Snozberry

As you all know, I put YDL on Jenny's G3. It's gone pretty well, but I now have a true appeciation for the fact that linux ain't ready for prime time desktop use.

First, off, a little about my usage habits: I've used linux for the past 5 years, or so. I'm a Debian guy, who uses blackbox as a window manager. For the less informed, that means that I don't use any desktop environments like KDE or Gnome. I don't have a "desktop" that I can put files and icons on. Although I remember being slightly unconfortable with this 5 years ago, it didn't take me long to realize that I really prefer it this way. Even when I'm on a Mac or Windows, box, I keep the desktop very clean and only use it as a very temporary way-point for files (usually archives). I have four virtual desktops, but no little graphical indicator to spatially align them. I like to think of mine as four in a linear row, but that's just my mental model. They are in no way actually linked to one another.

Jenny, on the other hand is most comfortable on a Mac. She likes her desktop (stores basically all of her stuff on it) and is pretty uncomfortable with multiple desktops. I've got her using them, but it's only on a trial basis. If she says no next week, then they're out of the picture. She uses Windows at work, but doesn't like it at all; I have to agree with her, it's nowhere near as elegant as MacOS. Needless to say, she's not super pleased with linux. She enjoys the stability, but that's about it. To look at the good and the bad, we really have to go on an application by application basis:

• Mozilla's essentially the same on all platforms. She can finally run a newer release than 1.2.1, which is very good. Since there's not much difference here, except that 1.4 is more stable than 1.2.2, she's quite happy.
• I have her using KMail, the mail app of choice for me, which she seems perfectly content with. It's intuitive and I haven't heard any complaints from over wher she sits on this.
• A relatively minor nit that I think I can fix through xmodmap: her ctrl, alt/option & command keys have switched roles. Having to use the little ctrl instead of the juicy command key drives her (and me) bonkers
• Office/productivity apps in linux rather suck. OpenOffice for Word documents is okay, but not great. It appears to be nothing but a mediocre copy of MS Word (which is just plain lame), plus it's dog slow on both her and my hardware (Jenny: G3 400 Powerbook w/ 384MB RAM; Chris: dual Celeron 400 w/ 384MB RAM). I haven't tried AbiWord on her machine yet, but the last time I tried it on mine, it crashed every other minute.
• Gnumeric works well and she didn't seem to have much trouble with it. I use it, too, but haven't had to help her at all with it. It's handling of cell fonts is a little dicey and her revision doesn't seem to allow editing a cell by double-clicking on it (that pissed her off), but on the whole it is a very solid app. Those of you who know Gnumeric may point out the seeming hypocricy in my criticism of OpenOffice for emulating Word while not criticizing Gnumeric for emulating Excel. This just isn't the case, as Excel is actually a decent app, while I find Word to be only marginally satisfactory.
• Konquerer is fugly. Neither she, nor I like it in the least. It's got a cluttered interface, crummy file handling and is too slow to start up. Plus, I think that the way it shields the user from anything but their home directory is well-intentioned, but poorly implemented. I find it painful to use, period. Jenny doesn't even go near it. I have no idea how she'll be able to manage files at all on her new machine, since the shell is utterly out of the question.
• KDE in general is just not very smooth. It's file handling (MIME stuff) is okay, but I had to do some advanced tweaking to make it actually work nicely. Also, the menu editor is horrendous. I have thorougly bolluxed her menus in an effort to simplify them (by hiding apps she'll likely never need). I'd like to point out here that much of the mess I made was not my fault, it seems as if there was some very nasty internal error that wound up duplicating and mixing many of my sub-folders. If the damn thing would actually support actually moving shortcuts, rather than just hiding the old link where you don't want it and creating a new one where you do, life would be much easier. You should also be able to rebuild the default menu set (based on your installed software) in case you really mess things up - like I did. Ugh. Let's put it this way: KDE's bad enough that I've been trying to figure out how to get rid of it and either use Gnome or some other non-desktop-whole-environment WM.