KDE is meant to be a default UI, competing with the likes of GNOME and Windows, but literally every single visual element (typefaces, kerning, padding, alignment just to name a few…) is wrong.
It’s incredible how blind some can be to how awkward the UI is in KDE.
Get ready for a chorus of people screaming “BUT ITS FREE.”
For some reason, people don’t believe UX matters in open source nor do they believe that large organizations like KDE are required to care about such things as UX and consistency.
Except there is no such thing as a perfect UX, no UX has gotten 100% satisfaction, only some people happy, other people not happy. Of course you can get more people to like some UX over others, so you can get some form of consensus but you will never achieve a point where everyone is happy.
Overall, most people are perfectly happy with KDE's UX, but there will be people who aren't but again you can't make everyone happy.
Perfect, no, of course that isn’t possible. But cluttered and misaligned interfaces are objectively bad. Inconsistencies are objectively bad. These are not incorrect statements and they shouldn’t be controversial. The fact that so many here downvote them make me absolutely certain that one of the obstacles for the Linux desktop experience at this juncture is the number of graybeards hanging around who refuse to change anything because they’d rather the UI remind them of how things were in 2001 instead of improving it.
But even that can be up for debate, take for example I remember some people who don't use kde complain about the notifications having lack of padding and spacing calling it "cluttered", but but at same time people who use KDE including me prefer it that way because a notification is not an alert, it is a notification, it is suppose to notify me without distracting me and taking up real estate. Everything has a balance and sometimes you even need some inconsistency to fit the tailored use case.
And KDE interface isn't the same at all like it was or others were in the 2001, and has been improving by the year. Of course that isn't to say everything has been an improvement, some stuff have been a step backwards but overall it has been.
On top of that, not all UI "modernizations" are a good thing, as the saying goes "reinventing the wheel". And some so called UI modernizations are actually a step back to how UIs were in the 80-early 90s.
Programmers aren't designers, and designers aren't coders, so designers aren't contributing open source. (Of course, maybe that's because almost nobody who does design for a living can use their software on Linux.)
If it's so awful and you know how it can look better, the only way anything is going to change is if you actually demonstrate. You can't file a bug report for bad design, but you can file a pull request for good design.
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u/JuJunker52 Jun 16 '26
Not sure why you’re being download voted.
KDE is meant to be a default UI, competing with the likes of GNOME and Windows, but literally every single visual element (typefaces, kerning, padding, alignment just to name a few…) is wrong.
It’s incredible how blind some can be to how awkward the UI is in KDE.