KDE is now my favorite desktop

> 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.

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.

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.

BTW, not sure if you were involved with this at all but I really appreciate all the work that's gone into making the Kirigami/Qt Quick KDE programs feel less janky. It's still not perfect (don't know if it ever will be unless Qt releases their AoT QML compiler as open source) but it's gotten MUCH better since the early KDE 6 releases.

> 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.

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!

I have used essentially all of the Linux desktop environments over the course of decades and my impression is that GNOME attracts developers with a strong interest in "design" as a hobby. And apparently ones who take the whole, "Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away," philosophy perhaps a little too rigidly.

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 always wanted to thank someone involved with KDE, here's my chance: Thank you!

Very appreciated, thanks :)

Likewise, I've been enjoying KDE both before and after the big bang redesign, jumped ship for a few years when nothing seemed to be working properly.

OP is talking about stuff that has nothing to do with check boxes or "simpletons". They're talking about super basic stuff like padding things the same way for dynamic content. Consistent fonts. Etc.

Even non-simpletons can appreciate that.