7 ms·

Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really nee

by dkiebd 1y ago

Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really need a professional designer.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine. I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
- codr7 1y ago
  Likewise, none of that bothers me as much as Apple's design over function madness lately.
- bundie 1y ago
  I dunno how to explain it, but to me, Plasma looks "bad" in a "good," or should I say "consistent," way. Like, it looks "bad," but it's honestly not that bad.
- graemep 1y ago
  I do not care much. I do use third party themes but I suspect they have the same problems. I just have some colour preferences and like pretty icons. I prefer to have third party apps icons overridden by the icon theme, but then I can just use another icon theme.
- orev 1y ago
  It’s very easy to become blind to UX issues even after just a few exposures to it. Once you “figure it out”, it’s not a problem anymore. The thing is that you can easily lose many potential users who don’t want to give any time at all to “figuring it out”.
- mih 1y ago
  I am one such user. KDE Plasma has been my daily driver ever since the early days of version 5. Admittedly am not someone with a keen eye for design. There might be some rough edges and the occasional annoyance, but you quickly get used to it. The desktop/windowing system for me is just a means to launch an application which is where I spend most of my time. This often happens to be a browser, a terminal and IDE etc. The design of such apps takes more precedence for me than some margin of the control center items where I couldn't recognize what the problems were if you asked me to. What bothers me more than the visual design is the interaction design ... am trying to find a way to move a sticky note which has been on my desktop for quite some time and the method I used previously no long works. Also some releases ago they mapped 'Alt-F' on the Konsole terminal app to a Find input box, whereas the binding is normally used on terminals for "move cursor forward by a word". This is not a sane default and has caused me to pick Wezterm as my preferred terminal app.
hnlmorg 1y ago
To be fair to KDE, it feels a hell of a lot more polished when you use it. The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change. The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.
oblio 1y ago
It won't ever happen. KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE. They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born. Look at this image: https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/1755342382_usb-device-connection-notification.webp https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423... The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care. At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-) Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this? Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
- graemep 1y ago
  Why did you have to say this!? Now I will noice! never did before! :)
  - oblio 1y ago
    Welcome to my world, since circa 2005! :-p
- nyonyo 1y ago
  >The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme. It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.
ndriscoll 1y ago
The user controls system font and size. It looks fine to me? KDE is also basically the only usable non-power user desktop environment these days. The margins/padding are a little big, but it's better than most modern applications that professionals produce.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I am not a designer, just a dev with a bit of a visual inclination, but I think what makes KDE’s typography feel “off” is missing steps in visual hierarchy due to how the different sizes relate to each other in screen (e.g. header vs body text), as well as font weights being a bit too homogenous. So its differentiation is too great in one way and not enough in another, which feels awkward. The font sizes being modifiable isn’t the issue.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    There's a community effort underway to develop a next-generation appearance based on a design system (and a new theme engine) that also includes a properly designed set of font weights. I agree this will be a big improvement. I love type design, and our typography in KDE being relatively scattershot has always been one of my pain points as well.
- nyonyo 1y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png Here's why no amount of mere customization can "fix it" Last screenshot is from Gnome settings serving as a strong contrast to the rest (KDE screenshots taken from the OP article)
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    It looks like most of the margin differences you complain about are due to icons not filling out their square canvas/bounding box depending on the depicted object. This is generally how icons work, unless you go Android and slap a circle/squircle background on all of them. Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course. There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Yeah. I’ve used KDE on and off a few times, but this aspect of it always bugs me. It can be dampened a bit by changing themes but ultimately fixing it would mean fairly major changes to almost everything, at which point you gotta start wondering if you wouldn’t be better off building your own thing. While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.
tiahura 1y ago
The funny part is that articles dumping on Windows UI get ranked up all of the time (like presently), but the alternatives are all 10x worse.
- diggan 1y ago
  Personally I dump on both Windows and macOS for being UI and UX dumpster-fires today, compared to how they used to be. macOS in particular used to have really good UX, but as times goes on, Apple seems to ignore the actual design of software more and more, for reasons that elude me. And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.
- dkiebd 1y ago
  I disagree. macOS and gnome are really good. Even xfce is better than kde
  - tiahura 1y ago
    macOS makes me feel like I’m on an Xwindows terminal in 1993, and not in a good way.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ksec 1y ago
Surprised this is upvoted on top and many comments agreeing. Every time on HN I said Linux Desktop ( KDE or GNOME ) still has that linux looks and unpolished, I get told off and even at one point being told I have no taste and most users wont notice it. Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals. On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.
- dkiebd 1y ago
  Gnome may not be perfect but it’s sooo much better than kde. kde is just awful, it’s an eternal mockup, as if they let the code writers also design the interface. They have no idea what they are doing. And they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better. > they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like. What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
    - dkiebd 1y ago
      > Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better. That’s good, but not what I was discussing here
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-) As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy. I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except. Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
w4rh4wk5 1y ago
Agreed, still better than Windows 11 ^^
mrob 1y ago
IMO, software should look unpolished, to match the quality of the code and set realistic expectations. Almost all code for general purpose use is broken in some way. Writing non-trivial correct code without formal verification is a hopeless task. Consider that even SQLite, which goes to extraordinary lengths to test for correctness [0], is still often found to be incorrect [1]. Correct code is rare and generally doesn't have a GUI. [0] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html [1] https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1 https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1 EDIT: Consider the Horizon IT scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal This kind of thing would be less likely to happen if designers didn't (probably inadvertently) mislead people into thinking software is usually correct.
ginko 1y ago
Eh, judging by what happened to gnome + gtk apps I’d rather keep designers as far away from kde as possible.
lousken 1y ago
After all those years I still don't understand this argument. Have you looked at windows since vista? Don't they have designers? What difference does it make?

by dkiebd 1y ago

Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really need a professional designer.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago

I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine. I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?

codr7 1y ago
Likewise, none of that bothers me as much as Apple's design over function madness lately.
bundie 1y ago
I dunno how to explain it, but to me, Plasma looks "bad" in a "good," or should I say "consistent," way. Like, it looks "bad," but it's honestly not that bad.
graemep 1y ago
I do not care much. I do use third party themes but I suspect they have the same problems. I just have some colour preferences and like pretty icons. I prefer to have third party apps icons overridden by the icon theme, but then I can just use another icon theme.
orev 1y ago
It’s very easy to become blind to UX issues even after just a few exposures to it. Once you “figure it out”, it’s not a problem anymore. The thing is that you can easily lose many potential users who don’t want to give any time at all to “figuring it out”.
mih 1y ago
I am one such user. KDE Plasma has been my daily driver ever since the early days of version 5. Admittedly am not someone with a keen eye for design. There might be some rough edges and the occasional annoyance, but you quickly get used to it. The desktop/windowing system for me is just a means to launch an application which is where I spend most of my time. This often happens to be a browser, a terminal and IDE etc. The design of such apps takes more precedence for me than some margin of the control center items where I couldn't recognize what the problems were if you asked me to. What bothers me more than the visual design is the interaction design ... am trying to find a way to move a sticky note which has been on my desktop for quite some time and the method I used previously no long works. Also some releases ago they mapped 'Alt-F' on the Konsole terminal app to a Find input box, whereas the binding is normally used on terminals for "move cursor forward by a word". This is not a sane default and has caused me to pick Wezterm as my preferred terminal app.

hnlmorg 1y ago

To be fair to KDE, it feels a hell of a lot more polished when you use it. The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change. The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.

oblio 1y ago

It won't ever happen. KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE. They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born. Look at this image: https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/1755342382_usb-device-connection-notification.webp https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423... The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care. At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-) Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this? Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.

graemep 1y ago
Why did you have to say this!? Now I will noice! never did before! :)
- oblio 1y ago
  Welcome to my world, since circa 2005! :-p
nyonyo 1y ago
>The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme. It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.

ndriscoll 1y ago

The user controls system font and size. It looks fine to me? KDE is also basically the only usable non-power user desktop environment these days. The margins/padding are a little big, but it's better than most modern applications that professionals produce.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I am not a designer, just a dev with a bit of a visual inclination, but I think what makes KDE’s typography feel “off” is missing steps in visual hierarchy due to how the different sizes relate to each other in screen (e.g. header vs body text), as well as font weights being a bit too homogenous. So its differentiation is too great in one way and not enough in another, which feels awkward. The font sizes being modifiable isn’t the issue.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  There's a community effort underway to develop a next-generation appearance based on a design system (and a new theme engine) that also includes a properly designed set of font weights. I agree this will be a big improvement. I love type design, and our typography in KDE being relatively scattershot has always been one of my pain points as well.
nyonyo 1y ago
https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png Here's why no amount of mere customization can "fix it" Last screenshot is from Gnome settings serving as a strong contrast to the rest (KDE screenshots taken from the OP article)
- sho_hn 1y ago
  It looks like most of the margin differences you complain about are due to icons not filling out their square canvas/bounding box depending on the depicted object. This is generally how icons work, unless you go Android and slap a circle/squircle background on all of them. Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course. There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Yeah. I’ve used KDE on and off a few times, but this aspect of it always bugs me. It can be dampened a bit by changing themes but ultimately fixing it would mean fairly major changes to almost everything, at which point you gotta start wondering if you wouldn’t be better off building your own thing. While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.

tiahura 1y ago

The funny part is that articles dumping on Windows UI get ranked up all of the time (like presently), but the alternatives are all 10x worse.

diggan 1y ago
Personally I dump on both Windows and macOS for being UI and UX dumpster-fires today, compared to how they used to be. macOS in particular used to have really good UX, but as times goes on, Apple seems to ignore the actual design of software more and more, for reasons that elude me. And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.
dkiebd 1y ago
I disagree. macOS and gnome are really good. Even xfce is better than kde
- tiahura 1y ago
  macOS makes me feel like I’m on an Xwindows terminal in 1993, and not in a good way.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ksec 1y ago

Surprised this is upvoted on top and many comments agreeing. Every time on HN I said Linux Desktop ( KDE or GNOME ) still has that linux looks and unpolished, I get told off and even at one point being told I have no taste and most users wont notice it. Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals. On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.

dkiebd 1y ago
Gnome may not be perfect but it’s sooo much better than kde. kde is just awful, it’s an eternal mockup, as if they let the code writers also design the interface. They have no idea what they are doing. And they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better. > they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like. What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
  - dkiebd 1y ago
    > Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better. That’s good, but not what I was discussing here
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
sho_hn 1y ago
Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-) As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy. I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except. Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.

w4rh4wk5 1y ago

Agreed, still better than Windows 11 ^^

mrob 1y ago

IMO, software should look unpolished, to match the quality of the code and set realistic expectations. Almost all code for general purpose use is broken in some way. Writing non-trivial correct code without formal verification is a hopeless task. Consider that even SQLite, which goes to extraordinary lengths to test for correctness [0], is still often found to be incorrect [1]. Correct code is rare and generally doesn't have a GUI. [0] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html [1] https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1 https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1 EDIT: Consider the Horizon IT scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal This kind of thing would be less likely to happen if designers didn't (probably inadvertently) mislead people into thinking software is usually correct.

ginko 1y ago

Eh, judging by what happened to gnome + gtk apps I’d rather keep designers as far away from kde as possible.

lousken 1y ago

After all those years I still don't understand this argument. Have you looked at windows since vista? Don't they have designers? What difference does it make?