KDE is now my favorite desktop

> Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors.

But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!

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.

Not sure if you're serious or missing an /s there ;)

That is entirely a matter of taste and familiarity

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.

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.

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.

Please don't ever again suggest Apple to hire the GNOME team. That would be a very sad day.

Let them cook!

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.

Do you have any examples where power features aren't accessible? The OP used a wifi applet as an example of exposing information. I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)? It's desktop agnostic, works even without a desktop. And then there's no need for an entire applet dedicated just to wifi for the rare occasion you need to lookup your MAC address.

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'.

One small example is how holding down Option/Alt modifies behavior in various ways throughout macOS.

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.

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.

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.

> I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment.

You're sabotaging hard your own messaging with comments like this.

> I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)?

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.

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.

UI also represents an opportunity for standardization, which is a powerful force for onboarding non-technical users and in time, turning them into power users. Standardized patterns illustrate to users that there's a method to the madness and that computers are finite, learnable systems and not seemingly arbitrary chaos or unintelligible techno-wizardry.

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.

That is untrue! There’s a CLI for loading them, and a settings api. The web thing is just one of the distribution channel.

Don’t use private API then. While the public API is not stable, there’s few changes there.

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.

Yeah, the first rule of HN is that you don't talk about downvotes/censoring.

The date/time format for the clock in the panel should always be %A %F %R. Anything else is unusable.

> I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal

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.

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.

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