One thing I didn't like about KDE was that it presents you with a lot of configurability, but it's configurability I never cared about in the first place.
Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.
Do you also complain about vim or Emacs having literally hundreds of configuration options?
The point is, flexibility is not by itself a sign of bad design (or avoiding design decisions). Good design is choosing sane defaults for the average user, and providing discoverable and understandable configuration options for the power user.
I'm not saying that good design is directly correlated to the number of configuration options. Some configuration options are genuinely indicative of bad underlying design, and can be removed once a better design is in place. But when you remove configuration options for the sake of removing configuration options, you obtain Gnome 3.
Configurability is the Number 1 reason to run Linux on the Desktop. KDE's number one selling point is Integration. There is no better integrated desktop in the world and that message is lost to 99% of people. I find that I use two desktops the last 5 years. KDE or i3 (tiled desktop) but my applications are always KDE even with i3.
I think that KDE has had so much FUD thrown at it that people just have a negative view of it right away. Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.
Let me give you an example, I hate working in Windows because I can't change the keyboard shortcuts of the Magnifier application so Windows forces me to use the Win+ +/- key and that is bad because I have to use two hands to press it.
My point is that maybe default options are good for a large majority but what about the rest? Should I not use computers because adding accessibility features like options for font sizes, color schemes, zoom applications or the great zoom options in KWin because some other people feel intimidated because the options popup has too many options?
People that are intimidated by buttons should use Gnome, they will remove everything that is possible from the options dialog.
> Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place
The defaults seem very sensible in my experience. Having the freedom to customise it further doesn't seem like a bad thing but perhaps I'm just old-skool.
Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.