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.

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.

I disagree - I see stuff like this, and I wonder if anyone actually thinks about the UI, or it's just "features thrown at the wall." It takes me a long time to remove buttons, icons, etc. from KDE's default layout. They seem to take too much comfort in "everything is configurable" as a way to ignore sane defaults.

https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba...

Not everyone wants or needs the customizability of KDE. But if you're a heavy desktop user, being able to tailor every aspect of your system to your specific preferences, is absolutely wonderful. Using my Mac for work has become excruciating since I switched to KDE for my Linux machines last year.

I'm heavy desktop user and I never want to tailor every aspect of my system to my specific preferences. I don't have any specific preferences. I have general preferences of any sane user and I want programs to have sane GUI which does not need additional setup. There's no good environment for me in Linux. KDE is too customizable, I installed it once, opened settings and immediately formatted my disk. GNOME is terrible with their tablet UI and miriad hidden keybindings, but at least it does not have billion options, so I'm using GNOME, but I'm not happy with it. All I want is something windows 95-like, but without any settings whatsoever. GNOME 2 was very good desktop back in the days, it's a pity they decided to ruin it.