Re: Comparative review between Gnome and KDE in UK PC-Mag

[Tom Gilbert <gilbertt tomgilbert freeserve co uk>]

* sungod (sungod@atdot.org) [990730 22:24]:
> Tom Gilbert (gilbertt@tomgilbert.freeserve.co.uk)'s email of 07/30/99 
> 18:10 said:
> 
> >* Tom Tromey (tromey@cygnus.com) [990730 22:08]:
> >> >>>>> "Tom" == Tom Gilbert <gilbertt@tomgilbert.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> >> 
> >> Tom> Things like not realising that mouse-focus behaviour is a wm
> >> Tom> setting and can be *changed* (as the reviewer did) is something
> >> Tom> that should not count against us in a review, or in the
> >> Tom> experience of a new user.
> >> 
> >> This also argues that the defaults should be set to match new-user
> >> (perhaps even coming-from-Windows-user) expectations.
> >> 
> >> Tom
> >
> >Definitely. This is a major contributing factor toward the success of
> >KDE.
> 
> I guess this depends on whether you define "success" as most-used, or 
> best-designed. :) After all, things like this will be defined (and 
> rightly so) more by the way distributions set it up than by the way GNOME 
> developers send it out the door.
[...]

In the software industry, how can you define success as anything other
than "most-used?". There is no "moral victory" in having the
best-designed software, when it is only used by two people...

Anyway, who judges what is best, if not the users, and in the free
software environment (unlike the MS + hardware distributors making the
choice in the commercial windows world), the users vote by downloading,
installing, trying, and then *continuing* to use your software. That
is the measure of success, and at present, KDE is more successful.
There are reasons for this which we can learn from.
That is the point I was trying to make, and you cannot avoid the issue
by saying "aah, but our software is _better_".

Tom.
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