7 ms·

I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved? These days, I daily d

I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved? These days, I daily drive Niri and love it. I love the workflow of a scrolling WM. I love that I can configure it via a single text file in the standard configuration directory, I love how lightweight it is. It’s just about perfect for me.

dmd 1y ago
> Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Gnome has been the best looking desktop for about 5 years now, with OS X in second place. KDE and Windows (after 7) are so far below that they're a category of their own. Apple should at once hire the people who are responsible for Gnome's UI, because they've got it figured out. Even better, put back together the Nokia N9 GUI team.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Not sure if you're serious or missing an /s there ;)
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      I honestly think so, but I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment. There's many things to not like with Gnome, but they've got the user interface figured out. Contrast is correct both in light mode and dark mode. Readability is excellent. Margins and paddings are consistent across the board. Buttons, checkboxes and other gizmos look exactly as they should, with subtle shadows and 3D effects. Border radiuses are consistent and not to large. Icons are not great, but that's the same on all desktop environments now. OS X had great icons, but that age is over. And since they have all the important basics correct, it is trivial to fix any short comings in the UI. The team deserves praise for what they've achieved.
      - distances 1y ago
        > I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment. You're sabotaging hard your own messaging with comments like this.
        carlosjobim 1y ago
        I don't concern myself too much, the value of votes are zero anyway, and the value of people who down vote is zero as well as far as I'm concerned. I have never down voted anything another person has written, I just think it's base behaviour.
        eth0up 1y ago
        You have at least one insignificant person on your side. I similarly almost never downvote. But they disabled my voting ability because I upvoted too generously. There are many cruel and pugnacious creatures here. Indeed, it's best to remain indifferent, lest... behavioral modification ensue, and one become strange.
        codr7 1y ago
        Yeah, the first rule of HN is that you don't talk about downvotes/censoring.
  - ziml77 1y ago
    That is entirely a matter of taste and familiarity
  - dimgl 1y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is a valid opinion to have. IMO my list is MacOS Sonoma, Windows 7, Gnome 30+. While I like the ideas behind KDE, XFCE and the like, they are terribly ugly by today's standards.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    GNOME is pretty, but it’s not great when it comes to progressive disclosure – what you see is what you get; there’s no depth in which power user features can be found. macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldn’t mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      The way for power using gnome is through extensions. But once you got used to the gnome philosophy, you find that you don’t have to fiddle with the UI that much.
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        Nice in theory, but my experience has been that extension devs burn out from having to update their extensions so often to keep them from breaking. There’s also some things that extensions can’t fix.
        skydhash 1y ago
        Don’t use private API then. While the public API is not stable, there’s few changes there.
        cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        I don't know what falls under public and private API but across my GNOME installs over the years there are numerous extensions that've broken and been abandoned, which suggests that most of the things that people want to customize sit on the private side of the line.
      - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
        The silly thing about Gnome extensions is that you have to configure them through a web browser rather than OS dialogs rendered with their own graphical toolkit.
  - amlib 1y ago
    Please don't ever again suggest Apple to hire the GNOME team. That would be a very sad day. Let them cook!
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      LetTim Cook!
    - pxoe 1y ago
      They already seem to vaguely echo gnome 3 look in macos. Huge titlebars with buttons, sidebar layouts in apps, transparent title bar, control center, etc., there's just a bunch of things that make you go 'huh'.
      - samtheDamned 1y ago
        I remember the first time I got to use OSX and realized just how much of it looked and felt like a less intuitive gnome haha
  - tmtvl 1y ago
    The date/time format for the clock in the panel should always be %A %F %R. Anything else is unusable.
  - prmph 1y ago
    Wow, just goes to show how different people's perception can be. To me Gnome is ugly, I really tried to like it but just could not. Didn't work too well for me also, but no way I'd describe Gnome as nice looking. KDE has been the only DE that does not give me that subliminal feeling of being grainy and crummy in the way that many people have associated with Linux UI since the beginning.
sho_hn 1y ago
> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved? It may have, yes! One of the ways we run the KDE community is that we have an annual process to elect community-wide goals, which then have their own leadership team, infra, budget, etc. The goals themselves are long-running, i.e. it's not one year and done, either. In about 2020/21 one of the goals that won/was added was titled "Improve Consistency across the Board", which lead to e.g. a comprehensive update of the HIG, renewed efforts on the controls library, and many cleanup passes across the products to get them up to date and in line. It's an ongoing process and I'm sure plenty of people can still point to a pet peeve or an ugly corner - we're happy to have discerning users with high expectations - but the general state of things should be much better than half a decade ago. There's also a next-gen styling/theming system project called Union in the works along with a next-gen design system developed in collaboration to take things to the next level in a few years, but we're taking our time to get it really right instead of pulling a Liquid Glass (one lesson we've learned through the years is that clawing your way back from reputational damage is really hard, and compromising on release quality is never the way to go). You can see annual updates on this e.g. in the feeds from our flagship dev conference.
- arximboldi 1y ago
  The screenshot in the OP article show already quite a few issues. It takes a trained eye to be able to articulate a lot of the issues. I feel like Gmome is designed by professional designers but KDE mostly by developers. I do share the sentiment that Gnome is often too rigid, but the design is coherent, consistent and aesthetically well articulated. I use Hyprland with mostly Gnome apps (have considered Niri too!) But I don't mean to trash KDE. Some people don't care about that padding or visual layering or whatever but do care about the extra options and features. At the end of the day, I'm just happy that we're on a platform where all these approaches have their space and people can chose and build commnities that grow tools that adapt to their own sensibilities and needs. KDE is great, Gnome is great, free software is great. Mac and Windows are hell.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    Honestly, I'm not too fond of the screenshots in the OP's article either. I'd say it looks all fairly slapdash and too busy. I will say that the permission editing is (as you can also see in the nav bar there) a few levels down digging into menus, and if you go into those kinds of corners of other systems the UIs often tend to start looking a bit more "developer-y". E.g. check the analogous bits of Android, and also MacOS has a few things like plist editor windows and such where you're suddenly well off the consumer track and into unloved form-shaped things. It's a bit like the backrooms. But that's not meant as a defense or justification! In fact blogs like this and lists of warts often help us. If you play fly on the wall in some of our channels (e.g. the promo ones), you will also often see people doing the legwork of parsing reviews and ticketizing criticisms. We try to listen quite actively because if someone dislikes a UI they're most often right. The most important thing is that what's bad today can in fact be good tomorrow, especially if you don't get defensive about it.
tuananh 1y ago
One day, I'm going to try niri. I'm just too lazy to migrate my i3 setup right now :D
- vladvasiliu 1y ago
  What's special about niri? Asking as a happy user of i3 for... I can't remember how long. It's one of the few pieces of software I don't have to think about, it just gets out of my way. Actually, the only situations where I think about it is when I'm driving a mac or a win and the window management gets on my nerves, although I'm generally a pretty chill guy.
  - pluc 1y ago
    i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo
  - WD-42 1y ago
    It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.
flohofwoe 1y ago
KDE Plasma 6 looks absolutely gorgeous on my Kubuntu laptop with highdpi OLED display, and that's coming from a mainly-Mac-user :) (this wasn't my main reason to switch from Gnome though, I just couldn't stand the random design decisions in each Gnome update anymore, and generally Gnome never really clicked with me the way KDE immediately did - which is also strange since Gnome is supposed to be the 'Mac desktop clone', while KDE is supposed to be the 'Windows desktop clone' heh)
- amlib 1y ago
  I really dislike how people present KDE and Gnome as being "clones" of Windows and MacOS. GNOME specially is so distinct (be it for good and bad reasons) that it deserves to be considered it's own thing. I can't stand MacOS with all it's Macosisms that are ingrained since it's Macintosh days. GNOME being grown for PC usages has none of these issues. Window management is also a breeze and easy to pickup rather than a byzantine mess. The only thing they really share is a nice, sparse look & feel. KDE does have a lot more similarities to Windows but saying it's a clone might put the wrong idea on peoples mind when they transition from Microsoft's system.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Back in the olden days, Microsoft and Apple did a lot of actual UI research, and for a resource-limited open source project there was no shame in piggybacking on those research results IMHO. But with the 'UX mafia' taking over big companies, nowadays it's reversed, the resource limited open source projects often have better usability.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. IDK mate, I care more about the utility than the looks since I spend my time using the DE, not hanging it on my wall to admire its artistic attention to detail. Like I'm sure those inconsistencies exist, but am I the only one whose brain just filters them out like they just don't exist? Kind of like how your brain filters out your nose from your eyesight and you only become aware of it when you look for it. And to me and my use case and formed habits, utility wise KDE >>> Gnome by a wide margin, though KDE still has some annoyances I wish they would tackle, but for a free product, I can't complain.
- jbstack 1y ago
  I think there's some truth to this (utility is overall more important), but also some falsehood (looks matter too). Aesthetics affect your enthusiasm and therefore your productivity. This is why, for example, most people would rather work in a room with large glass windows overlooking a lake than in a room with a small window overlooking a factory even if they are functionally the same.
- graemep 1y ago
  I agree with that. I really do not care about the inconsistencies - I did not even notice them until other people pointed them out. There are themes that look nice to me. None of that really matters compared to usability and functionality. Most of the time I have one panel showing and everything else I can see is applications. The applications are a mix of things anyway.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. I’m in that crowd. No matter how many times I see a poorly laid out dialog, it remains almost as abrasive as the first time I saw it. It can become a major distraction, especially as someone who’s capable of writing code.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. I’m in that crowd. I can empathize, but necessity has made me adaptable to all UXs at work. I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if I told my employer that their desktop environment that IT chose is not to my taste. At home I can be more picky but I still went with KDE and XFCE because that's what fits me best.
gempir 1y ago
I would recommend checking out Cosmic by System76. It's getting a beta very soon but I've been using the alpha and straight their git main for months now and it's very stable. It looks amazing and feels super snappy, I have never had such a painless Linux desktop experience. It even has a tiling window manager functionality built-in that was enough for me to sway away from i3/sway. But it also just works like a normal desktop that a non-technical user can use with ease. https://bsky.app/profile/system76.bsky.social/post/3lylz3cfyxk2g https://bsky.app/profile/system76.bsky.social/post/3lylz3cfy...
- dimgl 1y ago
  I'm actually super excited about this project. Out of curiosity, does the compositor they use have HDR support? It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    > It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops. Not sure about Cosmic, but both Gnome and KDE support HDR these days. Hyprland does as well and I think support for it was also merged into Sway recently.
osigurdson 1y ago
Ubuntu's Gnome is ugly imo, but stock Gnome on Arch is incredibly nice. Of course I really only use a terminal and a browser but still, Gnome + Ghosty + Firefox on Arch is just great.
Squarex 1y ago
Me too. I have used it in KDE 4 times when I was in high school, but it still seems to miss the design things. It is great for customization and functionality, but the design itself still seems off. This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here. [0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/posts/2025-09-17/Screenshot_20250917_192302.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
- aeve890 1y ago
  >This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here. I agree. Something looks off about it, but I can't put my finger on what. It's the empty space? The fonts? I don't know exactly.
  - inferiorhuman 1y ago
    For me it's the font. I know it serves a purpose but I simply dislike Noto Sans and to me that just makes KDE ugly to look at.
  - vitorgrs 1y ago
    KDE as a whole feels "UI design made by programmers" no offense to programmers who do UI (and to KDE designers)
- dwater 1y ago
  Can you explain explicitly what problems you have with the design in this screenshot?
whalesalad 1y ago
Here is my Debian 12 / KDE setup. With the "Inter" font, macOS icons (whitesur) and a little theming (klassy) I quite like it. Running this on a 5K Apple display and everything is crisp. desktop: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png code setup: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png
- klazutin 1y ago
  Those fonts look crisp! Is that 2x scaling? I've been considering converting a 27" Retina iMac to achieve something similar.
  - whalesalad 1y ago
    Yep - 200% scale, 5120x2880 res.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  What's that load monitor you have in the bottom left?
nixosbestos 1y ago
> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Hahhaha, absolutely classic linux on HN post. Couldn't be better written satire. Except that I guess you at least acknowledged it. Which non-abandonded OS/DE hasn't significantly changed in 5 years? I can't think of one. Maybe GNOME, but they were early movers and everyone hated them for that.
- pxoe 1y ago
  Looking at a screenshot from KDE home page, it really does not seem like anything has changed with it in terms of design polish that much. It doesn't even seem like it's moving in a direction that's any different. https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/fullscreen_with_apps.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/fullscreen_with... The most significant change for the whole look they could make is changing the system font, because that's the biggest and most visible thing, and the one they have looks amateurish and makes it feel slapdash, like it was an afterthought, just picking whatever default font there was and going "whatever", which kind of ends up being the vibe of the whole thing.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - nixosbestos 1y ago
    So you don't like it, I'm so sorry. I think it's a cluttered terrible screenshot, and I think KDE looks more consistent than Win11 or macOS. Nate's blog is full of detailed, significant, careful improvements to KDE's UX over the past few years.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    If you want to change the system font you can go right ahead. Don't knock it for it's default appearance because everything can be changed and skinned. Some people have made it look just like Windows, others just like macos.
- eviks 1y ago
  > Which non-abandonded OS/DE hasn't significantly changed in 5 years? Followed by a classic HN comment: the question was about improvement, not change!
rafaelmn 1y ago
No it has not. Despite the praises it is getting here it still looks like the programmer art, which fits with a certain crowd, but if you are (like me) into the Gnome/Mac type of look - its still gives Windows XP vibes.
thewebguyd 1y ago
KDE defaults used to be pretty ugly, but it has gotten quite a bit better. Still a little on the ugly side to me, but KDE is really what you make it. Quite literally everything about its UI and behavior is tweak able in settings (and unlike gnome, KDE provides a GUI for all of these settings...no hunting around in dconf). I used to prefer macOS, and still do to an extent, but Tahoe does not give me hope and I'm using my Linux laptop more and more. UI inconsistencies bug me, but Tahoe is full of them, so if I'm going to have to deal with it either way, might as well go Linux.
cryptos 1y ago
I had always the same feeling. KDE looks okay at first, but on a second look it would be somewhat ugly in a subtle way. That never changed for me in KDE, so I stopped looking at KDE some years ago. But maybe it is the time for another look!

dmd 1y ago

> Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!

carlosjobim 1y ago
Gnome has been the best looking desktop for about 5 years now, with OS X in second place. KDE and Windows (after 7) are so far below that they're a category of their own. Apple should at once hire the people who are responsible for Gnome's UI, because they've got it figured out. Even better, put back together the Nokia N9 GUI team.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  Not sure if you're serious or missing an /s there ;)
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    I honestly think so, but I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment. There's many things to not like with Gnome, but they've got the user interface figured out. Contrast is correct both in light mode and dark mode. Readability is excellent. Margins and paddings are consistent across the board. Buttons, checkboxes and other gizmos look exactly as they should, with subtle shadows and 3D effects. Border radiuses are consistent and not to large. Icons are not great, but that's the same on all desktop environments now. OS X had great icons, but that age is over. And since they have all the important basics correct, it is trivial to fix any short comings in the UI. The team deserves praise for what they've achieved.
    - distances 1y ago
      > I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment. You're sabotaging hard your own messaging with comments like this.
      - carlosjobim 1y ago
        I don't concern myself too much, the value of votes are zero anyway, and the value of people who down vote is zero as well as far as I'm concerned. I have never down voted anything another person has written, I just think it's base behaviour.
        eth0up 1y ago
        You have at least one insignificant person on your side. I similarly almost never downvote. But they disabled my voting ability because I upvoted too generously. There are many cruel and pugnacious creatures here. Indeed, it's best to remain indifferent, lest... behavioral modification ensue, and one become strange.
      - codr7 1y ago
        Yeah, the first rule of HN is that you don't talk about downvotes/censoring.
- ziml77 1y ago
  That is entirely a matter of taste and familiarity
- dimgl 1y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is a valid opinion to have. IMO my list is MacOS Sonoma, Windows 7, Gnome 30+. While I like the ideas behind KDE, XFCE and the like, they are terribly ugly by today's standards.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  GNOME is pretty, but it’s not great when it comes to progressive disclosure – what you see is what you get; there’s no depth in which power user features can be found. macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldn’t mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    The way for power using gnome is through extensions. But once you got used to the gnome philosophy, you find that you don’t have to fiddle with the UI that much.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      Nice in theory, but my experience has been that extension devs burn out from having to update their extensions so often to keep them from breaking. There’s also some things that extensions can’t fix.
      - skydhash 1y ago
        Don’t use private API then. While the public API is not stable, there’s few changes there.
        cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        I don't know what falls under public and private API but across my GNOME installs over the years there are numerous extensions that've broken and been abandoned, which suggests that most of the things that people want to customize sit on the private side of the line.
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      The silly thing about Gnome extensions is that you have to configure them through a web browser rather than OS dialogs rendered with their own graphical toolkit.
- amlib 1y ago
  Please don't ever again suggest Apple to hire the GNOME team. That would be a very sad day. Let them cook!
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    LetTim Cook!
  - pxoe 1y ago
    They already seem to vaguely echo gnome 3 look in macos. Huge titlebars with buttons, sidebar layouts in apps, transparent title bar, control center, etc., there's just a bunch of things that make you go 'huh'.
    - samtheDamned 1y ago
      I remember the first time I got to use OSX and realized just how much of it looked and felt like a less intuitive gnome haha
- tmtvl 1y ago
  The date/time format for the clock in the panel should always be %A %F %R. Anything else is unusable.
- prmph 1y ago
  Wow, just goes to show how different people's perception can be. To me Gnome is ugly, I really tried to like it but just could not. Didn't work too well for me also, but no way I'd describe Gnome as nice looking. KDE has been the only DE that does not give me that subliminal feeling of being grainy and crummy in the way that many people have associated with Linux UI since the beginning.

sho_hn 1y ago

> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved? It may have, yes! One of the ways we run the KDE community is that we have an annual process to elect community-wide goals, which then have their own leadership team, infra, budget, etc. The goals themselves are long-running, i.e. it's not one year and done, either. In about 2020/21 one of the goals that won/was added was titled "Improve Consistency across the Board", which lead to e.g. a comprehensive update of the HIG, renewed efforts on the controls library, and many cleanup passes across the products to get them up to date and in line. It's an ongoing process and I'm sure plenty of people can still point to a pet peeve or an ugly corner - we're happy to have discerning users with high expectations - but the general state of things should be much better than half a decade ago. There's also a next-gen styling/theming system project called Union in the works along with a next-gen design system developed in collaboration to take things to the next level in a few years, but we're taking our time to get it really right instead of pulling a Liquid Glass (one lesson we've learned through the years is that clawing your way back from reputational damage is really hard, and compromising on release quality is never the way to go). You can see annual updates on this e.g. in the feeds from our flagship dev conference.

arximboldi 1y ago
The screenshot in the OP article show already quite a few issues. It takes a trained eye to be able to articulate a lot of the issues. I feel like Gmome is designed by professional designers but KDE mostly by developers. I do share the sentiment that Gnome is often too rigid, but the design is coherent, consistent and aesthetically well articulated. I use Hyprland with mostly Gnome apps (have considered Niri too!) But I don't mean to trash KDE. Some people don't care about that padding or visual layering or whatever but do care about the extra options and features. At the end of the day, I'm just happy that we're on a platform where all these approaches have their space and people can chose and build commnities that grow tools that adapt to their own sensibilities and needs. KDE is great, Gnome is great, free software is great. Mac and Windows are hell.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Honestly, I'm not too fond of the screenshots in the OP's article either. I'd say it looks all fairly slapdash and too busy. I will say that the permission editing is (as you can also see in the nav bar there) a few levels down digging into menus, and if you go into those kinds of corners of other systems the UIs often tend to start looking a bit more "developer-y". E.g. check the analogous bits of Android, and also MacOS has a few things like plist editor windows and such where you're suddenly well off the consumer track and into unloved form-shaped things. It's a bit like the backrooms. But that's not meant as a defense or justification! In fact blogs like this and lists of warts often help us. If you play fly on the wall in some of our channels (e.g. the promo ones), you will also often see people doing the legwork of parsing reviews and ticketizing criticisms. We try to listen quite actively because if someone dislikes a UI they're most often right. The most important thing is that what's bad today can in fact be good tomorrow, especially if you don't get defensive about it.

tuananh 1y ago

One day, I'm going to try niri. I'm just too lazy to migrate my i3 setup right now :D

vladvasiliu 1y ago
What's special about niri? Asking as a happy user of i3 for... I can't remember how long. It's one of the few pieces of software I don't have to think about, it just gets out of my way. Actually, the only situations where I think about it is when I'm driving a mac or a win and the window management gets on my nerves, although I'm generally a pretty chill guy.
- pluc 1y ago
  i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo
- WD-42 1y ago
  It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.

flohofwoe 1y ago

KDE Plasma 6 looks absolutely gorgeous on my Kubuntu laptop with highdpi OLED display, and that's coming from a mainly-Mac-user :) (this wasn't my main reason to switch from Gnome though, I just couldn't stand the random design decisions in each Gnome update anymore, and generally Gnome never really clicked with me the way KDE immediately did - which is also strange since Gnome is supposed to be the 'Mac desktop clone', while KDE is supposed to be the 'Windows desktop clone' heh)

amlib 1y ago
I really dislike how people present KDE and Gnome as being "clones" of Windows and MacOS. GNOME specially is so distinct (be it for good and bad reasons) that it deserves to be considered it's own thing. I can't stand MacOS with all it's Macosisms that are ingrained since it's Macintosh days. GNOME being grown for PC usages has none of these issues. Window management is also a breeze and easy to pickup rather than a byzantine mess. The only thing they really share is a nice, sparse look & feel. KDE does have a lot more similarities to Windows but saying it's a clone might put the wrong idea on peoples mind when they transition from Microsoft's system.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  Back in the olden days, Microsoft and Apple did a lot of actual UI research, and for a resource-limited open source project there was no shame in piggybacking on those research results IMHO. But with the 'UX mafia' taking over big companies, nowadays it's reversed, the resource limited open source projects often have better usability.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

>I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. IDK mate, I care more about the utility than the looks since I spend my time using the DE, not hanging it on my wall to admire its artistic attention to detail. Like I'm sure those inconsistencies exist, but am I the only one whose brain just filters them out like they just don't exist? Kind of like how your brain filters out your nose from your eyesight and you only become aware of it when you look for it. And to me and my use case and formed habits, utility wise KDE >>> Gnome by a wide margin, though KDE still has some annoyances I wish they would tackle, but for a free product, I can't complain.

jbstack 1y ago
I think there's some truth to this (utility is overall more important), but also some falsehood (looks matter too). Aesthetics affect your enthusiasm and therefore your productivity. This is why, for example, most people would rather work in a room with large glass windows overlooking a lake than in a room with a small window overlooking a factory even if they are functionally the same.
graemep 1y ago
I agree with that. I really do not care about the inconsistencies - I did not even notice them until other people pointed them out. There are themes that look nice to me. None of that really matters compared to usability and functionality. Most of the time I have one panel showing and everything else I can see is applications. The applications are a mix of things anyway.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. I’m in that crowd. No matter how many times I see a poorly laid out dialog, it remains almost as abrasive as the first time I saw it. It can become a major distraction, especially as someone who’s capable of writing code.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. I’m in that crowd. I can empathize, but necessity has made me adaptable to all UXs at work. I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if I told my employer that their desktop environment that IT chose is not to my taste. At home I can be more picky but I still went with KDE and XFCE because that's what fits me best.

gempir 1y ago

I would recommend checking out Cosmic by System76. It's getting a beta very soon but I've been using the alpha and straight their git main for months now and it's very stable. It looks amazing and feels super snappy, I have never had such a painless Linux desktop experience. It even has a tiling window manager functionality built-in that was enough for me to sway away from i3/sway. But it also just works like a normal desktop that a non-technical user can use with ease. https://bsky.app/profile/system76.bsky.social/post/3lylz3cfyxk2g https://bsky.app/profile/system76.bsky.social/post/3lylz3cfy...

dimgl 1y ago
I'm actually super excited about this project. Out of curiosity, does the compositor they use have HDR support? It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  > It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops. Not sure about Cosmic, but both Gnome and KDE support HDR these days. Hyprland does as well and I think support for it was also merged into Sway recently.

osigurdson 1y ago

Ubuntu's Gnome is ugly imo, but stock Gnome on Arch is incredibly nice. Of course I really only use a terminal and a browser but still, Gnome + Ghosty + Firefox on Arch is just great.

Squarex 1y ago

Me too. I have used it in KDE 4 times when I was in high school, but it still seems to miss the design things. It is great for customization and functionality, but the design itself still seems off. This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here. [0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/posts/2025-09-17/Screenshot_20250917_192302.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...

aeve890 1y ago
>This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here. I agree. Something looks off about it, but I can't put my finger on what. It's the empty space? The fonts? I don't know exactly.
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  For me it's the font. I know it serves a purpose but I simply dislike Noto Sans and to me that just makes KDE ugly to look at.
- vitorgrs 1y ago
  KDE as a whole feels "UI design made by programmers" no offense to programmers who do UI (and to KDE designers)
dwater 1y ago
Can you explain explicitly what problems you have with the design in this screenshot?

whalesalad 1y ago

Here is my Debian 12 / KDE setup. With the "Inter" font, macOS icons (whitesur) and a little theming (klassy) I quite like it. Running this on a 5K Apple display and everything is crisp. desktop: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png code setup: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png

klazutin 1y ago
Those fonts look crisp! Is that 2x scaling? I've been considering converting a 27" Retina iMac to achieve something similar.
- whalesalad 1y ago
  Yep - 200% scale, 5120x2880 res.
wkat4242 1y ago
What's that load monitor you have in the bottom left?

nixosbestos 1y ago

> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Hahhaha, absolutely classic linux on HN post. Couldn't be better written satire. Except that I guess you at least acknowledged it. Which non-abandonded OS/DE hasn't significantly changed in 5 years? I can't think of one. Maybe GNOME, but they were early movers and everyone hated them for that.

pxoe 1y ago
Looking at a screenshot from KDE home page, it really does not seem like anything has changed with it in terms of design polish that much. It doesn't even seem like it's moving in a direction that's any different. https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/fullscreen_with_apps.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/fullscreen_with... The most significant change for the whole look they could make is changing the system font, because that's the biggest and most visible thing, and the one they have looks amateurish and makes it feel slapdash, like it was an afterthought, just picking whatever default font there was and going "whatever", which kind of ends up being the vibe of the whole thing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nixosbestos 1y ago
  So you don't like it, I'm so sorry. I think it's a cluttered terrible screenshot, and I think KDE looks more consistent than Win11 or macOS. Nate's blog is full of detailed, significant, careful improvements to KDE's UX over the past few years.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  If you want to change the system font you can go right ahead. Don't knock it for it's default appearance because everything can be changed and skinned. Some people have made it look just like Windows, others just like macos.
eviks 1y ago
> Which non-abandonded OS/DE hasn't significantly changed in 5 years? Followed by a classic HN comment: the question was about improvement, not change!

rafaelmn 1y ago

No it has not. Despite the praises it is getting here it still looks like the programmer art, which fits with a certain crowd, but if you are (like me) into the Gnome/Mac type of look - its still gives Windows XP vibes.

thewebguyd 1y ago

KDE defaults used to be pretty ugly, but it has gotten quite a bit better. Still a little on the ugly side to me, but KDE is really what you make it. Quite literally everything about its UI and behavior is tweak able in settings (and unlike gnome, KDE provides a GUI for all of these settings...no hunting around in dconf). I used to prefer macOS, and still do to an extent, but Tahoe does not give me hope and I'm using my Linux laptop more and more. UI inconsistencies bug me, but Tahoe is full of them, so if I'm going to have to deal with it either way, might as well go Linux.

cryptos 1y ago

I had always the same feeling. KDE looks okay at first, but on a second look it would be somewhat ugly in a subtle way. That never changed for me in KDE, so I stopped looking at KDE some years ago. But maybe it is the time for another look!