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KDE 4 out, and my, it looks gorgeous!

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tranglos:
Sounds like good news.. but.. hate to be the rotten egg in the box.. but.. those screenshots look ugly to me.. maybe i just like my displays packed tight and full of details.. all that whitespace looks yuck.
-mouser (January 21, 2008, 08:10 PM)
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With you all the way. And for some reason this seems to be typical of many open-source, cross-platform GUIs.

I remember when first installed Red Hat, back in the times when 800x600 was the typical home/desktop resolution, the windowing environment looked just like that. This made some applications almost unusable. Netscape's Options dialog box was so tall it didn't fit on the screen vertically, so that OK/Cancel buttons were off-screen. And at the same time everything on the dialog was oversized and there was plenty of wasted white space.

Back then I thought the developers must have been working on high-end systems with some obscenely high resolution and never thought about scaling issues. WordPerfect (then by Corel, and free on Linux!) was pretty much the same.

FireFox is the only app of the kind which manages to avoid this, perhaps because it truly gets a lot of cross-platform use, so such issues would have been caught and corrected early on. Although even in FF some dialogs are kind of space-y.

(I am aware that whitespace enhances readability, but those dialogs were just elephantine.)

Armando:
GUIs are so customizable that IMHO it's not a real problem. But true, they (the developpers) should be a bit more attentive to details... I personally find that Ubuntu has a nice default GUI (Gnome), and so does Mandriva and a couple other distributions.

Gothi[c]:
With you all the way. And for some reason this seems to be typical of many open-source, cross-platform GUIs.

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This seems typical of many people to judge a package by it's wrapping :)

I definitively agree that the screens look like absolute crap. My main beef with it is that everything is too friggin' big (I love Armando's "elephantile" description hehe) . I understand some people have wall-sized monitors, but i like everything small, and like mouser said, detailed.

But it should be noted that KDE is VERY customizable. Even more so than Gnome. And it is quite easy to do so. It is actually exciting that this new version will give us even more settings to tweak and customize, as any software-addict be it an open-source hater or not, should definitively love! :)

tranglos:
With you all the way. And for some reason this seems to be typical of many open-source, cross-platform GUIs.

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This seems typical of many people to judge a package by it's wrapping :)
-Gothi[c] (January 24, 2008, 01:59 PM)
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That's the only way I know of telling good software, has there ever ben another? :)

But seriously, this oversizedness and tendency to leave large pools of blankness is everywhere in apps that have originated on Linux. It's wherever you look, check out the screenshot of Nvu, the Gecko-based, cross-platform HTML editor:

http://images.linspire.com/nvu/siteManagerInSidebar.jpg


And anyway, what is the world coming to? First you could run Windows on a Mac, now it's KDE on Windows, pretty soon men and women will be, I don't know, living in the same *houses* or something!


But it should be noted that KDE is VERY customizable. Even more so than Gnome. And it is quite easy to do so.
-Gothi[c] (January 24, 2008, 01:59 PM)
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Easy as in easy, or easy as in "as soon as you have mastered editing sendmail config in vi"? (*gdr*)

f0dder:
But seriously, this oversizedness and tendency to leave large pools of blankness is everywhere in apps that have originated on Linux. It's wherever you look, check out the screenshot of Nvu, the Gecko-based, cross-platform HTML editor:

http://images.linspire.com/nvu/siteManagerInSidebar.jpg-tranglos (January 25, 2008, 11:17 PM)
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Oh gawd, that image makes my eyes bleed. So...much...wasted...space >_<

Seems typical of graphical linux apps. So much blank space, oversized buttons and borders, etc. Ugh.

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