> the makers don't have to do double the design work.

Attitudes like this sometimes make me regret going in to software engineering. I understand time may be of the essence in some instances, but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship, and it's now just gluing over-engineered and poorly designed shitware together. At least, in the Web Dev world -- maybe other subfields have faired better?

this reminds me of something i've observed. it seems like there is a general trend in software of doing things that look good (either in an ad or in a sprint review) rather than things that feel good to use. one example among many is nvidia's frame generation feature, which makes 60 fps look like 120 fps when you're watching somebody else play, but feel like 30 fps when you're the one playing.

It's not so much double the design work, it's double the code maintenance.

I'm of two minds on this. I agree with your complaint that "mobile first" (or just responsiveness in general) has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop experience. As a web application developer, the idea of having to maintain two separate codebases - one for mobile and one for desktop - is a big "no thank-you." So responsiveness tends to win on maintenance overhead.

The moment the "mobile first" trend appeared, I knew it was wrong and we were certainly fucked for many things. Plenty of websites are just bad because of this nonsense. And since now most people don't even use a computer for their web browsing, most websites are bad for computer browsing by default.

The insanity of it is that many websites push their mobile apps to use them. So, you get shitty mobile sites that ask you to use their app on mobile and are bad on desktop because of the stupid development philosophy (including poor information density and oversized interface for big touch targets).

The whole point of the first iPhone web browser was that you could actually use most typical websites without any effort on their part and it was good enough. Because of the display size and navigation effort required it wasn't the most confortable but the more time passes the more I believe that was kind of the point and almost a "feature" in itself.

We got there because people are glued to their phone, and sadly it's not even a good tool for efficient web browsing (it's useful for quick information gathering but that's it).

I don't know how to feel about that. To me it sounds like an awful direction for the desktop experience on macOS, but on the other hand iPads are currently held back by iPadOS

To be fair, a touchscreen is the one thing I miss moving from my thinkpad to my apple silicon macbook.

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

He's talking about MauiKit, which is a superset of Kirigami.

https://mauikit.org/

You get some nice predefined widgets to use with QML, but you also potentially have to build Maui/Kirigami against the platforms you deploy to, and it's a C++ & QML project with its own build platform.

I wrote the block editor of my note-taking app[1] in QML, I hope this can show it's not QML that makes it a out of place - it's the care for aesthetics that developers put into the app. I also wrote a blog post on the subject if you're curious[2].

[1] https://get-notes.com

[2] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

Settings modules (KCMs) have been gradually rewritten in QML since a while ago, I think. Do they look "extremely out of place" to you? I personally couldn't spot them out. Efforts have been spent making QtQuick controls look the same as their QtWidgets counterparts.

Mobile form factor and touch inputs are pretty inseparable, and are so different from desktop + pointer. A lot of subtle pain points get missed because people tend to focus on one over the other. So many desktop patterns rely on hover interactions. Touch targets need to be big enough for beefy fingers (which will then cover the thing being touched). Gesture is considered normal on touch devices but not pointer ones. Reading distance differences between mobile devices and desktop ones impacts typography. And that’s just a few basic UX concerns all before you get into the weeds of WCAG and other accessibility standards.

TL;DR - your designer needs a hug

>and a design that constantly makes trade-offs that benefit a touch-screen at the expense of keyboard-and-mouse users.

And this is true despite the fact that a vanishingly small number of users actually use a touchscreen with gnome.

They also look like a gripper widget: a small square that can be dragged around in order to move the item on which it appears, commonly used for for positioning toolbars or re-ordering list items. Because of this, they have added a bit of confusion to user interface conventions.

I must admit I don't understand this critique. I barely use a pointing device at all to navigate Gnome—mice included.

Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app, like seeing the version/build number, or certain settings. I'm not sure I want something like a "See hidden files" ticker occupying screen real estate forever when I could just set it once in an accessory menu.

I question whether these critiques would evaporate if, instead of the three horizontal bars, Gnome instead used a gear icon or something, and turned their contents into a pop-up window rather than a popover element.

Hamburger menus are also useful for things that otherwise would be behind a right-click. I personally have not encountered a good replacement for right-click in touch UIs.

KDE changed their design to include hamburger menu. Even KDE's Terminal have a "hamburger" menu.

As someone who does not use Stage Manager, I don't find that the other ways macOS has become more like iOS were, to me, bad ways. The most notable changes I find were that the Settings app became far more organized and consistent, and the Control Center has tons of convenient shortcuts with a very high level of customization.

In fact, Control Center is currently less customizable than iOS because you've been able to fully rearrange the controls on iOS for an entire year now. If anything, it could stand to be more like iOS in that regard, though it's not a huge deal either way.

I don't particularly use widgets much either, but I never felt their inclusion was a net negative, they're just not as useful as other interfaces already available on macOS.

One thing I'll definitely cede though: having some "macOS" apps actually be iOS apps, like Home, is weird not just because the UI design is unusual but also because there's been no attempt to make standard desktop hotkeys work, not even Esc.

I'm old enough that the first computer I used was an IBM PC. Running PC DOS. Granted, I was very young and only remember it because of the little turtle in Logo. Then it was Apple IIs. Then Windows. I actually used Linux in the 90's. I remember Windows 8, but mainly because of the complainers. I was Linux full time by then anyway.

But I do happen to enjoy having extraneous menus hidden. Why are they cluttering my screen and workspace when I'm using keyboard shortcuts anyway? I want to see my actual work, not some menu I don't need and will never click on...

Using a mouse to click on a bunch of tiny menus littered all over the place is horrible for productivity and screams "boomer"...

It's not that mobile is "cool". I've had analytics data for many apps across different types of industries. Consistently, even on mainline web pages, traffic is dominated by mobile. The vast majority of people visit apps and pages on their phones.

Which problem exactly? It works just fine. Just like there is no problem with well-designed websites that can work both on mobile and on desktop (like HN).

This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/

What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be.

And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.

Who needs konsole when you can have yakuake?

I use terminator as my terminal .. it allows to split windows which is somewhat implemented in console, but it doesn't work very well..

I have probably started using konsole because it was the default, but have since liked it a lot. I use tmux whenever I want to split windows, synchronize keystrokes and things like that but for all else, konsole works perfectly well.

I have set it up in a way that I don't see any clutter. You can hide whatever you don't want to see on the UI. All I see is the terminal and the tabs.

The killer feature is the 'monitor for silence' and 'monitor for activity'. Comes quite handy for long running background tasks that you want to monitor.

> the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge

What context menu is this about? When I right click into the terminal area, my context menu has a grand total of... 11 items.

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.

It's certainly possible, but to me it feels like a junk drawer without too much thought. In konsole, for example, it buries "use dark color scheme," which I'd assume is a fairly common option.

KDE now has its own Linux distribution called KDE Linux!

https://kde.org/linux/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204393

https://news.itsfoss.com/kde-linux-alpha/

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/09/kde-officially-release...

https://linuxiac.com/kde-linux-alpha-launches-with-immutable...

I don't know if there is a "best" but I've been using OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 with KDE on my work, personal, and family machines for the last year or so. Even my non-technical (but technologically capable) spouse has been using and enjoying it over that time on their personal laptop.

For me the best KDE software integration is in openSUSE, also love their YaST graphical control center and BTRFS filesystem snappshoting integration with the package manager and the control center. Second best distro for me is Fedora KDE.

Whatever you do, don't use anything debian or ubuntu-derived, they have tons of bugs that aren't upstream. CachyOS and Fedora KDE are great options.

Use a rolling release so you get the latest KDE and not whatever Debian froze two years ago.

My choice has been Kubuntu. With all vestiges of snapd removed.

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

They don't work like the UX teams of yesteryear.

In the early 2000s, companies did user studies. Put a potential user in front of the product, let them use it while the UX team observed. Ask questions to the user afterwards. Make changes, repeat.

But that kind of research is expensive, so it's thrown out to instead just collect tons of metrics that likely don't tell a whole story. They think "Users must love feature X because they keep clicking on it!" when the reality is that they're trying to find something else, but the label for X looks related to what they want.

I agree with all your points regarding the race to the bottom. I think that's why UIs hide so much information. Older interface designs are considered "confusing" or "cluttered" because there's so much there at a first glance, even if all the buttons elements are grouped by functionality.

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

Imho, this is a big source of the problem.

Granted: there are some amazing UX designers and teams out there.

But my experience with UX teams has been that in most middle-market companies they're usually less that sort and more the {huge designer ego} + {management consulting political skillset} one.

And it's a tough problem to solve! Because ultimately you want someone who can argue very hard for their approach to improving UX (usually against opposition from others). But when someone's ego exceeds their skill, that leads to disaster.

And without a strong Jobs-esque "this sucks" arbiter over them, their changes make it to prod.

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

No you can't. That telemetry gives you view into how users are experiencing the software is a myth because it doesn't include the actions users don't take and it doesn't include the reasons for actions taken.

A Linux user is, and has always been, an edge case

There isn't only one kind of power user, and not every kind of power user will like KDE. I use GNOME almost daily, with KDE being my primary daily driver. I just really don't see how GNOME could ever said to be great for power users. There are so many ways you can tailer KDE to specific things you may find yourself doing heavily, that would be impossible with GNOME's UI. Being a power user and using GNOME, to me just means you're using the terminal for everything, which is totally valid.

Linus also may not even really be a power user. He says himself that he rarely writes code anymore, and primarily just sends emails and reviews code.

I didn't say KDE is the only option for power users, or that there aren't multiple types of power users with different use cases and individual preferences. I'm not sure what I'm gatekeeping.

Is it really gatekeeping to say that KDE is for power users? Setting it up in a way that really meshes with your use case and preferences is a process that you'll spend many hours or days of time on. That's not something that makes sense for grandma's computing workload.

> This is an opinion stated as fact. KDE is mostly for dads that like a mouse oriented Windows/mac like OS but with buttons to customize. Sway, exwm etc are for power users.

So you're saying that prefering a highly customizable GUI means you're be a power user, but instead you're a gasp dad? This isn't Reddit, buddy. Grow up.

As a developer who has worked on similar things, that interface can prevent a lot of trouble of the kind "What if the user edits a setting that updates something in another part of settings, which might also be open at the same time?" - or even the same settings screen opened multiple times. It is rare that such cases come up for users, but they can be very annoying and time-consuming to deal with. Perhaps that was the motivation.

Yes, that's known as global application menu (not enabled by default). It's not the most discoverable feature, but it's working great once set up. (For reference, just add the widget to your panel and then make sure to restart plasma for it to take effect).

Yes, this was mandatory for me. It's the reason I switched from GNOME to KDE originally, GNOME broke the global menu bar.

You can recreate the layout almost perfectly. Don't try to theme it as macOS, just get the UI components in the right places using the widgets it comes with.

KDE has a global menu bar widget. Unfortunately not all applications work with it.

Gorgeous, lightweight, easy on the eyes, gets out of the way. I cannot plug it enough.

Am my bad, I was thinking of EndeavourOS the Arch based one.

Which parts of Windows 11? Because there are still double digit different context menus in there, on recently developed built-in applications (introduced in 8 onwards). KDE is 1000x more consistent than that and has been that way for a long time now.

It still has weirdly inconsistent margins in places but compared to the disaster that is the jumble of different UIs in Windows that's nothing.

macOS before Tahoe, sure, but now? Have you looked at the screenshots where people layered different fullscreen apps on top of each other and the rounded corners look like a stack of cards because they're all different? It's a complete disaster.

You could power all those fancy new AI datacenters with Steve's spinning skeleton.

Why are there 2 context menus, multiple places to change settings, and a file explorer that is somehow a worse experience to use than one they had in XP?

All the while they develop and push a product that screenshots what you are doing so that AI can "assist" you. Not to mention pushing ads and news and free to play games.

Maybe the margins or icons aren't what you'd prefer, but you're being intellectually dishonest pretending that there is any uniformity in their product let alone even a single iota of care or interest in the experience the user has with their product.

There are 4 (or 5?) volume control UIs in Windows 11.

Um, Windows 11 still hasn’t moved all the necessary utilities and administrative panels over to the windowing toolkit Microsoft introduced in 2012, and MacOS 26(??) is… hideous.

Sure but they look pretty bad.

Hello, KDE's Advanced Text Editor /s

(just a text editor is KWrite)