Graphical User Interfaces - When will they be normalized?
I’ve installed SuSE Linux v9.1 a couple of days ago on my now secondary PC and after 2-3 days also managed to get rid of that ugly default KDE desktop look and turned it into a somewhat bearable view.
Honestly when do the interface designers stop smoking strange things and come back to a neat and clear GUI design? The icons of the default KDE were huge (48px) and even looked way to big on my 1280×1024 resolution. The initially chosen color palette can only be described as atrocity and the default wallpaper was of minor quality! When flapping out the kicker menu (that’s basically the same as the windows start menu) again huge icons and text is thrown at you and shine in a multitude of fancy colors with soft edges as if they want to compete with the Teletubbies! Who ever had the idea to introduce 24 bit colored icons: here comes my hand and whips to your face!
There is no need for Linux to imitate the childish color look of Windows XP or the rasterless plastic GUI from OSX and fortunately there are ways to tweak the look of a Linux desktop more freely than on any other system … if you are willing to dig in the deep! Luckily I’ve found one tolerable window sheme in the default set of KDE but until you tweaked your KDE desktop to what you like to see it takes a while! What happened to the promising uniform isometrically clear look of beOS icons? We can only hope that the interface terror that the designers commit these times will be gone someday and clarity returns! Until then I recommend to get a new theme for your Linux at themes.org!
One Response to “Graphical User Interfaces - When will they be normalized?”
By Sam
on May 14, 2006 | Reply
You have an interesting look upon how a graphical OS should be (or look).
But just like Microsoft-products: the way it looks is more important than the way it works, but fortunately Linux still has the choice of not using its splendid and sparkling features and just use it as it is meant to be used.
But still, I’d like to see your way of configuring your distribution, I hope I can learn something from it;
Kind regards,