Re: KDE and Gnome

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

On Tuesday 26 August 2003 16:34, Julien Olivier wrote:
> > Buttons are in
> > different orders in dialogs.
>
> Well, the situation kinda sucks. Why can't we find a consensus on this
> problem ?

The reason why GNOME follows the right-to-left order is because the HIG says 
so. The HIG says so because a number of usability studies showed that people 
usually scans the bottom right of a dialog first.
However, a lot of people (including the KDE team) don't accept this because 
they and a lot of users are already used to the Windows-style left-to-right 
order, and think that the benifit is changing the order is too small.


> OK, that means that I can't create presentations because I don't like
> OOO's look as GNOME doesn't have a presentation program. And that also
> means that, for a developer, it's impossible to create an app that will
> please everybody. Or you have to create a KDE frontend, a GNOME frontend
> and a MOTIF frontend. That sucks...

Even if QT and GTK look the same you still can't please everybody. Windows has 
a "sort of" unified look*, yet there are many, many people who absolutely 
hate it's look. Ditto for MacOS X. There will always be unhappy people. 
Making the two look like each other will please some people but absolutely 
piss of other people.

* Windows doesn't always have a unified look: Norton AntiVirus, McAffee 
VirusScan, ZoneAlarm, Direct Connect, Office XP, Easy CD Creator, just to 
name a few. Not to mention all the amateur freeware apps out there that use 
flying colors and look totally inconsistent.