Re: How should we present KDE Plasma desktop sessions to users?

[René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday October 23 2020 19:41:24 Andy B wrote:

No to hijack this thread but

>In the VDG we work with the Human Interface Guidelines that tell users
>how to interact with the system.

Ah, now that explains a lot! *)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines

I am just too young to have experienced the first "consumer" HIG drafted by Apple and while an interested user could deduce all the subtle ways one could interact with the system from them that was NOT their goal. On the contrary, HIG are guidelines for developers how the system should allow users to interact with it.

That may sound like 2 faces of the same coin, and that's what it is, but the end result will not be the same at all if HIG put the user first (as they should) or the system (as in Andy's wording).

*) lots of open source projects (and KDE sadly is not exempt of it) feel to me as if they are primarily the "little" projects (not to say playthings) of the developers, allowing them to tinker with nifty ideas and/or serve their own needs. This is mostly an observation; I'm not saying that it isn't understandable and certainly won't claim that serving my own needs isn't what brought me here - nor that commercial software is always so much better in that aspect.

R.