That GUIs on Linux were designed by developers for developers is a common criticism, but does it still hold true?  The tide seems to be turning, at least if the areas of FOSS inhabited by Ubuntu and KDE are any indication.

KDE developers have just elected a new executive council.  Notable as one of the new e.V. council members is usability guru Celeste Lyn Paul.  Celeste has spent the last five years working to make KDE more usable for the masses.  It really shows in current versions of KDE 4.  I found KDE 3 confusing and would give up when trying to change any settings, always running back to GNOME, but now I’m sticking with KDE 4.  It’s still KDE, so it’s still going to give lots of customizations, but it does them in ways that are easier to digest.

Last winter, Canonical’s Desktop Experience team set about touching up the rough spots of GNOME in Ubuntu, starting with notifications.  Not everyone liked the changes.  At first I didn’t either because of the inconsistency between KDE and GNOME applications, but I have to say, the decision to only show one notification at a time was a good one.  What’s more difficult than trying to read 15 timed  popup notifications at once?  Inconsistency is a problem from a usability standpoint, but now that KDE’s Knotification daemon is able to respond to notification requests from both GNOME and KDE applications, there’s a consistency win.

A new mission in the Ubuntu world is to fix 100 “papercuts” in each release.  This comes from the term “death by 100 papercuts.”  A papercut is a small issue that has a big impact when a user runs into it multiple times a day, or something small that if changed would make a big difference.  Of these 100 papercuts, Kubuntu has made it a goal to own ten of the papercuts this cycle.  The ongoing target of fixing ten papercuts each week is going well.  One I just fixed for Kubuntu (and yes, sent upstream to KDE) is that if you use Firefox, you get a bouncing Firefox icon and a bouncing Konqueror icon when you click on a link.  It’s a simple one-line change to a launcher file, but darn it if it isn’t confusing to see icons for two different web browsers.  I would always be afraid it was broken and about to start Konqueror instead of Firefox.  Other ones we’re working on for KDE include making the Get Hot New Stuff buttons consistent (six different makeshift buttons are used in KDE), getting the user’s avatar in the menu to be near the user’s name instead of with the search box, and changing techy phrasing to user phrasing.

If you’ve used Kubuntu 9.04, you may have noticed that the default IRC client is not good old Konversation.  It’s Quassel.  Why?  Well, Konversation wasn’t ported to KDE 4 yet, and the developers wanted consistency.  So they needed something that used Qt 4.  Quassel was Qt 4, but golly was it made for geeks.  Celeste went to the developers with a list of things that would make the user interface more usable for normal folks.  Since they weren’t designers, they were happy to have some guidance on these matters and set to making it better.  It’s not perfect, and there’s now a KDE 4 Konvi.  So what did we do at this year’s Ubuntu Developer Summit?  We came up with a list of features and usability requirements to give to both groups of developers, in the hopes they’d get up to speed.  What will come of it? Hopefully, they’ll both improve, and we’ll end up with a tough choice between two very good clients.

GNOME, of course, is working on their Next Big Thing: GNOME 3.0.  The discussion in the GNOME Usability mailing list about new, more intuitive widgets is really something.  I’d be interested to try out some of these new widgets.  Then there’s GNOME Zeitgeist, the new tool that’s supposed to revolutionize how we deal with files.  “Where did I put those spreadsheets for work?  Was it Work/Documents/Financial…no that’s not it.  Maybe Documents/Spreadsheets? No…” No more of that. Instead, the context of the file, its data, when it was used, tags, etc. will all be stored to make it easier to find the file you’re looking for.

And really, if you were using Linux in the mid-90s, did you really expect you’d see the day when installation meant clicking (yes! with a mouse!) “Next” six or seven times and only having to give basic information like language, keyboard, username, and password with no questions about DHCP or setting a static IP address, no compiling kernels?  Did you think your computer would respond to plugging in a printer by popping up a notice that it was already configured?  What about GUIs to install drivers for the very few things that didn’t work perfectly out of the box, yet still worked?  We’ve made great strides toward a polished desktop that anyone can use.