Hey y'all - I've been with y'all for quite a while now, though not nearly as long as many... I came to linux on Redhat 5.1, came through Ximian's 1.4, KDE's 3.0, KDE's 3.1, and Garnome/YAGNOBS/gnome-2-snapshots/build from source/RH8/phoebe... I've read flamefests on both sides and on about every dork site out there... and I generally consider myself pretty non-dogmatic when it comes to things like this... When I first came to usability@ and was introduced to Havoc's advocacy of simplicity and cleanliness, I was coming to GNOME2 from KDE 3.1... And, being a "raise-on-focus after precisely 650 milliseconds, edge flipping, hidden panels" kind of user, yeah, I was skeptical... but bottom line, y'all have made me a believer for the simple reason that the GNOME team has put together a simple, clean, intuitive desktop that "Just Works" 99% of the time... None of the features in KDE 3.1 or GNOME 1.4 made me a better worker... I didn't code any faster, get anything more done, or make any leaps that I wouldn't have made otherwise... because that's not what a desktop does... It should (and GNOME2 does) simply facilitate work... and it's getting better with every release that I try... I don't really listen to the KDE flames anymore or even pay too much heed to the response to Havoc's article on UI design... Because KDE and KDE's users have made it clear that they feel their desktop configuration is some sort of personal expression or statement... GNOME and KDE just value different things... and KDE seems to want the desktop environment to be more than a systems and work facilitation architecture... they want it to be more than something that you don't have to think about and can ignore... For me, I like the GNOME philosophy of being invisible... I like the emphasis on and adoption of HIG standards... I like the clean, simple, invisible desktop environment... and I do more and better work because of it... So bottom line, please, keep up the good work... you've made your philosophy clear and you're not wasting time getting into dogmatic arguments like the recent KDE advocacy has presented... your desktop is your argument... and it was all the convincing I needed... Thanks again... -jag -- --------------------------------------------------------- Joshua Adam Ginsberg Cellphone: 970.749.8530 Rice University '02 Email: joshg myrealbox com St. Mark's School of Texas '98 -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin ---------------------------------------------------------
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