Re: Owen Taylor's paper

> Presenting a Gnome desktop to a prospective customer and show that
> while Gnome uses one UI, Mozilla and Acrobat Reader use another, and
> the clients in house Java apps are consistent with Mozilla and Acrobat
> but opposite of Gnome, and again you will likely be laughed out of the
> room.
> 


That's certainly a down side. A frustration in Acrobat is that "ALT+F"
doesn't work some of the time - but most other programs it does work in.
The advantage of Windows from a UI point is that nobody would draw their
own dialog-box, but use the one Bill Gate designated as standard... and
it work (until Office 2000 came around anyway).. Being consistent in the
way apps work, Alt + F does what Alt + F should do. Gnome 1's terminal
doesn't have an ALT binding for File. With a bit of time you can get
used to this.

I'm not convinced I agree with goings as far as making Gnome and KDE the
same - long ago I settled on Gnome - and realized it would take a few
blows to the head for me to start using KDE. If a large company were to
roll out linux - my experience suggests it would be IT managers who
would dictate that users must use KDE (and if they use Gnome they are on
their own, or vice versa). I remember that Internet Explorer was pretty
much mandated for web-browsing since every web based system required
subtle "features" of IE. There were only ever a list of supported
applications - everything else you ran at your own risk. It would be
nice for everything to be the same layout (arrangement of buttons).. but
not perfect copies of each other. I personally credit people with enough
intelligence to not ring a help desk if the "theme" of an application
changes from one to the next.

I've always believed that if Windows had options asking "Do you want to
be patronised or can you manage this on your own" during installation of
programs- you might not get so annoyed with pop-up assistants. I'm all
for making Redhat nicer for beginners. Computing for me has always been
a "trial and error" affair - so I can work out what Evolution is for
myself, others aren't so keen to click what they don't understand.

If time were freely available, I'd be glad to write something to
rearrange the new Gnome Menus into something resembling the old Gnome
menus. [It's not as easy as I'd hoped to understand the Gnome2 menu
structure.] Something as simple as a utility to run after a
fresh-install to do some rearrangement of the furniture.

What I see as been useful is a utility to translate between KDE toolkits
and Gnome toolkits so applications truly look the same - so a KDE
version of GIMP can exist, and a Gnome version of Konquerer exists. I've
always stayed away from KDE programs since I use Gnome- try saving
kde-libraries for the odd program. This seems to me a negative point to
OpenOffice.org- that it look out of place among other Gnome programs.


	... let Redhat evolve Gnome/KDE how they believe is best.
	(maybe switch to twm/windowmaker which probably won't get so much
attention by Redhat).
what I think RedHat should do

	... remember some of us may be far too happy with the ways things were
- and may be a little too much of a stuggle to adapt. There's a cost for
me to adapt involved aswell.

-- 
NAME    :	Adam Allen.
EMAIL   :	[email protected]

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