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KDE is now my favorite desktop

(kokada.dev)
892 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 18 Sep 25 12:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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sirwhinesalot ◴[18 Sep 25 13:47 UTC] No.45289648[source]▶
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.

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distances ◴[18 Sep 25 14:40 UTC] No.45290300[source]▶
KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool atmosphere of designer-developer cooperation which quickly led to very sleek results that persist to this day.

VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before.

I've been long a KDE user, even through the 4.0 troubles, but also the first to admit that it used to look clunky. Looking at old screenshots is a quick reminder of how far this initiative has taken it.

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1. Dunedan ◴[18 Sep 25 20:12 UTC] No.45294405[source]▶
I'm not sure usability is moving in the right direction with KDE. Over the past years, more and more applications started to hide menus by default, sometimes adding hamburger menus instead.

There is also a "new way" (I believe QtQuick-based) for applications to create popups, which results in them not being separate windows anymore. System Settings makes prominent use of them for example and those popups just behave entirely different than one is used to. As far as I know it's not even possible to navigate these popups with the keyboard.