Linux = Ugly

[slave]

I'm sorry but I must agree with Calum.  I just re-installed Yoper and upgraded to KDE 3.1 to see what all the fuss was about, and it's very disappointing.  The KDE developers must be applauded for trying to cram so many features into KDE, but they really need to test their product before they release a "stable" version.  There are so many problems with it, usability-wise and more importantly bug-wise that I hardly know where to begin!  It reminds me of running Windows XP (eww)

Here, briefly, are some problems I've encountered during the past day of using KDE 3.1:

1. Menu shadows are really cool, but when you move your mouse between menus the transparency goes away, which looks very ugly.
2. Menu transparency, also very cool theoretically but when you move between menus it doesn't redraw what's behind the menu correctly; you end up seeing ugly artifacts left over from the previous menu.  What astonishes me is that this bug has been in KDE since 3.0 and they still haven't fixed it, making using transparency at all pointless.
3. Selecting text in Konqueror is very sloooooww, I don't know why this is.
4. When I drag icons around on the desktop, they frequently leave ugly text artifacts behind them and I have to move the icon over the artifacts to make them disappear.
5. Some text in web pages rendered by Konqueror are anti-aliased, others (such as this forum) are not.  Go figure.
6. None of the style GUI options work as they should.  Menu fade does *not* fade every time, in fact it only fades about 1/3 the time, same with animate.
7. The control center is very poorly designed, with many similar or redundant options hidden all over the place under different menus.  It makes the Windows 98 control panel look elegant by comparison.  For instance, the option to enable a desktop menu is located under desktop behavior, which makes sense, but there's also an "enable menubar on top of screen in the style of MacOS" is located under appearance and themes > style.
8. Clicking on a link in Konqueror creates an ugly selection artifact occasionally which won't go away.
9. the kicker is ugly.  sorry for speaking the truth, but it is.

In general, there are way more bugs in KDE that I'd like, and the overwhelming number of options in the interface make it very hard to find what I want.  GNOME may be a bit lacking in features, but at least it doesn't include broken features.  (like kde does with its menu transparency and shadows)

Furthermore, none of the apps that I like are KDE apps!  Xchat, Evolution, GIMP, etc. are all GTK+ apps.  KDE has kSirc, kMail and so on but they aren't nearly as advanced.

One more annoying thing I seem to notice is that the KDE developers seem to take forever acknowledging bug reports.  Whenever I reported a bug in GNOME, I almost always got some sort of response within 24 hours.  I looked at bugs.kde.org and there are month-old bug submissions for the menu shadow redraw error, all of them marked "unconfirmed" and with zero comments!!

[ February 05, 2003: Message edited by: Linux User #5225982375 ]

[Fett101]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,864989,00.asp" target="_blank">February 4, 2003: Desktop Linux Consortium Formed


A consortium dedicated to improving the look and feel of desktop Linux distributions was formed Tuesday. eh?

[solo]

HAHA you guys just wasted your time! i meant that i would make the kde LAYERS you should be able to switch what layer makes the gui, of course i want gnome and any other tk to be included!!

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by Linux User #5225982375:
I'm sorry but I must agree with Calum.  I just re-installed Yoper and upgraded to KDE 3.1 to see what all the fuss was about, and it's very disappointing.  The KDE developers must be applauded for trying to cram so many features into KDE, but they really need to test their product before they release a "stable" version.  There are so many problems with it, usability-wise and more importantly bug-wise that I hardly know where to begin!  It reminds me of running Windows XP (eww)

Here, briefly, are some problems I've encountered during the past day of using KDE 3.1:

1. Menu shadows are really cool, but when you move your mouse between menus the transparency goes away, which looks very ugly.
2. Menu transparency, also very cool theoretically but when you move between menus it doesn't redraw what's behind the menu correctly; you end up seeing ugly artifacts left over from the previous menu.  What astonishes me is that this bug has been in KDE since 3.0 and they still haven't fixed it, making using transparency at all pointless.
3. Selecting text in Konqueror is very sloooooww, I don't know why this is.
4. When I drag icons around on the desktop, they frequently leave ugly text artifacts behind them and I have to move the icon over the artifacts to make them disappear.
5. Some text in web pages rendered by Konqueror are anti-aliased, others (such as this forum) are not.  Go figure.
6. None of the style GUI options work as they should.  Menu fade does *not* fade every time, in fact it only fades about 1/3 the time, same with animate.
7. The control center is very poorly designed, with many similar or redundant options hidden all over the place under different menus.  It makes the Windows 98 control panel look elegant by comparison.  For instance, the option to enable a desktop menu is located under desktop behavior, which makes sense, but there's also an "enable menubar on top of screen in the style of MacOS" is located under appearance and themes > style.
8. Clicking on a link in Konqueror creates an ugly selection artifact occasionally which won't go away.
9. the kicker is ugly.  sorry for speaking the truth, but it is.

In general, there are way more bugs in KDE that I'd like, and the overwhelming number of options in the interface make it very hard to find what I want.  GNOME may be a bit lacking in features, but at least it doesn't include broken features.  (like kde does with its menu transparency and shadows)

Furthermore, none of the apps that I like are KDE apps!  Xchat, Evolution, GIMP, etc. are all GTK+ apps.  KDE has kSirc, kMail and so on but they aren't nearly as advanced.

One more annoying thing I seem to notice is that the KDE developers seem to take forever acknowledging bug reports.  Whenever I reported a bug in GNOME, I almost always got some sort of response within 24 hours.  I looked at bugs.kde.org and there are month-old bug submissions for the menu shadow redraw error, all of them marked "unconfirmed" and with zero comments!!

[ February 05, 2003: Message edited by: Linux User #5225982375 ]

I agree with you about a lot of these bugs, but I still use KDE, just because it is more usable than Gnome to me. My suggestion for you is to send this list to the kde developers. Maybe the next relaese will get these things fixed if they know that people are sick of the problems.

[solo]

Here we go, we're about to start a war.

 

quote:1. Menu shadows are really cool, but when you move your mouse between menus the transparency goes away, which looks very ugly.

umm the transparency never goes away. unless you are talking about mousing OVER an item, and on the keramik style which i use, it makes it a 3D blue color

 

quote:2. Menu transparency, also very cool theoretically but when you move between menus it doesn't redraw what's behind the menu correctly; you end up seeing ugly artifacts left over from the previous menu. What astonishes me is that this bug has been in KDE since 3.0 and they still haven't fixed it, making using transparency at all pointless.

yes, this is a bug that they could quite easily fix, i agree. however it doesnt make transparency pointless... unless you have the transparency REALLy transparent, because i cant see the menus at all unless i look real close

 

quote:3. Selecting text in Konqueror is very sloooooww, I don't know why this is.

hmm i have a celeron 600mgz and selecting is perfectly fine for me... unless you have like a 100 mhz system

 

quote:4. When I drag icons around on the desktop, they frequently leave ugly text artifacts behind them and I have to move the icon over the artifacts to make them disappear.

never happens to me... are you sure you have kde 3.1 and not some rc?

 

quote:5. Some text in web pages rendered by Konqueror are anti-aliased, others (such as this forum) are not. Go figure.

say thanks to helvetica! helvetica doesnt seem to render antialiased in mozilla either, but i dont know about galeon

 

quote:6. None of the style GUI options work as they should. Menu fade does *not* fade every time, in fact it only fades about 1/3 the time, same with animate.

umm maybe you havent noticed but it only fades when you ENTER a menu window. when you switch between menus it wont and it wont if you click on a menu twice (so it appears then disappears) and then click it again. they definitely could make that more forgiving tho and make it animate in that situation. as for fading same thing, but i dont use it because i want the transparent menus (u cant have both! that sucks!)

 

quote:7. The control center is very poorly designed, with many similar or redundant options hidden all over the place under different menus. It makes the Windows 98 control panel look elegant by comparison. For instance, the option to enable a desktop menu is located under desktop behavior, which makes sense, but there's also an "enable menubar on top of screen in the style of MacOS" is located under appearance and themes > style.

yes but do you have any other examples? and dont you ever call the win98 control panel elegant.

 

quote:8. Clicking on a link in Konqueror creates an ugly selection artifact occasionally which won't go away.

you are talking about the selection box i presume and it DOES go away, all you have to do is click somewhere else...

 

quote:9. the kicker is ugly. sorry for speaking the truth, but it is.

the kicker is literally as beautiful as you want it to be. of course you can change it to be whatever the hell you want. for instance check out my desktop in the 'quest for linux desktop' topic. its quite nice. however im thinking of dewindows'ing it (right now it looks too windows-like). the only complaint i have is that you cant do something like lock it so the dragbars disappear because those look ugly in some themes

maybe this will help you understand the universal ui thing:

-----------------rendering layer----------------
V^V^V^V^ communication layer V^V^V^V^
--------------------api layer----------------------

the user would be able to choose what style they wanted (ie kde, gnome, or even Tk if someone made an output layer).

lets say a kde application is launched and the current rendering layer was gnome. ld tries to load the kde libs but instead loads the universal ui version of it. the uni-ui libs use the communication layer functions/objects to communicate with the active rendering layer, and the rendering layer renders the windows and widgets described in the objects/structures given to it (via the comm layer)

[edit: forgot to put quotes on]

[ February 05, 2003: Message edited by: Solo ]

[slave]

quote: umm the transparency never goes away. unless you are talking about mousing OVER an item, and on the keramik style which i use, it makes it a 3D blue color

from http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50311

Bug 50311: Menu shadow not transparent

Version: unknown (using KDE 3.0.9)
Compiler: gcc version 3.2
OS: Linux (i686) release 2.4.19

If I open a menu with shadows on it looks fine. If I move the mouse left (eg, from settings to tools in konqueror) then the shadow will lose its transparency. If I continue moving left it does this for every menu. However if I move the mouse from left to right through the menu's then the shadow remains transparent.

I can send you a screenshot of the oddity if you like.

[this is the exact bug I get]

 

quote: hmm i have a celeron 600mgz and selecting is perfectly fine for me... unless you have like a 100 mhz system

No, it happens on every system I have KDE on, you really notice the difference if you select text while making the screen scroll at the same time - especially anti-alised text.

 

quote: never happens to me... are you sure you have kde 3.1 and not some rc?

Yes I'm sure.  I even clicked on the "about KDE" button conveniently located in the menu of every KDE program in existence.  It said "KDE 3.1"

 

quote: say thanks to helvetica! helvetica doesnt seem to render antialiased in mozilla either, but i dont know about galeon

Actually it was the TTF font Arial.

 

quote: you are talking about the selection box i presume and it DOES go away, all you have to do is click somewhere else...

Trouble is, when I click somewhere else it does exactly as I said - leaves an ugly partial drawing artifact behind of the selection box.


KDE has just always sucked for me!  If it's my fault, I'm sorry.  What distribution are you using?

[solo]

slackware 8.1 (well, at least calix is based on slack 8.1)

as for the menu shadow bug, that is jsut the menu transparency bug! when you move left, you are seeing the crud left from the other menu under the shadow, but when you move right, there is no crud because there was never a menu there!

whoever sent in that bug shouldve looked closer

selecting really works pretty good for me, i think i see what your saying, it is slower than mozilla, but its really not that slow.

[slave]

I see.  Well they certainly should fix that transparency bug since it not only affects transparency effects but also menu shadows!

[solo]

maybe i should get into kde development. seriously, this stuff cant be hard to fix!

[solo]

quote:
quote:

say thanks to helvetica! helvetica doesnt seem to render antialiased in mozilla either, but i dont know about galeon

Actually it was the TTF font Arial.

Wrong! That is NOT Verdana!!! THIS is verdana:
http://www.geckosoftware.net/exp/windowed.html
Gee, looks GREAT in konq 3.1  

<FONT size="2" face="Lucida Grande, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Theres a font tag from the forums

[Calum]

verdana and arial are not the same font.

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by Linux User #5225982375:

KDE has just always sucked for me!  If it's my fault, I'm sorry.  What distribution are you using?

I understand your troubles with KDE, and its not your fault. Im not gonna try to force you to use KDE, Im just glad you use linux now.