The not so pretty face of Linux

As I come from a Macintosh background with strong roots in the graphic design tradition, the way things look is fairly important to me. Over the years I have grown to appreciate design that is simple yet attractive and well suited to the task at hand. Which raises an important question: Why am I using Linux?

Application developers are also too close to the code, so for them everything seems simple.

Alastair Otter, journalist, ITWeb

To be honest, the various Linux graphical interfaces are at best bad imitations of other operating systems, and at worse, are all but incoherent. For a long time I`ve justified using Linux on the basis of its technology and rationalised that the operating system is still in the early stages of its development and the interface is bound to improve over time. And in truth, this has been true to some extent, although there are still acres of space for improvement.

So why is Linux interface design so poor? The biggest reason, perhaps, is that there are very few open source interface designers around. The majority of skills lie with programmers who are driven by one major goal: to create a tool they really need. Also, interface design is very low on most programmers` agenda, if at all. Besides, when they do design the interface for their application, they are doing something they know very little about.

Application developers are also too close to the code, so for them everything seems simple. Yet when outsiders use the application they are completely confounded by nonsensical text boxes and menu systems. This is the typical "push these three buttons in sequence and then right-click to highlight the text" type of command that makes absolutely no logical sense.

In contrast, the likes of Apple have the money to employ interface designers who do nothing else but make sure that everything looks good and works in an as understandable way as possible.

The other reason for the tacky open source interface design is that developers add in interface features for forthcoming releases but somehow they never get around to finishing the code. Instead of hiding these elements, programmers leave in the menu items, which only confuses and annoys users. Also, programmers tend to forget that coherent error messages and input boxes are useful for users unfamiliar with the application, and so they leave in those annoying "Error -000123" messages which do nobody any good.

Sadly, the situation doesn`t look like it is going to change anytime soon. The death knell for interface design must surely have come in the form of the closure of Eazel, creator of the Nautilus file manager and desktop. Eazel, a collection of ex-Apple designers, was widely trumpeted as the saviour of the Linux desktop when it first announced plans to pretty up the operating system.

A year later, when Eazel closed up shop, the message was clear: there is no money to support interface designers in the open source movement. Fortunately, Eazel released early versions of its software before closing down, allowing the open source movement to run with the code.

For the moment, however, I will stick with my Gnome desktop, the best of a bad bunch and possibly the closest to my ideal operating environment. But I still live with the hope of a new interface, one that does everything I need it to do without the clutter usually associated with open source interface design.