[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.