[mvelbaum]

KDE is pretty feature-rich, but it is just ugly. Look at the poor use of spacing/margins, the ugly black & white icons, the ugly font, the square edges, and just the overall look & feel. It needs a major face-lift. I dislike the attempts to dumb down GNOME but KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to.

[brnt]

Excellent spacing: no useless wide margins. Stylish icons that can blend in with various themes, which are clear and easily distinguishable. Font: most distro's actually default to Noto, not KDEs own. But you know what: this you can change, KDE didn't remove any and all options for customisation after all.

You can pry Plasma out my cold, dead hands. Gnome, Macos, and Windows: now that's amateur hour.

[seba_dos1]

To be honest, there are many places in the "refreshed" Breeze look'n'feel and the Kirigami suite of apps in general that could really use some margins. It doesn't need a lot of padding, just a pixel here and a pixel there - not to make it less dense, but to make it look cleaner and consistent. To my eye, screenshots from the blog post look worse in this regard than Plasma 5.

[nmstoker]

It'll need finishing touches but they've got plenty of time for that before the February 2024 launch

[brabel]

I use KDE and MacOS on different laptops. Even though I like KDE , I find that compared to MacOS, KDE is the one that comes out a bit amateurish... the attention to detail in the MacOS UI is just amazing. Am I missing something?? How is KDE better (it really feels much more raw to me, but being on Linux I don't really expect much more)?

[GuestHNUser]

I think it comes down to preference. I definitely don't think KDE is amateur, but it certainly lacks the fine polish Apple has the money to pay for.

That said, I find MacOS frustrating at times because basic things can feel like a pain. Switching between several windows of the same application isn't a simple Alt-Tab; the green button enters full screen mode (KDE/Windows F11 Full Screen is equivalent) instead of leaving just the menu bars and application bar on screen; tiling windows isn't as simple as ramming the application against the border you want to expand to. These are simple things I do often in other OS's that have tedious menu workflows in MacOS. I still like a lot of MacOS though.

[michaelmrose]

Ramming against edges doesn't work as well in a multiple monitor arrangement. I forget which environment had this as a default and in what era but one of the smarter defaults I've seen is super(windows key) + keypad numbers. For instance 1: Bottom left quarter, 4: left half, 5: maximize

[onetom]

The built-in Cmd-` (backtick) cycles through the windows of the currently selected app.

I find it better than Context.app, which i did buy and used on a few machines for a few years.

it's like navigating within a sparse table.

columns are the apps, chosen by cmd-tab.

rows are the windows of an app, chosen with cmd-` .

[fragmede]

Contexts.app to fix alt-tab

[GuestHNUser]

Thanks for this! Shame it isn't built in functionality.

[MarcusE1W]

I guess MacOS is more polished than KDE. Probably more polished than anything. A few billions here and there help. Given that KDE is an open source community project it’s quite good.

[amlib]

In terms of look & feel, sure Mac OS wins over all other options, but in terms of functionality... its very debatable.

[skinkestek]

> the attention to detail in the MacOS UI is just amazing.

Please feel free to answer these questions (I think I already know the answer so this is to illustrate a point, but I will also be happy to learn a better way):

1. How do you cut and paste something on a Mac using the keyboard?

2. How do you cut a file in one folder and paste it into another in Finder using the keyboard?

3. How are you supposed to know the answer to 2. except by learning it by discussing with Mac users?

4. I haven't tested recently but it used to be that there was no single consistent way to get to the start or end of a line while selecting the text in between. CMD-shift-arrow left/right worked most places, but not everywhere. Ctrl + a/e always worked but couldn't be used to select text, only to move the cursor.

PS: I already asked for a Mac as my next machine at work. But as someone who uses and have used almost all major desktops (Gnome 2, KDE 3, 4 and 5, Windows 95 - 10, several iterations of Mac OS X) for significant time, I do feel the "attention to detail" argument for Mac is a bit overblown.

PPS: I planning to get a Mac because it has good hardware, is silent, fast and because I want to try it again after a few years. Also I have migrates my whole family to Apple phones since last I used Mac at work.

[Wowfunhappy]

1. By pressing cmd+x and cmd+v

2. You don't.

I realize that's not a very satisfying answer, but it's quite obviously a conscious UX choice, and IMO not a bad one. The problem is, where does the file go in between the time you cut and you paste? If you accidentally copy something else to your clipboard, do you loose the entire file? Does the file appear in the Trash or is it deleted perminently?

You can use cmd+c and then cmd+alt+v to copy a file to your clipboard and then move it to a different directory, but moving is distinct from cutting in that it's a synchronous operation. There is no in between point where your file is lost in the ether.

3. Assuming we're referring to "how do you move a file with the keyboard", you open the "edit" menu in Finder's global menu bar, then hold down "alt", at which point "paste" will change to "move item here".

I agree "hold down option" is not particularly discoverable. However, it's a standard across all of macOS for enabling alternative options. For example, holding down alt will also change "Minimize" to "Minimize All", and "Quit" to "Quit and Keep Windows" (or "Quit and don't keep Windows" depending on your default preference). Once you know this basic idea, it's consistent.

4. To my knowledge this works in all apps that use Carbon/Cocoa. If apps reimplement these views and disregard Apple's design guidelines, what is Apple supposed to do?

P.S. I think modern macOS is a poorly thought out mess but I love how it was a decade ago (up to OS X 10.9).

[skinkestek]

Late, but thanks.

I am waiting for a Mac as my next machine and the bit about alt in the menu should help quite a bit.

I am stil a bit annoyed from last time I used Mac a decade ago and all the things I couldn't figure out without extensive web searches or asking coworkers but I have still figured out it is time to try it again :-)

[sbuk]

The cmd+x/c/v keyboard shortcuts have been around much longer than the ctrl+x/c/v equivalents - copied by Microsoft in Windows 3.0; it was all CUA previous to that.

1. So to cut in applications (or anywhere anything is selectable other than Finder), it's cmd+x, as it has been since the early '80s; likewise, paste is cmd+v

2. In Finder, you'd use cmd+c to copy the file, cmd+v to paste a copy and cmd+opt+v to move the file. This was introduced, I think, in Lion (OS X 10.9).

3. Erm, using the menu bar to begin with? Reading the built-in help? Searching the internet? How do you learn it in Windows and/or any other $desktop or $wm?

4. *Emacs keybindings work in most places in macOS, and they have since the first beta of OS X.

Edit: *most...

[hotnfresh]

Cutting stuff in word processors or content areas, and moving files, are two different operations that behave the same approximately nowhere, and it’s not obvious that they should share the same commands. Digging back into the distant past when I first encountered this on Win 95 (I don’t think I knew about it on 3.1?) it was indeed confusing, though of course now it seems OK, because I got used to it.

The example of whether to use the same command for ready-a-file-to-perhaps-move-but-leave-it-otherwise as for definitely-remove-this-thing-now-and-maybe-put-it-somewhere-else is more a matter of taste than one or the other representing better attention to detail.

[arein3]

Agree. Plasma is another league.

[tsss]

The margins and paddings are objectively terrible. It is not a matter of taste. There is no coherent design here, nothing aligns, there is no visual hierarchy and often it doesn't even show more information than GNOME despite looking so much worse.

[smoldesu]

> often it doesn't even show more information than GNOME despite looking so much worse

Yeah, even as a GTK developer I'm gonna throw a yellow flag here. I've got both Qt and GTK apps that I really love and daily-drive, but none of my GTK3, GTK4 or Libadwaita apps even remotely approach the information density of a Qt app. There's nothing wrong with that; simplicity is nice for a lot of software. But programs like Cutter, Okteta or even music apps like Eliza cannot be built with the GNOME HIG. I'd even argue that certain GNOME apps like Meld, GIMP and Glade/Cambalache suffer from relying on the GNOME HIG too much.

[aquova]

I used to think the same as you, and I would still agree that out of the box, KDE is probably uglier than Gnome is. However, I've grown to be rather impressed with what you can do with KDE, and more importantly that KDE allows you to do it. Using Gnome was a slow descent into watching all the plugins and UI choices I liked be slowly removed or break over time.

[creesch]

I am not really sure how your comment is a reaction to mine? Having said that, opinions are opinions. I much prefer KDEs UI/UX choices over those made by Gnome and have no problem with the general look and feel of the interface.

[JohnFen]

Beauty is entirely subjective, though. I don't find KDE ugly at all. Nor do I find Gnome ugly. But I find KDE easy to use, and I don't find the same about Gnome. Even if KDE was ugly to me, usability is more important. KDE is also very configurable, so I could probably bend it into something more to my taste.

[znpy]

unironically if that's what you're complaining about, you might have liked kde3 a lot (yes, it's been 15 years and i still miss it).

anyway, kde is very configurable so most likely you might bend it to your liking, had you been somehow forced into kde.

> KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to

have you considered XFCE ? to me it's the best so far: it does all the things i need, it's fast and it isn't dumbed down like gnome.

It's not on wayland yet, but frankly I don't care much about the X11 vs Wayland debacle (though i slightly side with Xorg). Essentially I run whatever XFCE needs.

When XFCE will run on wayland, I'll run on wayland I guess.

[JohnFen]

> you might have liked kde3 a lot (yes, it's been 15 years and i still miss it).

You're not the only one. Ah, the poignancy of reminiscing about loves that we've lost.

[amlib]

kde3 with kdemod and the breathtaking choices of _actual_ themes (not just color schemes or "accent color" bs, but a plethora of widget themes that could make it look like anything you wanted plus rich guis to customize any and everything) plus the "emulation" of windows 9x HIG which kde apps back then used to copy and even improve upon was the pinnacle of desktop OS for me. Every major OS has been a major downgrade since... :`(

[lnxg33k1]

I don’t care as long as something is capable of solving issues, but for those who have the needs to have pretty DE, kde has a lot of custom themes and customisability, otherwise its just a boring old guy complaining at the sky, the linux world is better off without those kind of people

[schmorptron]

I agree on the spacing part, but it's not fair to complain about it and not submit actual solutions to them.

Have you tried getting to know their contribution process, looking at their current design guidelines and submitting a new, well-thought-out and complete design guideline proposal to KDE? Having someone who notices the current problems with that aspect, like you, actually do the work and help fix it could really make a difference! :)

[walteweiss]

I would really like to step up here (not joking), but I am yet to understand the process and explore KDE once again. I do like it generally, but visually it’s a mess. I use swaywm on my Arch laptop and pure Gnome 45 on a couple of my Fedora 39 PCs (work and home ones).

Would appreciate if someone can help me to get quicker at understanding with their system, so I can actually contribute and not just complain about it being inconsistent here and there. Even though I not use KDE myself, I use it from time to time on other’s machines and enjoy playing with it. I would consider a switch only if the DE would highly reconsider itself towards simplifying and making other defaults. At the moment, Gnome looks like it to me.

[schmorptron]

That's great! (i mean this unironically in case that came off sarcastic)

I'm not a kde contributor myself, but they seem to have a matrix channel for that purpose at [ https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#new-contributors:kde.org ], where the contributors themselves can probably point you to the relevant resources and get started.

About your second point: From what I've been reading on their blog, a large focus of Plasma 6 is making the defaults more sane and simplifying them a good bit.

It's obviously a huge challenge to design systems that are simple and polished to understand and use on the surface, but powerful to customize underneath, and I'm interested to see how it will be tackled.

Edit: Also on this site [ https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved ] they point to resources for the KDE Visual Design group

[walteweiss]

Thank you! It will take time, but I will come there eventually.

[fbdab103]

Not OP, but everyone is entitled to an opinion. I can not like Transformers without having a ten-point plan for how to make it a passable movie^.

^ While writing this, I came up with loads of concrete suggestions relating to Transformers, but kind of beside the point.*

[jwells89]

Even as someone who’s using KDE on one machine I tend to agree. Things can be polished up a bit by changing themes and font settings but that only goes so far — it can’t do anything about widget arrangement and the general flow of UI design in KDE apps which I find somewhat awkward.

[cmplxconjugate]

I absolutely agree. It is functional and stable, but my gosh I can’t stand the design. The oversized top decoration for windows as well as the extremely poorly rendered pop-up for hovering over elements on the task bar.

[wasmitnetzen]

You know can change that, right? One major point of KDE is that you can configure anything.

[cout]

I remember when gnome was that way. I still don't understand why it changed.

[tentacleuno]

> extremely poorly rendered pop-up for hovering over elements on the task bar

The only real issue with that, for me (and it's not poorly rendered, not sure what that means) is the time it takes to activate. You have to hover over it for like a second before the pop-up shows up; this is especially frustrating when items are grouped.

[solarkraft]

Absolutely. It's not just that, it's also how it's different in every app.

KDE (perhaps surprisingly) does have a design group, but I have to imagine them not being taken seriously in the slightest.

[wkat4242]

I love KDE. Also everything is themeable and configurable so if you don't like how it looks, just take a theme you do like.

[sph]

I'm gonna be very controversial here, but the problem is that the vast majority of Linux users are blind to aesthetics and design. Perhaps the vast majority of people are. Mind you, being blind to something does not mean it does not exist.

Just look at the desktop wallpaper or any font choice of the average person. It's no wonder Comic Sans and Papyrus are the most common fonts in the world, even for formal business documents.

Which is perfectly fine, and design challenged people would enjoy a well-designed desktop environment as well, the issue is that they are ready to defend bad design choices to the death. So mention KDE having lower design standards than GNOME and you get a ton of people telling you "it looks fine to me, I don't know what you're moaning about."

You'd get the same answer telling the average person that, no, Comic Sans is not appropriate for an obituary.

---

That said, KDE is slowly growing on me, but the default GNOME look is much more slick, even though GTK4 does 1/20th of what QT does. All modern GTK4/Adwaita apps are a flat, slick blob of grey list widgets.

Colour theory and the use of accent colours or non-monochrome icons is unknown to the average GTK developer.

[sublinear]

> the vast majority of Linux users are blind to aesthetics and design

Yes, my god is KDE ugly, but just because they don't prioritize aesthetics doesn't mean they don't know better.

Linux users (and developers) prioritize functionality above all else. Meanwhile the entire discipline of visual design is just not very consistent. There are far too many subjective little rules and exceptions to maintain and they change all the time. Who cares?

Deliberate oversimplification of how things are displayed from the perspective of the implementer rather than the designer is its own aesthetic. It's the choice of reason and a rejection of the imperfections of human perception. It's rebellious and edgy. It's not a mere rationalization of laziness or ignorance, but a middle finger to business types and their marketing henchmen with their annoying design guidelines and requirements that just get in the way of the actual product. KDE was not made by people getting paid to smile and nod while staying quiet in their cubicles (at least not during the hours they worked on it). Very rock and roll. I'm all for it.

[jdiff]

This is exactly the problem. These two things are not at odds. Good design is functional. Good design makes information easy to find and digest. Visual soup is hard to organize and make sense of. Form is a component of function. A knife with another blade instead of a handle can do less cutting, not more. A knife with a contoured handle is easier to wield than one with a flat block handle. These concepts translate well into UI.

[sublinear]

If you don't think they're at odds, then you should try your hand at implementing what you think looks good without breaking upstream features. Then try maintaining it indefinitely.

> Visual soup is hard to organize and make sense of.

Initially yes but once you know where things are, having everything be visually distinct can sidestep a lot of unnecessary GUI features (search boxes, configurable views, toolbars, etc.) to overcome the impenetrable and dishonest sameness that comes with "good design". If there's a way to avoid writing more code to maintain, they're going to find it. Why obscure the reality of the underlying logic and data when it just gets in the way of progress towards more functionality?

In a production setting desktop environments are rare anyway and that's where applications are at their most complex. That should be proof enough that visual design isn't functional. You want functional and accessible? That's a simple 1KB config file on a server somewhere that you edit from a terminal instead of an endless sea of GUI menus and a lifetime of wrist and eye issues. The ultimate "contoured handle" is a copy of vim! If you don't see the equivalence then you don't understand how much of an unnecessary and tortured metaphor the desktop really is. It's a concession, not a requirement.

[jdiff]

Information can be dense and designed. It's actually more important for dense information to be designed well to avoid devolving into soup. KDE and its many design inconsistencies and automatic collapsing of menus into "... and X more items" leading to menus nested 5+ deep is not good design.

Away from KDE, away from GUIs, a dense text readout of key value pairs with no new lines presents a lot of information, but is functionally useless. A tiny dash of design - pairs on new lines, some boldness for keys, indentation for values that wrap to new lines - drastically increases the readability. No matter how familiar you are with this particular text dump, this remains true. You can't escape design by running off into the terminal.

In GUIs, having movable, modular panels can be good design. Blender's design is quite good, especially among its peers, and everything about it can be shuffled around in ways most apps with modular panels can only dream of.

Again, we're not talking about a 1 dimensional spectrum between design and density. Design isn't just "add padding" and "remove customizability."

[jdiff]

I fully realize I'm just talking to myself at this point but I want to get this thought out of my head and add that a big part of Blender's good design specifically comes from its flexibility. Every workspace is built from well-designed panels that are consistent internally and with each other, and that can be moved around at will to suit particular parts of the 3D workflow. Blender's modularity and customizability is actually a vital part of what makes its design good.

[Pannoniae]

Your comment is funny because Comic Sans is actually pretty good from a design and accessibility perspective.

The complaints are mostly "fun fonts are not appropriate for a business" and everyone jumped on hating it. But those who are not that stuck-up don't hate it with a passion...

[addicted]

There you go proving that it’s not just that many Linux users have a bad design sensibility, but worse, they will defend bad design as good design.

Not only do you defend it, even your defense proves that Comic Sans is a bad design, because matching the needs of what it’s used for (in this case a business setting, where fun fonts are not allowed) is one of the highest factors in good design.

And you display another behavior which is common among Linux users that the parent hasn’t mentioned. Finally resorting to complaining that the Users are wrong.

Here’s the usual 3 step that prevents a lot of progress in the Linux world.

1. Have bad design ideas. 2. Defend those bad design ideas. 3. Insist users and the people who want better design are wrong.

[Pannoniae]

Not all of life is business, and there's some business where fun is allowed.

Also, Comic Sans is not even something rebellious, it's literally a good-looking, quirky font, people just hate it because it looks distinctive and it stands out.

This is a bit dystopian to scream "NO FUN ALLOWED"....

[walteweiss]

Oh my, you guys came from ’90s or ’00s with your Comic Sans. I myself forgot this font ever existed, I see it nowhere these days.

It’s beyond awful, just get yourself some link to Google Fonts at least, and explore the myriads of much better looking fonts in every possible way. That’s exactly the problem with aesthetics perception of the FOSS community, having this subjective ‘oh but I like it’ stand on absolutely mediocre shit. I’m very happy that by some (unknown to me) reason modern Gnome (45) looks (and works) so good.

[sph]

I'll typeset your obituary in Comic Sans. I'll even add a clipart.

[sanitycheck]

> 1. Have bad design ideas. 2. Defend those bad design ideas. 3. Insist users and the people who want better design are wrong.

Not sure if you're right or not about Linux, but what you've laid out there has been Apple's approach for the past 20+ years and it's been working out pretty OK for them!

[walteweiss]

Yeah, just the company making the best UI/UX and basically leading the way for everyone. So bad indeed that their just smartphone department worth more than some countries GDP.

[lupusreal]

Since we're all being frank and sharing our two cents.. The people who criticize Linux aesthetics often come across as insufferable snobs who are obsessed with small details and have a hard time acknowledging the subjectivity of their personal preferences. If they spent half as much time configuring KDE/etc as they did complaining, then they'd soon have a system that aligns with their preferences.

[cedilla]

Op did not say it is a good choice for business.

Among designers the idea that comic sans is a very decent font is a very uncontroversial opinion.

[jdiff]

As a designer, the absolute warmest take I've seen towards Comic Sans is "It's fine, not good, but fine. But it's so overused and misused that it's become slightly radioactive."

[speed_spread]

You're confusing design with aesthetics. KDE design is fine. It doesn't chase the latest fads in GUI appearance which rightly makes it more usable than its peers which seem hellbent on reinventing conventions every few years for superficial reasons. This isn't just to the benefit of rigid nerds, a lot of people grew up with classic MacOS and Windows and expect some basic functionallity.

[JohnFen]

> the problem is that the vast majority of Linux users are blind to aesthetics and design.

This is just saying that people who don't share your taste are wrong (and worse, just don't know any better). I dispute that. Aesthetics are highly subjective, and things that have an aesthetic sense that I dislike are not wrong, and the people who do like it are not ignorant or idiots.

[kuschku]

I absolutely agree with everything you said.

Sadly, that's going to fall on deaf ears, as most people still can't tell aesthetics and design apart.

KDE has all the features and all the buttons. It's what I'd expect a prototype to be like.

Gnome simply reaches good design by just omitting everything that'd be hard to design. One way to do it, but obviously missing a lot of functionality.

Truly good design is making all the bells and whistles feel intuitive. Good design isn't about looks, it's about information hierarchy and structure.

Which is why I love the Windows 9x design so much.

[dooglius]

If the vast majority of people don't perceive it, it isn't bad. Some people are deathly allergic to peanuts, but that doesn't mean that food with peanuts is inherently bad, just that a small number of people react badly to it.

[ta8903]

>the vast majority of Linux users are blind to aesthetics and design

Are you sure you don't feel this way because Windows and Mac go out of their way to prevent you from changing anything about the UX at all?

[magicalhippo]

> the problem is that the vast majority of Linux users are blind to aesthetics and design

I'm not blind to it, but it certainly comes way down on the list compared to other things, like actually working.

As an example, my SO recently bought a new egg timer. She picked it solely based on it looking good. Turns out it's completely useless because you can barely hear it even if it's right in front of you.

Sure, if I'm buying something purely decorative, like a statue a painting, then aesthetics is all I'm going for. But for things I have to use, the thing has to do its job above anything else.

This is something a lot of designers seems to miss. Just look at Windows 11 when it launched, and the completely idiotic decision to force icons to group without text. Sure it looks less cluttered, but it's just like the egg timer, completely useless.

[hacker_homie]

Honestly I don’t need my DE to look pretty, I need it to do is show me information, not crash and not search bing so all in all KDE is just fine in my opinion.

[Zardoz84]

You know that changing everything that you dislike from the default theme, can be done easily.