| Linus, KDE, and GNOME |
Dec. 13, 2005
"Mom! KDE and GNOME are fighting again! And Linus is taking KDE's side!"
"If you kids don't shut up, you're going to go to bed without your supper!"
It all started, like most family fights, with a little incident that was blown out of proportion.
Till Kamppeter, a developer for Mandriva, innocently asked for help on the GNOME usability list on how to make GNOME printing options reflect a given's printer full range of functionality.
Kamppeter is a printing and imaging expert who was one of the people who went to the recent OSDL Desktop Summit to help figure out how to make the Linux desktop a lot more successful than it is currently.
Frederic Crozat, a GNOME packager/maintainer at Mandriva, replied, according to Kamppeter, that, "the usability team of GNOME was against listing (the full printer's) options (because) they clutter the dialog and can be more confusing than useful to the user."
Torvalds then chimed in:, "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."
"Please, just tell people to use KDE," Torvalds concluded.
This is a pretty common point of view of those who prefer KDE to Gnome. As it happens, I agree with Torvalds.
We may not have a lot else in common -- Finnish software genius, West Virginia technology journalist -- but we both like having as much control over our systems as humanly possible.
Now, if this had just been me mouthing off, it wouldn't have been a big deal.
But because if was Linus "Linux" Torvalds, suddenly the howls were heard all over the Internet. The Slashdot discussion on this matter alone has over a thousand messages.
For the most part the discussions were the usual food fight between KDE and GNOME fanatics. "Mine's better!" "No, mine's better!"
Sigh.... and people wonder why Windows rules.
Anyway, a lot of the discussion centered on how mean Torvalds was being to GNOME, and how "Linus is increasingly 'out there' in his hyperbolic statements."
Oh please.
Torvalds has always sounded the way he does today.
If you think he was being grumpy today, check out his exchanges back in 1992 with Andrew Tanenbaum about Minix, Linux, and operating system theory.
Besides, I've been around geeks and developers most of my life. I'm even a bit of one myself. This is how they talk.
Hell has no fury like someone who really knows their technology -- or thinks he or she does, anyway -- making a point about it.
Of course, in Linus's case, he really does understand the technology.
That doesn't mean that the GNOME people don't have a point. Millions of Mac OS X users aren't all wrong, and there are marked similarities between the Mac's Aqua interface and GNOME.
Still, Torvalds is worth listening to anytime he talks about operating systems and their interfaces, and being a techno-wizard, that means sometimes he's going to say it in a way that's going to rub some people the wrong way.
That's how techno people have been, are now, and forever will be.
If I wanted manners, I'd call in Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners. Since I want top technology, I'll call in Linus Torvalds, and be glad that he's actually such a nice guy… except when you get his dander up about technology.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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