On Monday 15 November 2004 10:41, Mark Crean wrote: [...] > Because it's easy to forget that the whole is greater than the sum of > its parts. There are a raft of small touches than aren't much > individually but which collectively soon add up:
to something that is very much a matter of taste, though > superior > anti-aliasing because files have been tweaked, careful choice of > desktop theme, which I always find I hate and have to spend time changing > careful work on menus which I then reconstruct into a more compact structure that I prefer > , choice of fonts, window borders that I would not have chosen > , colour schemes, wallpaper, surely each user has a personal feeling about wallpaper, and does not benefit from having one chosen for her/him? > automatic placement of icons for > networking and devices, automatic mounting of windows partitions in > fstab, dma for ide disks already enabled, a centralised help system that is not very useful - far inferior to man and apropos usually > that fires off one icon, etc., etc. Some distros do all this and > some, like Debian, don't. These things all come under "look and feel" > and are easy to underestimate, I would have thought they were easy to overestimate. > but they do have a marked impact on > the user even if it's largely unconscious. Of course Debian has huge > strengths... Including coming with KDE already configured ready for me to undo... > and it's not all one way at all, but I'd argue that for > many folks these strengths are in the field of servers and specialist > tasks, development and the like. I don't know why I'm arguing, really. I suppose because I think the eye-candy is entirely peripheral to what makes a good distro. I think SuSE is terrific, but I prefer Debian (mainly for ideology and for apt). I don't think the default KDE configuration is any easier to remove in one than in the other, and it certainly is not a good enough reason to determine which to choose. -- richard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
