Been a few years since I’ve used Gnome, I hadn’t realized they’d pivoted so much to following MacOS.
It looks like they’ve taken a lot of the best parts of MacOS and built something really nice atop it.
It looks like they’ve taken a lot of the best parts of MacOS and built something really nice atop it.
But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go check out an app like https://inkscape.org and compare it to something like Illustrator or Gnome to Photoshop. The messy jumbled stacks of options with huge icons and paddings instead of being condensed and easy to use - most of it stems from GTK controls being bad.
Now this is all with a huge disclaimer that I haven't used a Linux desktop in over 5 years at this point, maybe things got better but I doubt it - I still use Inkscape for example from time to time and Gimp on OSX and putting the non-native issues aside the apps look terrible on their own because of what I already said.
The current state of Apple App Store app is just the cherry on the top.
The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).
Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)
Nowdays I need to develop stuff that deploys to iOS so I'm kind of stuck on a mac.
KDE looks like you got stuck in an alternative reality and Windows 7 evolved differently. (And Windows 8/10 never happened)
I never really cared for the Windows UI.
I was mostly stricken with how much many of the features they are highlighting look straight out of stuff which was unveiled in MacOS about 5+ years ago. Extensive gesture support being a biggie.
from Palm
MacOS’s fundamental look has a pretty consistent chain all the way back to NextOS in the 90s. The Dock, the dot indicator, and many other core pieces are visible in versions of MacOS which predate the launch of webOS. MacOS borrows some bits from webOS as well, but the fundamental Dock layout is right out of NextStep.