GNOME and KDE might be competing projects, but both must overcome some significant, common obstacles before either Linux desktop can wrestle marketshare from Windows and Mac OS X.
Desktop Linux developer and GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza remembers the moment “usability” first entered the daily lexicon of the GNOME development team. “It was about four or five years ago,” says de Icaza. “We had these guys come into the community from a company called Eazel. Most had been Apple developers, and all had very strong ideas, especially when it came to usability and user-friendly design.”
Not surprisingly, debate ensued. Apple exiles, eager to grab PC user marketshare from Windows, suggested an integrated, intuitively structured, and gentle enough user interface to spark instant conversions. GNOME developers, eager to retain the full power and freedom of the Linux operating system, looked askance upon anything that “dumbed down” or restricted flexibility for the sake of mere popularity.
De Icaza, then a college student-turned-IT staffer at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, admits to being a solid member of the latter camp. That is, until a series of videotaped user tests sponsored by Sun Microsystems, a corporate supporter of GNOME development, revealed the ugly truth: The typical business users just introduced to Linux all but pounded his or her head into the keyboard in a frustrated attempt to navigate the GNOME 1.0 interface.
“It was a wake up call for the community,” says de Icaza. “We basically learned the lesson that usability wasn’t something you could just sprinkle onto the project in the final stages. It had to be a part of the development process itself.”
Four years later, GNOME…
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