KDE is now my favorite desktop

We now live in a world where KDE looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS. I don't know how that happened, and KDE isn't even particularly nice looking, but here we are.

For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.

Major changes aren't even _desirable_ in UI. People kind of emotionally enjoy novelty, however when it actually comes to using a computer consistency is superior to absolute excellence. Figuring out where settings and buttons are just because you ran software updates is a total waste of time on both ends; it wastes the user's time, and was a waste of time to develop. Maybe I'll switch from gnome to KDE this weekend, this looks promising.

Any organization that doesn't have backpressure against UX breaking changes is vulnerable to this.

The root cause is that UX folks almost never use a product as often as their users.

So what's an "oh, left instead of right" minor change for them is anathema to someone with muscle memory.

Ergo, IMHO, all breaking UX changes should be required to clear a high bar, with the default being status quo + tweaks.

I think it's perplexing that UX has generally gotten worse subsequent to multiple developments which you might expect would make UX better:

  - We now have a plethora of UX logging and can see real time where users struggle.

  - There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.

  - More people are using technology than ever, and so we have a more representative sample of data to work with.

But despite this, UIs have consistently gotten worse over the past 10-20 years. I think there are a few possible culrpits.

  - Mimicking mobile UIs, as eloquently called out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290812

  - I suspect there is something of a race to the bottom WRT To UX teams; they're always designing around any pain point, which has a few knock-on effects:

    - There will _always_ be pain points, and so there will _always_ need to be UI changes.

    - Designing a product so that the bottom of the bell curve can use it well probably does make an objectively worse product.

    - There's nothing wrong with needing to learn a UI, and this "learning" could be mistaken as pain point.

    - UX teams can't exist if there aren't things to constantly change, which increases the UI churn.

In concert, you have a UX which is constantly changing, and never really getting better, and often getting worse.