Please be nice :(. Some of those so-called "neckbeards" probably helped build the stack upon which things like elementaryOS rest.
- dismissal of design as a sort of thin veneer, somewhat fake, lipstick-on-good-bacon
- design as a kludge aimed at amateurs, to the point of preferring the worse UI (all else being equal) so as to prove something
- design = prettiness, and, by extensions, design being entirely a matter of taste and therefore impossible to criticize
- the complete rejection of any argument or evidence that cannot be derived from any of the laws of thermodynamics, Shannon, or at least an RFC
That being said, having browsed the elementary OS website, I'm not sure if isn't the victim of some of these errors itself. It sure seems to be a ripoff of macOS ca. 5 years ago applied as thin veneer to Linux. Their "brand" page may also be the first implementation of cargo-cult design.
Secondly, "good design" is subjective as opposed to a program that achieves its goals. No matter what you do, you will have a substantial amount of people hate your designs. So when people come in and tell them that the design sucks, there are a lot of people also telling them that it is good and it works.
What needs to happen is people come up with objective shortfalls in existing designs and let them know how that can be fixed.
An API is almost as binding as a law of nature. People will grumble, and maybe write adaptors, pile on abstractions, possibly even send you pull requests. But to change an API against the owners' will requires a bold and binary decision to fork with all it entails.
It also doesn't matter. There's only one limitation programmers are often exposed to: that of the choice of language/framework/platform... And witness how much flack a perfectly innocent language* like JS gets.
Within their implementation, programmers have free reign (within reason, don't get your hopes up, tab-indenting freaks)
For design, it starts out with a somewhat arbitrary definition of what is meant by a "style guide". Methods to validate implementations are tacked-on (if existing). A fully-formed style guide (...doesn't exist, but...) would reduce those implementing it to mere tools, while any style guide that allows creativity will inevitably lead to design-by-committee-that-never-meets. At a company, this tension is resolved by iteration, team-work and constant communication, allowing people to form a group identity. But that requires some sort of authority, a hiring/education process that creates a group with some basic, shared understanding/ideology/vocabulary and lots of FaceTime.
*applying the insanity defense
As a front-end web-dev with a passion for Design/UI/UX I can tell you that many designers just don't know how to contribute and a large portion don't know that contributing to a project as large as an OS is even something you can do.
Programming has a history of collaboration going way back, and because of things like Git/package managers etc, this sharing economy is presented very early on and it sticks on the programmers mind. The designers equivalent is stuff like free stock-photo websites and icon packs, their sharing economy lacks comparable concepts.
edit: formatting
This is why many of us that enjoy UI design ended up going to platforms where it is praised.
That said, not all design is made equal, sometimes a little dose of reality check from the community can be helpful.
Which means it took 4 years to get it to usable state where i don't have to download tons of plugins to make it effective environment for work and multitasking.
Designers do their own part by putting out the design equivalent of free open source code, in other words free icons, fonts, templates, concepts, etc.
The only well designed open-source projects are usualy from people who are designers who can code. Or led by company hiring designers.
Most of the open source software manages to ask for logo and thats it. Logos are hardly passion, in fact its boring and its not design.
- There is a lack of contrast for the text in the left bar.
- The icons in the bottom bar are off: the colors are dull too (too low saturation is a common theme in elementaryOS).
- The size of the icons in the bottom bar is also off. They are way to big if you compare them to the main navigation (left bar). The visual hierarchy is not ok.
If you ask me: the best looking linux distro atm is manjaro kde.
That said, my favorite UI design was mid-to-late 2000s GNOME, as implemented by Ubuntu 6.09 Edgy Eft. It was simple, and everything just worked. Sadly, Ubuntu has become a bit more complex and buggy these days.
I think that, if I want to get the best of Linux as a developer, running a text-based keyboard-driven environment (mutt, emacs...) on a tiling manager is the best route to happiness.
Part of the problem is that people confuse good design with pretty design (on both sides). The purpose of design is not to improve aesthetics but to improve usability. Aesthetics is an important component of usability, to be sure, but it is not the primary goal.
The difficulty is that power-user control/discoverability/aesthetics ends up being a pick-two triangle. And most designs pushing aesthetics also push discoverability, and power users feel shafted with an overly simplistic tool that isn't as productive as their tool which emphasizes control but totally lacks in discoverability and maybe leaves aesthetics to plug-in themes.
Good design tries to maximize all three.
I'm not aware of any slurs against designers that are equivalent to the slur against OSS developers as "neckbeards."
Ugh, I know exactly what you mean. It's maddening to see stereotypically uncultured nerds celebrate ugly UIs and clumsy CLI apps. It's so ridiculous.
I'm sick to death of XFCE and KDE setups with poor proportions and crazy alignment issues, I don't want an interface that is spatially hyper-compact, I want one that looks pleasant.
I mean Christ, you can't even vertically align elements in XFCE Panels, the whole thing has an aversion to aesthetics.
for example, my firefox looks like something out of windows 95, but if i want to pretend i'm using i3, f11 -> fullscreen, ctrl+tab and i'm set. and if i want to see a bookmark toolbar, url bar, tabs, a title bar, and a menu, i can. why not?
and yeah, the real goodness (which is not unique to gnome3) is the snap alignment stuff and ease of using virtual desktops and setting keyboard shortcuts. gnome3 could be a lot worse than it is. (edit: for me, everything gnome3 does, kde does better, but gnome3 "just works" a lot better than kde and, to some degree, unity. i'd rather be using i3 generally, but that can be more effort to maintain than its worth in certain situations)
For my taste, Gnome 3 only needs a few small tweaks, dash to dock, dropdown terminal, and jetisoning adwaita out of the nearest airlock.
Do you not use the tiling? Do you simply use it for greater screen real-estate?
I'm curious as my preference of i3 focuses on the tiling
And while not as good as real tiling, keyboard shortcuts to the various snapped positions go a long way for the couple minutes of effort they require to configure in the settings UI.
Edit: e.g. super+arrow keys for various areas, or add in shift. Not a lot of planning required.
the unearned appreciation of elementary has always baffled me. i mean, the developers are not hacks or anything. i quite liked geary, and i'm fine with distros multiplying (why not? just use what you want, it doesn't matter). but elementary is barely any more mac-ish than ubuntu with unity, and it's always felt like the beta version of someone's side project.
to sum up, i'm happy that they have interest in their project, and i respect the effort they put into it. however, most of the praise for elementary seems to come from and for the wrong places; it's not particularly polished or user friendly (they have a history of "i'll choose for you," but not in as an intuitive way as Apple), its thematically unified design does not last unless you either use a vanilla install forever or put in just as much linux-y work in maintaining your install as you would w/ arch or debian or ubuntu (and you cared about how everything looks).
to me, elementary is a nice little niche distro like bodhi linux. it's bizarre to me that people can use it as a main system unless they're very advanced (read: they play with config files like a sysadmin and code decently in at least bash), and it's outright unthinkable that people use it for anything beyond checking email if they're keeping a vanilla install. this stuff keeps the ecosystem healthy, but the articles and comments i read about it look like they're coming from people who simply don't use linux that much (and aren't aware that all the good things they see in elementary are done better in other distros).
However, I can also confirm what you say about bugs - a vanilla Ubuntu LTS is quite a bit more stable than eOS is. Having said that, most of the bugs I encountered on eOS were either avoidable (by switching the browser to Firefox, for example) or I could live with them. The one I found most annoying was a bug in the music app that didn't let me save songs to a playlist. I did actually dig into the source code for that one, but eventually gave it up and went back to trusty old (terminal!) mocp.
All in all, I enjoyed using eOS, but when the time came for me to buy a new laptop, I decided to go back to Ubuntu. ElementaryOS is a great project that deserves more attention (and more programmers working on it), but unfortunately does still feel too much like a perpetual beta. I'll keep my eyes on it, hopefully some day I'll go back, but not just yet.
This was simply a "surface" observation of mine too, until I've first hand met people who were impressed with it, and haven't actually used used Linux, but merely used it occasionally.