7 ms·

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 jus

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.

creesch 3y ago
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.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
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
brnt 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    It'll need finishing touches but they've got plenty of time for that before the February 2024 launch
- tsss 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
- arein3 3y ago
  Agree. Plasma is another league.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - wpm 3y ago
    It’s a desktop environment not a prom dress, I don’t really care about aesthetics.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      If you came up with clothes to compare, it fits well this comparison. You can wear shitty clothes, look bad, but if you’re comfortable, then it’s ok for you. But you tell others you look great, and truly believe you look great. And want others to look like you. That’s the problem. Keep that to yourself if you aren’t about to learn at least some basics.
- brabel 3y ago
  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)?
  - MarcusE1W 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      In terms of look & feel, sure Mac OS wins over all other options, but in terms of functionality... its very debatable.
  - GuestHNUser 3y ago
    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.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Contexts.app to fix alt-tab
      - GuestHNUser 3y ago
        Thanks for this! Shame it isn't built in functionality.
hacker_homie 3y ago
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.
aquova 3y ago
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.
znpy 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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... :`(
cmplxconjugate 3y ago
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 3y ago
  You know can change that, right? One major point of KDE is that you can configure anything.
  - cout 3y ago
    I remember when gnome was that way. I still don't understand why it changed.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  > 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.
sph 3y ago
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.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  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.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
solarkraft 3y ago
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.
schmorptron 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 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 https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved ] they point to resources for the KDE Visual Design group
    - 3y ago
JohnFen 3y ago
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.
Zardoz84 3y ago
You know that changing everything that you dislike from the default theme, can be done easily.
jwells89 3y ago
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.
wkat4242 3y ago
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.

creesch 3y ago

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.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

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

brnt 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  It'll need finishing touches but they've got plenty of time for that before the February 2024 launch
tsss 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
arein3 3y ago
Agree. Plasma is another league.
walteweiss 3y ago
[flagged]
- wpm 3y ago
  It’s a desktop environment not a prom dress, I don’t really care about aesthetics.
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    If you came up with clothes to compare, it fits well this comparison. You can wear shitty clothes, look bad, but if you’re comfortable, then it’s ok for you. But you tell others you look great, and truly believe you look great. And want others to look like you. That’s the problem. Keep that to yourself if you aren’t about to learn at least some basics.
brabel 3y ago
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)?
- MarcusE1W 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    In terms of look & feel, sure Mac OS wins over all other options, but in terms of functionality... its very debatable.
- GuestHNUser 3y ago
  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.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Contexts.app to fix alt-tab
    - GuestHNUser 3y ago
      Thanks for this! Shame it isn't built in functionality.

hacker_homie 3y ago

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.

aquova 3y ago

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.

znpy 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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... :`(

cmplxconjugate 3y ago

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 3y ago
You know can change that, right? One major point of KDE is that you can configure anything.
- cout 3y ago
  I remember when gnome was that way. I still don't understand why it changed.
tentacleuno 3y ago
> 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.

sph 3y ago

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.

speed_spread 3y ago
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.
Pannoniae 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.

solarkraft 3y ago

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.

schmorptron 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 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 https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved ] they point to resources for the KDE Visual Design group
  - 3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

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.

Zardoz84 3y ago

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

jwells89 3y ago

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.

wkat4242 3y ago

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.