[inetknght]

Lack of horizontal padding? What padding do you want? There's clear whitespace between everything.

I for one definitely like and want more compact information. I definitely do not like the trend for making information more sparse. Leave that for your blog; business runs on information.

[notatoad]

The most egregious example that stood out to me here is the x-padding between the edge of the notification panel and any text inside the panel is less than the padding between the notification title and the text below it.

The problem isn't that they need more padding, it's that their padding makes no sense. If they made a design decision to have tight padding that would be one thing, but they've got a horizontal layout with tight padding in the horizontal direction and wide padding in the vertical.

here's a really quick-and-dirty edit to even out the padding around each text block to be equal to the line height, which actually tightens up the total density by correcting the too-high line height in the notification text: https://imgur.com/uVcY6Sw

[inetknght]

That is still a context-sensitive opinion.

Programmatically, that assumes that that information is available (query a font rasterizer: where is the first pixel? consider also kerning and foreign languages; also query icon: where is the first non-background pixel? consider also theme information where window background might not show the icon well!).

Programmatically, you've un-aligned everything: now the amount of whitespace at the top of the notification is different than the amount of whitespace on the left of the notification.

Sure you might say it looks better. But how much time do you think it would require to make it look "pretty" (for you)? As-is, it's functional and isn't ugly. If you want to improve it, then go contribute to the libraries and applications being used.

[wlesieutre]

> As-is, it's functional and isn't ugly

As you’re keen to point out regarding everyone else’s comments, that’s your opinion.

Personally I think it’s functional and ugly. They could skip the drop shadow, the subtle transparency, the big icon on the right, the rounded corners, and just draw a white box. As long as they fixed the left padding it would look better than this.

Lots of attention to detail on the wrong things before they have the basics, IMO.

EDIT: Here's one for all you folks that aren't bothered by iffy typography https://i.imgur.com/4tBNA0w.jpg

[ru999gol]

> Lots of attention to detail on the wrong things before they have the basics, IMO.

thanks you pretty much perfectly summarized KDE

[eitland]

For some reason a lot of us folks find it not only usable but also pleasing.

I wont say it can't get better but I'd be hesitant to anyone who comes from the outside if they try to to make to many changes at once.

Again good UX exists but recently it seems it is all about

1. Copying Mac (see Unity) and Chrome

2. Removing options and configurability (see any modern app)

[notatoad]

>If you want to improve it, then go contribute to the libraries and applications being used.

proposing design changes to open source projects when you haven't already been a contributor for a hundred years never goes well.

[mixedCase]

Then the vertical padding should be reduced. As it is, they're inconsistent and looks bad. I really want to like KDE and I used KDE 3, KDE 4 (from 4.8, since every version before that was a shitshow) and Plasma 5 for a long time as a main driver and is still my go-to in my backup laptop; but the visual aspect has always been an utter failure despite the massive improvements made in version 5.

[TheCoreh]

Information density is not hampered by the presence of proper negative space, on the contrary, using the right amount of negative space actually allows for very information dense layouts to still be readable. A good example is a traditional paper phone book

[inetknght]

What you define to be proper is likely not what I define to be proper. It's certainly a context-sensitive opinion.

The amount and location depends on what you want to do. Yes, just like a phone book, it needs whitespace. A notification window is not a paper phone book though. A paper phone book typically has a lot less whitespace than we're discussing here, so I'm not even sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or trying to point something else out.

[Crinus]

Yeah, i've found GP's comment amusing because from my perspective KDE looks like it wastes too much space on padding.

[genghizkhan]

I think the gp means the left edge of the notification and the starting of the text.