[mwidell]

Look at how the icons at the bottom have almost zero margin to the overly rounded sides.

Why is it so hard for anyone outside of Apple to make a visually appealing GUI? It just requires a little bit of taste and sense of aesthetics. I am baffled that this hasn't happened yet. The closest thing so far is probably ElementaryOS.

[jklinger410]

My whole issue with the COSMIC thing has been that it seems to be designed by developers. Not designers. At every corner they make baffling choices. The speed and functionality are great. The design not so much.

I'm hoping this UI matures and allows for customization so that I can get it where I want it.

[causal]

Yeah I think the HN crowd easily underestimates the amount of specialized talent and effort that goes into a good design. Much like good software, good design blends in so well that users don't realize how hard it was to make.

Apple spends billions on design, even inventing many of the core paradigms that have since become foundational. Apple still frustrates me with a lot of their choices, but let's not pretend just anyone can match their design prowess.

[ibash]

Care and craft. A lot of software engineers think that “done” means functional. And not “feels right”.

That and unless a software engineer has specifically practiced implementing pixel perfect designs from a great designer, then they don’t spot the errors. The design will feel wrong but they don’t know why.

[pxc]

'Pixel perfect' designs are stupid, qnd responsible for backwards steps in font scaling. GUIs should be reflowable, not 'pixel perfect'. Dumbass 'pixel perfect' designs are the reason you can't resize the fucking System Preferences window.

They're also shitty for accessibility. If you're significantly visually impaired but still inclined to rely on your remaining vision, you'll find that (a) macOS doesn't let you jack the fonts up big enough and (b) when you actually do get large enough text just by jacking up the scale of the whole Ui, all kinds of text fields are truncated and some windows some even fit properly on your screen.

Aligning UIs by pixel makes them worse.

[ibash]

You're arguing with yourself. "Pixel perfect" doesn't mean what you think it does.

> Pixel perfect is a design approach that aims to achieve a precise and consistent look for a design, down to the pixel level.

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+pixel+perfect

[pxc]

I'm aware that 'pixel perfect' doesn't strictly mean 'totally fixed layout'. That's not really relevant here.

You can't have, for instance, consistent alignments down to the pixel level, on systems with arbitrary DPI emulation, e.g., when you set DPI manually to something other than 96 in Xorg. This is where the usual caveats for 'fractional scaling' come in (because you have to render at a higher resolution and then scale it down), why such scaling often results in blurry text, why HiDPI displays are required for the normal scaling on macOS, etc. Such changes come in part in pursuit of enabling 'pixel perfect design' on the desktop, and they suck.

Commenters on this site will frequently point out things that are apparently misaligned by a single pixel. What is their complaint, if not that the UI element in question fails to be pixel perfect?

Whether the System Preferences pane must have a fixed size in order to achieve 'pixel perfection' is perhaps debatable. That such inflexibility makes pixel alignment easier is obvious. You think Apple have some other, better reason for System Settings being completely unresizable? What is it?

[ibash]

The point was that unless an engineer has practiced implementing designs exactly, they often miss the details and don’t _see_ the details they’ve missed.

I say this as someone who used to not see the details, and then worked at a company where it was expected that we implement designs exactly. Ever since then I can’t _not_ see UI design details.

It’s like shopping for a car, once you’re biased towards a specific model you see it everywhere.

[devnull3]

> a visually appealing GUI

I think it requires a combination of things: a good taste, a sense of visual design and programming. The first two is more of art form.

Most of the developers on these projects are really good at programming but its rare to get a good combination mentioned above AND willing to work on open source over multiple years consistently.

Update: Also someone in the decision making hierarchy needs to have a keen sense of design. Example: Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and even though he did not actually designed it he would certainly veto and pass feedback to the developers.

[PufPufPuf]

People are just used to how Apple GUIs look like. I could do the same thing, look at the macOS dock and exclaim that it's ugly because the bottom margin is noticeably larger than the top margin. It's all a matter of taste.

[ibash]

It's really not a matter of taste though. This dismissive attitude of good design is part of the problem.

[jaimehrubiks]

I'm looking right now at my mac's dock (on the left side) and see clear misaligned stuff. I think it's because of the black dot that tells when the app is opened or not, but the right margin is smaller than the left margin, and the dot is not even centered in the left margin, is close to the left edge, looking even bad if you notice.

[renewiltord]

Only software has the culture of sharing. Not other engineering. And certainly not design. Consequently, the open-source mentality pervades software: lots of good stuff is available. Lacking this culture, people with design sensibilities work on design in proprietary spaces and comment in public but do not make open-source software.

Some people think this is because it's hard to contribute as designers, but I think it's just that designers are brought up in a proprietary school of thought. It's just like some cultures have recipe-sharing and others have the notion of 'secret recipe'.

To my people there is no 'secret recipe': if you ask, you shall receive. But others hold this notion dear. This cultural divide pervades occupations and makes some incapable of sharing.

[dartharva]

Microsoft attempted the same thing with Windows 11 and it turned out to be a functional disaster. All platforms have their own legacy default workflows that regular customers are used to, that cannot be screwed with for "aesthetics".

[juujian]

I have no admittedly no understanding of aesthetics. Is the ideal big margins and this is far away from it, or is this close to the ideal with minimal margins? From a functional standpoints margins around a dock would be a waste of space, no?

[gizmo]

The problem isn't that margins should have a specific size but that the design as a whole should feel cohesive. It's the balance of padding, margin, font sizes, and text alignment that is all wrong. Not just one specific thing, but the whole thing. Nothing lines up vertically. There are too many and too few borders. Some invisible borders take up space and others don't.

Big margins and tons of whitespace is fashionable. Good design doesn't need to be fashionable, but it does need internal consistency. A Mac-style dock with big rounded corners needs some space to breathe. If you don't want to sacrifice that screen space then maybe it's better to go for a more angular design.

[gjsman-1000]

It seems Linux is stuck in two worlds, never the Twain shall meet:

1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.)

2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.

I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.

[squidbeak]

It's more granular than that. Engineers who are good at UI are often really bad at UX. Very often with Linux the UX has been sacrificed to some snazzy new look (Gnome 3 and Unity) with horrible UX. Meanwhile UX is quite seriously good in environments that look plain, such as XFCE.

But using KDE, Gnome, XFCE or Mate and then popping into the modern Windows' hellscape shows that actually Linux on the Desktop is already here and pretty damned good.

[jklinger410]

I installed EOS on my dad's old computer. He is stuck on an old version because he is not technical enough to do a re-install. I pretty much swore it off after that issue.

[jwells89]

Seems like the ideal is for group 2 to be producing the DE and working in concert with group 1 who's responsible for the distro. How exactly to arrive at this result is another question.

[jeremyjh]

Well, and then there is Gnome. Where the aesthetics are appealing but the usability is a scornful afterthought.

[stiltzkin]

I thought someone as Steam can make it work.

[Vogtinator]

> you do you, but watch your market share always be niche.

As long as I can use the OS I like and how I like, I don't care about metrics like market share.

[hindsightbias]

Another spelling for OCD was Ive.