On a whim, I installed Fedora 11 (kde) on my main work computer.  This exercise made me realized how little I am missing in the state of window managers today.  KDE is terrible.  I feel sorry for someone wanting to manage their computer entirely from the GUI (probably the majority of users).

It is a byzantine collection of configurators, launchers, gadgets (widgets?), and menus.  I rocked back-and-forth through the pseudo-Start icon dozens of times to configure a few things like network cards, nvidia, sound, users, iptables, themes, package manager, and so on.  This was just an exercise, as I said (I live in screen).  I have been using Debian (sid) with ion3 for the past few years.  Clicking launchers at random hoping it is the one you need is reminiscent of Windows.

For an example of an excellent, coherent, and useful system check out Apple’s recent operating systems.  Those have very well done user interface, and even a complete userland underpinning it for daily use in software development or system administration.

The truth is, I hate every Window Manager that I have ever used.  I despise the mouse.  Obviously, I am not happy with the whole idea of “clicking things”.  However, I read this really great review of Fedora 11 at CNET.  The article goes on about how easy it is, especially in comparison to Windows.

Perhaps this is obvious by now, but I am not much interested in things being just “easy”; efficient, useful (utility), and extensible are at least a few adverbs valuable to me.  Also, using Windows as a standard-to-match for easy-of-use is absurd, but this article at least piqued my curiosity.  The truth is, I badly need to be on either the Eclipse or Netbeans bandwagon, and they don’t play very well with ion.  That is a story for another time.