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

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

+++ Fri, Jul 30, 1999 at 10:31:29PM +0000 +++
Tom Gilbert e-mails me. Film at 11. Reply right now, after the break.
> * 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_".

Free software is a lot about intellectual satisfaction. Making
widely-used, crappy software is less satisfying that making
scarcely-used, brilliant software.

mawa
-- 
THINGS THE WORLD NEEDS MORE OF #3:

Beautifully typeset at-signs.