make our applications better, not just in terms of raw performance, but also in terms of satisfying our users.