Since Vista the start menu folder hierarchy is completely irrelevant. You don’t have to go through menus anymore, first because the 10 most/last used programs are right in your face when you pop the windows menu, secondly because if it’s not there, you don’t lose time to find it in menus and just type the 3 first letters of the program and press enter.

In Windows 7 i personally do not open the windows menu anymore because of the new taskbar.

At least they are copying a current OS rather than one from 1998.

I’m surprised though by how few distros use the lightweight window managers like xfce when running on old hardware is often used as a selling point.

First impressions seriously count in Interfaces, whether for shells, or applications. The first “It’s different!” might be enough to put people off trying it out properly. In the case of Office 2007, they might find out they like it (or not, in which case there’s always 2003). In the case of KDE4, they get over the visual changes, try to use it, _then_ find out it’s a buggy, unstable mess. It is, too. I tried it in Kubuntu. Turn on all the desktop effects to see what all the fuss is about, then watched the desktop die a painful black with random white rectangles death. No way of getting it back found, rebooting just brings up the same borked desktop.

Microsoft do things like this right – any change to display settings has to be confirmed within a countdown period, or it’s reset back to the previous WORKING settings. No such joy in KDE.

Could this be yet more FOSS double-standards at work??

KDE4 – FOSS-developed, badly designed, buggy, unstable and different = “It’s just different!”
Ribbon UI – Microsoft developed, well-designed, usable, stable and different = “It’s shit!”

“It also looks like a bad copy of Vista.”

Very true.

I saw a blog of someone critiquing the KDE4 desktop (I’ll see if I can find it again and post a link) He took a couple of screen grabs, and then proceeded to take it to the fucking cleaners; lousy graphic design, waste of screen space, bad usage of fonts, you name it. The first thing I noticed though, was just how many elements of Vista had been ripped off; glossy black Taskbar, large analog clock, smaller Start Menu button (You can call it the “Kicker” all you want, it’s still the Start Menu).

When Microsoft copy, it’s theft. When FOSS copies, however badly, it’s innovation.

It is built for the desktop.

The people working on it do not clone design choices from the 70′s.

It isn’t Linux. A dozen articles proclaiming the year of the Haiku desktop would at least be a change of pace.

Cons:

Like Gnome it appears to be from the 90′s

Software selection is worse than Linux and will be for years.

No one really cares

Oh and I want to want to wish a very special Happy Douchebag Day to Thomas and Adam
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2009/09/happy-douchebag-day-out.html

http://www.dresan.com/images/doing-it-wrong.jpg

piestar.net/2009/03/20/gnome-226-partying-like-its-1995/

I did say I had already covered this