[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sat Sep 14 20:44:45 PDT 2013


On Saturday, September 14, 2013 22:00:02 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> And besides, KDE and GNOME have always been about giving a more
> Windows-like (or mac-like) feel to Linux, and in no small part for
> the sake of new Linux users. Plus, the latest ones, KDE4 and GNOME3
> were largely about re-designing things in hopes of making them easier
> still. (At least that's been my understanding.)

KDE 4 was more about redesigning KDE's architecture. They went with a less 
cartoony look and feel by default than they had for KDE 3, but ultimately, KDE 
4 is a _lot_ like KDE 3, only built in a much cleaner and modular manner 
underneat the hood. It's main problem was that the developers released it when 
it still wasn't really ready (because the app developers wouldn't port to it 
until they released, and KDE 4 wouldn't really be ready until the app 
developers had ported stuff to it and found bugs - a bit of a catch 22), so 
initially, KDE 4 had a _lot_ of problems, which gave it a bit of a bad rep. 
But at this point, it works as well as KDE 3 did, and most of the features are 
essentially the same. Some aspects of both KDE 3 and KDE 4 are quite Windows-
like (albeit generally more feature-full than what Windows provides for the 
same thing), though I think that it's more a case of simply not redesigning 
things that didn't need redesigning rather than trying to emulate Windows.

As for Gnome 3, I don't know what they're smoking. It's one of the most 
bizarre DEs ever - enough so that there are at least two major Gnome 2 clones 
floating around (IIRC, one is actually a fork of gnome 2, and the other is a 
fork of gnome 3 made to look like gnome 2), and a lot people seem to hate 
Gnome 3. At least KDE hasn't tried to completely change its basic UI paradigms 
like Gnome 3 did.

Oh well. Unfortunately, DEs tend to end up being an almost religious argument. 
I'm a big fan of KDE, so that's what I tend to promote, and I really don't 
understand some of what the Unity and Gnome guys have been up to (or the 
Windows 8 guys for that matter), as I'm of the opinion that the basic UI 
paradigms that we've had since Win95 (if not before) really don't need to be 
redesigned. We've had plenty of incremental improvements over the years, which 
is great, but it seems like the UI guys just can't accept that you don't need 
to keep completely redesigning stuff. It's not like we redesign door knobs or 
pots all the time. We found basic designs for them which work, and we've stuck 
with them, and at most, new designs are variations on the same basic design 
rather than being completely new. Unfortunately, it seems like the UI guys 
just can't accept that UIs are the same.

- Jonathan M Davis


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