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.

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.

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.

Very appreciated, thanks :)

Back in the olden days, Microsoft and Apple did a lot of actual UI research, and for a resource-limited open source project there was no shame in piggybacking on those research results IMHO. But with the 'UX mafia' taking over big companies, nowadays it's reversed, the resource limited open source projects often have better usability.

GNOME is pretty, but it’s not great when it comes to progressive disclosure – what you see is what you get; there’s no depth in which power user features can be found.

macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldn’t mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.

Wow, just goes to show how different people's perception can be. To me Gnome is ugly, I really tried to like it but just could not. Didn't work too well for me also, but no way I'd describe Gnome as nice looking. KDE has been the only DE that does not give me that subliminal feeling of being grainy and crummy in the way that many people have associated with Linux UI since the beginning.

Please don't ever again suggest Apple to hire the GNOME team. That would be a very sad day.

Let them cook!

Not sure if you're serious or missing an /s there ;)

That is entirely a matter of taste and familiarity

The date/time format for the clock in the panel should always be %A %F %R. Anything else is unusable.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is a valid opinion to have. IMO my list is MacOS Sonoma, Windows 7, Gnome 30+. While I like the ideas behind KDE, XFCE and the like, they are terribly ugly by today's standards.

> It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops.

Not sure about Cosmic, but both Gnome and KDE support HDR these days. Hyprland does as well and I think support for it was also merged into Sway recently.

Yep - 200% scale, 5120x2880 res.

For me it's the font. I know it serves a purpose but I simply dislike Noto Sans and to me that just makes KDE ugly to look at.

KDE as a whole feels "UI design made by programmers" no offense to programmers who do UI (and to KDE designers)

It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.

i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo

>That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. I’m in that crowd.

I can empathize, but necessity has made me adaptable to all UXs at work. I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if I told my employer that their desktop environment that IT chose is not to my taste.

At home I can be more picky but I still went with KDE and XFCE because that's what fits me best.

>"I don't care about this bad thing" isn't really a very good response to someone's "this is kinda bad" post, is it?

I don't think you read my comment properly because that's not what I said.

>you should care about e.g. wasted screen space with extraneous padding.

Where KDE is better than Gnome whose UI looks like its was designed for tablet use or 4K+ displays. So yeah, on that front I do care, which is why I prefer KDE.

So you don't like it, I'm so sorry. I think it's a cluttered terrible screenshot, and I think KDE looks more consistent than Win11 or macOS.

Nate's blog is full of detailed, significant, careful improvements to KDE's UX over the past few years.

If you want to change the system font you can go right ahead. Don't knock it for it's default appearance because everything can be changed and skinned. Some people have made it look just like Windows, others just like macos.