LinLog

I was playing with SuperKaramba a little today. I guess I just had that occasional urge to make my desktop look really cool. But you know what? After an hour or so of browsing around KDE-Look and downloading different themes, I came to the realization that the entire endeavor is completely pointless. SuperKaramba is a nice idea, but I have so far been completely unable to find any practical application for it.

If you've never heard of SuperKaramba, it's a nifty little program that allows you to download or create "themes" that sit on your desktop. These themes are basically just pieces of eye-candy that do semi-useless things like monitor your CPU temperature, your disk usage, or put a calendar or clock on your desktop.There are also more complicated themes that do things like show you a weather report or act as an application launcher. The overall effect is similar to what you would get with GKrellM, except the visuals are much cooler and it's not confined to a single bar at the side of the screen.

While I do understand the "wow, that looks so cool" factor of both SuperKaramba and GKrellM, I have the same problem with both of them: they're essentially useless to me. First, the system monitoring aspect of no interest to me. I pay a flat rate for web access, so I don't care about my network usage. I'm not an over-clocker, so I don't care about my CPU temperature. I already know roughly how much disk space I have left, so I don't need a constant reminder. And let's face it: does anybody really need to know what their uptime of their desktop workstation is?

As for the semi-useful functionality that these programs can provide, I stopped needing any of that when I started using a full-featured desktop environment. Clock and calendar? I've got a clock on my panel, and it can pop up a calendar with one click. Program launcher? I've got an application menu and I can add arbitrary programs to my panel. Weather report? I've got that in Kontact, and I don't check it often enough to need it on my desktop.

The bottom line is, I have yet to find a genuine use for any of these eye-candy programs. Yeah, they look great in the screen shots, but I've always found that they just get in the way of every-day work. Therefore, I don't use them. The only down side of that is that my desktop always looks exceptionally boring.

The thing that really gets me, though, is that so many people seem to be into this stuff. There seem to be tons of SuperKaramba and GKrellM themes, half of which do the exact same thing. It's a lot like the desktop theme situation. The vast majority are either painfully derivative or just unusable. And yet there's always steady supply of new themes.

My theory is that this is caused by a combination of factors. First, creating a new theme is generally not a technically demanding task. There's usually no programming logic involved and the theme format is generally not too complicated. Add this to the preponderance of rotten themes and "wow" factor, and you have a classic "anybody can do this" scenario.

The only problem is that anybody can't do it. I know I certainly can't. Balancing visual appeal with usability seems to be much more difficult than you would think. Just look at all the bad web sites out there. Just think how many business web sites you've seen that had ugly color schemes, or hard to use menus, or pretty but unreadably small fonts. And many of these were designed by professionals. In fact, now that I think of that, the preponderance of poor desktop themes doesn't seem at all surprising.