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 is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus.

I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible somewhere in the 2010s and I don't want to attribute it to laziness, greed, etc... People have been lazy and greedy since people existed, there must have been something else. And I think that mobile is the answer.

UI designers are facing a really hard problem, if not impossible. Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do?

In addition to mobile, you often need to target the browser too, so: native desktop, native mobile, browser desktop, browser mobile. And then you add commercial consideration like cost, brand identity, and the idea that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. Commercial considerations have always been a thing, but the multiplication of platforms made it worse, prompting for the idea of running everything in a browser, and having the desktop inferface just being the mobile interface with extra stuff.

> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do?

You keep the UIs separate. Dumbing down desktop UIs to mobile capabilities is just as bad of a design as it was when people tried to jam a desktop UI into mobile. You have to play to the strengths of the platform you are on, not limit each one based on the other. Yes, it's more work, but it's well worth it to have a product which is actually good.

Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.

At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.

That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability?

Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?

GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. Almost nobody runs vanilla GNOME because it's missing basic things. They refuse to have a system tray. I don't particularly like the system tray, but that doesn't change the fact that some apps continue to run the background when you quit them by closing the window. Up until recently, you had to install a system tray extension so you could properly quit programs like Steam. Finally, the GNOME developers added functionality where you can see background apps and close them, but it's hidden behind a few clicks. A clipboard manager is another one. KDE includes it by default. GNOME? There's an extension for that. And the problem with extensions is they always break every single time GNOME is updated.

This generally isn't my experience with GNOME.

You have to install an extension to get a dock at all.

No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.

You had to install a system tray extension

I'm sure you needed to at some point, but (as you mention), that's no longer the case: it's built in by default.

clipboard manager

If you mean clipboard history... That's true. Although macOS doesn't have a built-in clipboard history viewer either, and I never particularly missed having one. There are plenty of GNOME extensions with clipboard history if you want one.

Generally speaking I like GNOME much more than KDE, since GNOME's gesture support is much better than KDE's. I also personally dislike Windows-style infinitely-nesting-menu taskbars, which is what KDE uses, whereas GNOME is more macOS-like (although it has its own, IMO slightly cleaner style... And of course, it's much more modifiable than macOS).