I can't be the only one that dislikes KDE's typography.
I see that notification pane and aside from color, nothing gives it typographical hierarchy. It just looks odd to me.
I see that notification pane and aside from color, nothing gives it typographical hierarchy. It just looks odd to me.
I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned.
I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closing and setting icons seem slightly lower than the icon on the left of the title. The large hamburger menu icon is actually two pixels on the left of the closing icon. There are 17 pixels of top padding but only 12 pixels of left padding. The large image is one pixel of center (232 pixels on the left, 230 on the right). Every single line of text has a different interline.
And it's same for every application of KDE. They really need a design team to polish it up.
1) Information dense
2) Looks good in screenshots
3) Information dense and easy to use
4) Information dense and easy to use and looks good in screenshots
An awful lot of designers stop at 2 because a 4 is way harder to achieve, yet a 2's pretty easy to sell (to "stakeholders"). The result is at least sometimes (sometimes) better than a 1. They may also drop a 3 to a 2, though, and it's really hard to later turn a 2 into a 3 (since it's "uglier", so harder to sell) and a 2 is so different in character from a 4 that it can't even really be considered progress toward it (a 3 might be).
For progress in polishing stuff (not only visual), see the blog https://pointieststick.com/ for weekly updates.
I kind of feel bad about my first comment because I know it takes a lot of time to do these modifications, the new interface is a clear improvement from what was there before and UX wise it's not bad at all.
It's just that every time I use KDE, I have this feeling that great work doesn't shine as it should because of padding, alignment and box in a box in a box issues. I know these adjustments are a pain to make and that it's a very ungrateful work but it shows.
So, thank you to the design team I guess and keep up the good work.
KDE UI never gets Typography, spacing/padding, or alignment correct.
It's a shame because they are so close on most other criteria.
I also get exasperated when I get asked to pixel perfect align checkboxes and the labels in web pages, each browser has different checkbox dimensions and styles, and aligning them how the designer wants means a lot of extra styling that will break on users that don't use the defaults(but the designerr wants his pixel aligned stuff on his Mac screen... also rewording messages to align in message boxes or labels
I'm not a huge fan of the default configuration, but the ability to completely change it (with the many panel options) is just amazing (kind of contrary to GNOME).
I think I have figured out at least part of the reason for the spacings always feeling just a bit (or very) off (although I think it's bearable with my theme):
Their Kirigami design support library has a set of pre defined spacings and sizes developers are advised to rigidly stick to. These probably break down in many contexts and might not even be chosen well in the first place.
Another reason might be that KDE doesn't have a design group that is as strong as Gnome's and KDE might not be organized top-down as much (which is probably related to financing).
I think you can fix or mitigate well a lot of the mistakes (Qt is great) by using a good Qt curve theme.
I am a fairly new KDE designer who started contributing icons in the spring of 2018 because it was easy and fun.
That being said, on Linux I think Elementary OS is at least trying to create a coherent visual design language. Maybe there are others?
Please don't inject meaningless flag waving platform propaganda into genuine conversations.
Personally I find that using Source Sans Pro as the font and the Arc theme for most of the rest works well.
In short outside of the bizarre software/tech world very few subscribe to the idea that intellectual property should be shared and used freely.
But design for a GUI is more like industrial design. Getting a designer to help improve KDE's look-and-feel would be like squatters in a dilapidated hotel convincing an interior decorator to spruce the place up for fun.
Actually, that sounds like it would be a blast. Perhaps open source people are simply terrible at marketing.
I am not saying it is perfect, it is not, but especially in design terms, 'newer' isn't always better. And in general, I like KDE look very much.
Actually, I have my KDE set up to be an approximation of Gnome 2 with a few tweaks that work better for me, but I'm not under any impression that it approaches the immediate usability of Gnome 2.
It even looked nice! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Ubuntu_8...
I don't really get that. I suppose I've just never gotten used to it, but I just find that typing the name of the application is so much easier and faster. If I know I want to e.g launch Nautilus, why would I first spend time thinking about whether it's a "place" or an "application" or a part of the "system"? Is my text editor an "educational" program or an "office" program or an "accessory"? Or maybe _that_ is a "system" tool?
I'm actually genuinely curious about this; how is it better to mouse through hierarchical categories and look for an application, instead of just hitting super and typing the first couple of characters? Especially something like KDE's start menu, where you can hit super and start typing, or hit super (or click the icon) and mouse through similar categories to not lose the discoverability benefits of categories.
Well, there are several aspects to this. For an ordinary user, who's just started with the system, they don't even know the file manager is named "nautilus", so they wouldn't know to type it in. The Gnome 2 system aids discovery. Second, a user might not even know they could search for things, or be less comfortable with the keyboard. (Personally I do set things up this way: I have caps lock mapped to KDE's search widget, in the style of Chromebooks. I don't have a "Application" menu at all.)
But maybe most importantly, one usually thinks "I want to look at my pictures", not "I want to open the file manager." In Gnome 2, you would open the Places menu and click Pictures. Which, of course, would open Nautilus already pointed at the correct directory. I have a Places widget with a folder icon on my KDE taskbar for this purpose.
Yeah. That probably KDE's most compelling feature.