KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds

'Boring' Linux deity revisits UI, finds it 'too cartoony'

By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor, 5th November 2012

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Linus Torvalds has decided, “after a long absense” (that's his spelling), to give Unix desktop environment KDE a go.

His assessment of the UI isn't kind, with his opening statement declaring:

“It still looks a bit too cartoony, and the default widget/plasmoid behavior with mouse-over pretty much immediately showing the controls for it annoys the hell of me. You can lock the widgets down and they calm down and act normal, but it's some really odd and distracting default behavior.”

The review, published amidst the tumbleweeds on Google+, sympathises with Gnome aficionados who feel “ … KDE may have gone a bit overboard on the configuration ability, though. Because some of the 'you can configure everything' things are just odd.”

Among the odd things are what Torvalds describes as “ … being able to rotate those desktop widgets any which way you want. 'I wonder what that odd rotation thing on the widget control bar does? Whee – trippy'.”

The results of those explorations have left the Linux deity “mildly amused by the sheer whimsicality of it all” as his “terminal and web browser buttons look like a drunken fratboy has been messing with my desktop.”

He's promised to restore everything on his desktop “to their boring upright position (because that's how I roll – boring).” ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Monday 5th November 2012 08:23 GMT

xj25vm

Re: Every user interface gets this way!

"Because of featurism. It's a great excuse for a developer to not work on what needs to be done or finish what he was doing before."

I agree. Prime example is Mozilla Thunderbird right now. The bugtrack is full of elusive, annoying and intermittent bugs experienced by users in the last 10 years. But these are difficult to work on - why bother. The back-end, including the address book and email storage engines need a serious rework to bring Thunderbird into the 21st century, including Maildir support (locally, not on the server), which would seriously improve performance and reliability - but that's like, well, hard work, and you can't exactly show off at the end - so let's forget about it and just move the icons around the screen for the next version, or hide them altogether so that we can all be hip and up there with the other fashionistas of the software industry. Urgh!

Posted Monday 5th November 2012 04:57 GMT

Ole Juul