| Well, I won't deny that there's some truth in what you said, but first a couple of comments about the examples. Transmission is as much a Gnome as a KDE application. It has both Qt and GTK clients that look the same. Brasero looks as complex as K3B. I understand that Skanlite can look intimidating (especially on the Image Intensity properties), but Simple Scan seems simplistic. Scan source, scan mode and scan resolution are important properties when scanning and it's very useful to have direct access to them. The default view in Digikam is not so different than that from Shotwell, a folder list to the left and the corresponding pictures to the right. The metadata widget is not opened by default. As jstanek pointed out, even if some things could be made simpler and more polished, it's not so much that KDE doesn't have a clue about design and GNOME knows its stuff, but that they have different objectives. GNOME tries to be as simple as possible while KDE wants to give you power in the friendliest way possible. It's apples and oranges. I feel uncomfortable with GNOME because I think it treats its users as perpetual newbies. I understand that a person's first use of an application should be made as simple as possible, but then they should be able to require more from their software if they want to. There are some things about KDE applications that maybe you won't find a use for at first, but then you need them and it's great to have them at your disposal. I don't want GNOME to be like KDE, it's good at what it does even if I don't like it. The reverse holds true, too. |
Well, your comments are on the screenshots, not on the applications. Try to use these applications for a while "to get the job done", you will get what I meant.
I have been a KDE user for years, I even contributed some patches back then. I still prefer Qt to GTK. But I whenever I can I use GNOME applications instead of KDE (with the exception of K3B).
I think the main problem can be traced back to when you say
> [In Skanlite/Simple Scan] Scan source, scan mode and scan resolution are important properties when scanning and it's very useful to have direct access to them.
Simple Scan (the GTK app) presents you two presets (Text and Image) and just guesses the rest of the details for you. And you know what? It gets them right 99% of the times. When it doesn't you can access the usual Preferences pane and modify whatever you want.
As somebody else commented in this thread, the KDE world refuses to have "reasonable" defaults in place, starting from the default theme to the good engineering practice of trying to guess as much as possible before asking questions.
PS: Transmissions was born in 2005 as a neat Cocoa application, GTK for Linux has been added soon after in version 0.6 (2006) and the Qt interface was started only in version 1.6 (2009). This is why it looks so like nice.