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.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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/3lylz3cfy...
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.
[0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
desktop: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png
code setup: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png
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.
I don't think you read my comment properly because that's not what I said.
Where KDE is better than Gnome whose UI looks like its was designed for tablet use or 4K+ displays. So yeah, on that front I do care, which is why I prefer KDE.
What a great way to put it. I wish software developers of every product would feel that way.
And also thank you for all the hard work, to you and the team!
Often it functions as a “do this for everything” modifier. So for example, option-clicking the minimize traffic light minimizes all windows from the application the window belongs to, and option-clicking a disclosure triangle in a nested list expands or contracts all child nodes.
There’s tons of little things like that which might sound silly but become significant time and sanity savers after making a habit of using them.
I'm a regular Linux user, but I wouldn't know how to get all the data from the Wi-Fi applet using the Command Line. GUI have the advantage of discoverability over CLI: with a GUI I get a bunch of useful info in a single place, with a CLI I first need to know that a data is available and then I need to look-up the right invocation to get this data.
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.
There are many cruel and pugnacious creatures here.
Indeed, it's best to remain indifferent, lest... behavioral modification ensue, and one become strange.
KDE tends towards pragmatism, discoverability, and customization over simple and flashy. The developers don't assume their users are simpletons who will get confused and run away if they encounter a checkbox they don't understand. They understand that many of their users are advanced tech-enthusiast "power users" just like themselves.
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.
Nate's blog is full of detailed, significant, careful improvements to KDE's UX over the past few years.
Well, for a start, `ip` isn't enough to give you anything. You'd need at least `ip a` or `ip r`, but then you'd have to already know that or go hunting in the manual (the `ip` help really is pretty bad). For something you might only need once a year (and will forget before you need it again!), having it in the GUI is very valuable.
Even non-simpletons can appreciate that.
