Hacker News Reader

Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

Do they test with end users thoroughly, like Microsoft and Apple did back in the 80's and 90's?

Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.

FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on.

The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.

Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate.

Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it.

But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.

They do, but their resources are fairly limited so the methodology is abysmal. See https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change... for an example. They don't so much test with end users as gather anecdotes (and then largely ignore test results that contradict their existing design guidelines anyway).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com