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Free Software User Interfaces: Usability and Aesthetics

2015; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-20609-7_63

1611-3349

Edmund Laugasson, Mati Mõttus,

Interactive and Immersive Displays

Using free software has been one of the discussion topics for time to time. There are several desktop environments available for nowadays modern GNU/Linux (hereinafter: Linux) distributions with different usability levels. However it seems that some of the users are not satisfied with current graphical user interfaces. We present a qualitative analysis of four different Linux distributions using different desktop environments. We find that most usable desktop is XFCE, then comes Mate, KDE and last one is LXDE. The results are a bit surprising as the LXDE is very similar to famous and recently widely used MS Windows XP. Our findings lead us into understanding that Microsoft has designed the past user experience of computer use and its user interface design is affecting also other operating systems based on users perception.