Linus on User Interface Design
December 13th, 2005
Linus Torvalds is encouraging people to switch to KDE citing GNOME’s "mentality" of removing features.
This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.
He also writes "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis" and "Same with the file dialog. Apparently it’s too "confusing" to let users just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection thing, never mind that it’s a million times slower."
And the angriest parts:
In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It can be true for any particular feature, but it’s simply not true in general.
To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest minorities is the universal set".
Perhaps Linus should join the ranks of Jakob Nielsen and get his own user interface law: "The Intersection of all Majorities is the empty set" 
. It is true that I find KDE easier to use than GNOME even though KDE is cluttered and 80% of the features no body needs to ever use. Yet, I find Firefox infinitely easier to use.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be to say that the program begins hard to use if the user interface gets in the way of the user. If the program provides too many obtrusive options (i.e. Mozilla Suite) then it becomes hard to find the options you are after. Similarly, if there are too little options and configuration then it again becomes hard to find the options that you are after. (In fact it’s probably worse since you’ll never ever find them.) The key is to find the right balance.
Firefox gets the right balance because it does not ask me to configure things I do not care about such as HTTP pipelining, bfcache or how the browser handles non-existant URLs. However, you can still configure things that you do care about: proxies, tabs, privacy, cookies. And for everyone else, there’s about:config and extensions which give you tons of configuration power. Probably about 99% of Firefox users don’t have extensions installed however because the default setup is brilliant.
Forums
Bringing this back to the comparison of forum creation forms I posted the other day, I want to try and give the best balance. We’re probably not there yet; passworded forums may be an important feature as well as permissions. The truth is the forum currently supports neither 
However, there are some options I believe that people just won’t care about. Search Indexing or Topic Icons? Do specific forums really need to have these configurations? Would anyone really want some forums to be indexed and some forums with topic icons enabled and others with them disabled? Or different prune settings for each forum? That’s assuming people even know what pruning is.
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Linus is not an interface designer, so it’s pretty safe to say he doesn’t know anything about the users UI needs.
I personally find Gnome much, much better than KDE. KDE is far too cluttered for my tastes, and you don’t exactly need advanced options available through a menu, when you have the terminal, which 90% of people use anyway.
This is exactly what is stopping mainstream Linux adoption.
Same here. I find KDE too cluttered and prefer the GNOME approach. One man shouldn’t really give all Linux users advice to switch to KDE when it’s his opinion, and not majorital fact.
I too am on the GNOME side of this, I think the GNOME interface is much cleaner and uncluttered then the KDE interface, and much easier for my needs. The new default Clear Looks especially.
I hope people just don’t jump ship of GNOME just because Linus was the one too say it, and especially to call them interface nazi’s and such, sorry that it’s helping Linux improve in the desktop market.
I’m by no means knowledgeable about Linux. I first tried it a couple of years back and couldn’t live with it. Just recently inspired by the Ubuntu hype I decided to give it another shot.
I’ve installed the Kubuntu packages needed so i could try out KDE and found that whilst I tried it I didn’t stick with it long.
It felt disorganised and messy, harder to acquaint myself with. Sure it has a bit of gloss to it but it feels like cheap plastic. I suppose that’s not important though, both environments being customisable.
In short though it’s Gnome for me at present.
Had a quick try of E17 too and allowing for the fact it’s very much incomplete. I get the impression it’s yet to get to walking. It does look very promising.
I prefer KDE when compared to GNOME.
I like all the options, as a fact I want as many option I can get. I do not like to have no options and I do not understand why somebody else should decide how I would prefer my desktop, layout etc.
Also I want it to be easy to change my setting, as an example I do not consider typing about:config in my firefox window an easy way to change my preferences since I have to know all the accepted values. However I do like the option to do it, since it is fast if I know the different values.
In other words I am a preference settings option junky.
I also prefer the look and feel of KDE when compared to GNOME as my favourite is Fluxbox, a window manager where I use KDE and GNOME programs.
One of the reasons I liked KDE was because it had a menu editor. In GNOME you had to manually edit files to change the items on your Applications menu but with KDE its as simple as right clicking and using the editor. This is one example where less is not more - by removing this essential feature, GNOME is reducing some clutter but at the same time making it easy to do something which should be trivial.
I really like about:config myself - a lot easier than the old method of having to manually edit a js file and keeps the options window tidy.