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Comment by funkiee | Hacker News Reader

Is lack of horizontal padding part of the KDE aesthetic?

When looking at all the screenshots, it’s clear that padding and alignment is neither professional (looks amateur), nor consistent.

If you’re going to rip off Apple, at least do it to Apple quality! Otherwise it’s a cheap knock off. Before people grip that this is free software, would you be happy if KDE’s core components were poorly written? Free or not, we should take pride in our work and put the bar at high quality.

kde: still a cartoon

edit: i mean this as the conscious aesthetic, no disrespect is implied

That notification doesn’t look like a cartoon, nor does it demonstrate a sophisticated aesthetic.

> If you’re going to rip off Apple, at least do it to Apple quality! Otherwise it’s a cheap knock off.

KDE isn't similar to Apple at all.

Source: have used both for years.

I’m specifically talking about notifications: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204079

Just har a look at this as well as the fine article. Colors are similar but that's about it in my non designer opinion; even the colors are different as the ones from Apple seems to be somewhat translucent (kind of like Vista IIRC ;-).

Lack of horizontal padding? What padding do you want? There's clear whitespace between everything.

I for one definitely like and want more compact information. I definitely do not like the trend for making information more sparse. Leave that for your blog; business runs on information.

Yeah, i've found GP's comment amusing because from my perspective KDE looks like it wastes too much space on padding.

Information density is not hampered by the presence of proper negative space, on the contrary, using the right amount of negative space actually allows for very information dense layouts to still be readable. A good example is a traditional paper phone book

What you define to be proper is likely not what I define to be proper. It's certainly a context-sensitive opinion.

The amount and location depends on what you want to do. Yes, just like a phone book, it needs whitespace. A notification window is not a paper phone book though. A paper phone book typically has a lot less whitespace than we're discussing here, so I'm not even sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or trying to point something else out.

The most egregious example that stood out to me here is the x-padding between the edge of the notification panel and any text inside the panel is less than the padding between the notification title and the text below it.

The problem isn't that they need more padding, it's that their padding makes no sense. If they made a design decision to have tight padding that would be one thing, but they've got a horizontal layout with tight padding in the horizontal direction and wide padding in the vertical.

here's a really quick-and-dirty edit to even out the padding around each text block to be equal to the line height, which actually tightens up the total density by correcting the too-high line height in the notification text: https://imgur.com/uVcY6Sw

That is still a context-sensitive opinion.

Programmatically, that assumes that that information is available (query a font rasterizer: where is the first pixel? consider also kerning and foreign languages; also query icon: where is the first non-background pixel? consider also theme information where window background might not show the icon well!).

Programmatically, you've un-aligned everything: now the amount of whitespace at the top of the notification is different than the amount of whitespace on the left of the notification.

Sure you might say it looks better. But how much time do you think it would require to make it look "pretty" (for you)? As-is, it's functional and isn't ugly. If you want to improve it, then go contribute to the libraries and applications being used.

> As-is, it's functional and isn't ugly

As you’re keen to point out regarding everyone else’s comments, that’s your opinion.

Personally I think it’s functional and ugly. They could skip the drop shadow, the subtle transparency, the big icon on the right, the rounded corners, and just draw a white box. As long as they fixed the left padding it would look better than this.

Lots of attention to detail on the wrong things before they have the basics, IMO.

EDIT: Here's one for all you folks that aren't bothered by iffy typography https://i.imgur.com/4tBNA0w.jpg

> Lots of attention to detail on the wrong things before they have the basics, IMO.

thanks you pretty much perfectly summarized KDE

For some reason a lot of us folks find it not only usable but also pleasing.

I wont say it can't get better but I'd be hesitant to anyone who comes from the outside if they try to to make to many changes at once.

Again good UX exists but recently it seems it is all about

1. Copying Mac (see Unity) and Chrome

2. Removing options and configurability (see any modern app)

>If you want to improve it, then go contribute to the libraries and applications being used.

proposing design changes to open source projects when you haven't already been a contributor for a hundred years never goes well.

I think the gp means the left edge of the notification and the starting of the text.

Then the vertical padding should be reduced. As it is, they're inconsistent and looks bad. I really want to like KDE and I used KDE 3, KDE 4 (from 4.8, since every version before that was a shitshow) and Plasma 5 for a long time as a main driver and is still my go-to in my backup laptop; but the visual aspect has always been an utter failure despite the massive improvements made in version 5.

This is the first thing I noticed too. The text is too close to the leftmost border and feels very claustrophobic.

Claustrophobic? That's your opinion. It looks great to me.

Of course it's an opinion; They said it "feels", not "is".

> It looks great to me

That's exactly why we've seen scientific slide presentations in Comic Sans. It looks great to someone != it's good.

I also noticed that, came here to comment precisely the same thing.

I think the problem might also be exacerbated by the fact that the padding doesn't seem to be scaled based on DPI. (Unlike line height/icon size) So it looks acceptable on a low resolution display, but super close to the edges on a "Retina" display.

Thank god I'm not the only one who is annoyed by that. I remember 1 or 2 years ago when I first installed KDE I thought I messed up the installation because the padding/margins looked so jarring, I was convinced there was something wrong with the UI theme.

I don't know how to explain. Those look exactly like the KDE notifications I see all the time, but they never looked compressed inside the window on my desktops. Instead, it always bothered me that they were too spacey.

I am not sure if there really is a lack. I mean, I think I see what you mean, but given the fact that those are notifications, they are probably meant to feel 'thin' to not attract too much attention.

Another factor might be that those small, focussed screenshots are just not the appropriate format to show how those notifications would look like in the context of a complete desktop.

But in the end, it is also possible that there is an unintended lack of horizontal padding.

Awful padding and spacing has always been part of the KDE aesthetic. It comes from aggressive use of auto-layout by Qt, I think.

I agree, the lack of padding is aesthetically bad. It's my opinion however, others may not agree.

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