gwenview: user friendly?

"Carla Schroder wrote an editorial piece this week on Linux Today (a website I enjoy and frequent daily via their RSS feeds) entitled Editor's Note: What is User-friendly, Really?.

"In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz. [...] There is a trend to dumb Linux down in a fruitless attempt to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. Which is wasted effort, because in doing so computer-savvy users are being ignored and frustrated, and Jane and Joe Sixpack don't care anyway."

"What's interesting about this for me is that Gwenview's redesign wasn't to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. It was to take a powerful app with a rather clumsy UI and turn it into a powerful app with a slick UI. Now, I don't know about you, but I like tools that fit my hand when I use them; creating tools that fit the tentacles of an octopus might be interesting as an academic exercise in design, but I don't live in the ocean and I have arms with hands, not tentacles with suction cups. Similarly, I like slick UIs. I'm not the only one, as fans of MacOS and other nicely designed UIs will be happy to relate."

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