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> we've been saved from this flat design trend so far

That's false, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582009

Also in System Settings 5.24:

• switch to sidebar view and examine the buttons at the top of the sidebar

• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Desktop Effects and examine the buttons at the right

• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Virtual Desktops and examine the buttons at the right

• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Activities → Activities and examine the buttons at the right

• go Workspace → Window Management → Window Rules and examine the buttons at the right

• go Workspace → Startup and Shutdown → Autostart and examine the buttons at the right

• the most egregious example: go Personalisation → Regional Settings → Formats and examine the whole dialogue, it is entirely made of frobable regions

• go Network → Connections and examine the buttons at the bottom of the connections list

• go Hardware → Printers and examine the buttons at the top of the dialogue

I do not understand what goes on in the responsible programmers' heads. Why does the implementer reinvent buttons badly, instead of using a standard button? Is there no one reviewing? Is there no one saying "no, we cannot burden a KDE user with this bad usability, I will not merge this code"?

Indeed, you are right, those buttons have no border and no background.

How's KDE/Plasma with touch these days? I'm running GNOME on my Surface right now because it does pretty well with both Desktop and Tablet modes, but I'm pretty unhappy with the at times patronizing philosophy behind the project.

The biggest complaint from steam deck users seems to be the virtual keyboard isn't reliable, which is a pretty big issue.

I have a pine-phone and the virtual keyboard just refuses to pop up for some apps (like firefox!!). I keep looking in the settings for "force virtual keyboard on" or something but can't find it.

Firefox does use GTK unfortunately.

But this was running under Plasma Mobile

The Plasma Mobile Maliit keyboard works with GTK apps on Manjaro Plasma Mobile.

There must be some way to make this work on other Plasma Mobile distributions.

It indeed works now. Firefox was unusable on Plasma Mobile in 2020, it now mostly works on an updated Pinephone Pro (can't click on those popups when you try to install an extension, but the virtual keyboard shows up and seems to work ok).

I'll try Manjaro then; it definitely doesn't work on an up-to-date postmarketOS on a (non-pro) pinephone.

[edit]

Can confirm keyboard works in FF on Manjaro, but it has other jankiness (e.g. it seems to think it is much wider than the screen).

Turning scaling down to 1.8 (default 2.0 on Manjaro/Plasma) or lower lets Firefox work on the screen; I didn't have this problem on pmOS; either the default scaling is lower on pmOS, or they have some other workaround.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348

You may need to install package mobile-config-firefox

I like how sxmo lets you open/close the keyboard whenever you want by swiping up from / down to the bottom edge of the screen, regardless of what apps are open or what’s happening within them.

XMonad has also escaped the visual design fads quite well.

Does it have any visual elements at all, isn't it only showing other applications visual content?

Well, I was a bit tongue in cheek.

There's some minimul visual elements, eg if you choose the tabbed layout.

So the comparison for XMonad wouldn't be all of KDE or Gnome, but just how those two choose to decorate their windows. Eg their 'minimize' and 'close' buttons and window borders.

To be slightly more serious than my original comment was:

If you can rethink your UI in such a way that some things can become invisible, that can be a very ergonomic choice.

To give a better example: look at the bad old days of C and memory management via malloc and free.

One direction you can go into is Rust. Compared to C, Rust has a greatly improved user interface [0] for handling memory allocation.

Another direction you can go into is Python. Compared to C, memory management is basically invisible in Python. It just works.

Now, of course, Python gets to simplify its UI by essentially removing control from the user. But for many programming tasks, that's a good trade-off to make.

Similarly, iOS gets to drop the UI elements associated with manipulating windows, because it puts every app in full screen. (And XMonad greatly discourages you from fiddling with Window placement and layout manually; but has some less-intuitive less-discoverable means to do that manual fiddling, if you need it.)

[0] The user of Rust being typically called a 'programmer'.

How is KDE these days?

I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement.

Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?

KDE 3 was rock solid. They did break a lot of stuff when releasing KDE 4. That was very unstable / crashy. At that time I moved to Gnome 2, and moved back when Unity was shipped by default in Ubuntu. The late KDE 4.X releases were rock solid. I didn't like KDE 5 at first. A lot of things felt unfinished / not ready. but KDE 5 has been rock solid for years now, and from what I understand they have promised they would make more incremental changes from now on (so no more KDE 4.0-like disruptions). They are currently focusing on ironing out the small things instead of breaking stuff every month.

Now the world seems more mature: Cinnamon, KDE and The Ubuntu favor of Gnome seem to work very well (Each time I see Ubuntu Gnome I think "wow, that looks good!"). Xfce have been rock stable and reliable for years and years for people who like it. Still looks the same as when I discovered it 17 years ago. I've heard people like the current versions of Gnome and that the latest versions are better.

And yes of course everything is still highly customizable in KDE. There are people who make it look like old Windows, some who make it look like Mac and both work quite well. But you are not forced to customize, the default are top notch and that's what I use. They've been working on the settings center which was a mess and which is still not perfect, but it's gone to the point where it is one of the best I've seen. In comparison, the Windows' several setting centers are a huge mess and the Gnome settings are lacking, and you need to install Gnome Tweaks to have some useful stuff and now you have two settings panels.

Don't forget MATE. It got redone in GTK3, and it is terrific.

Xfce is also based on gtk+3 now. Quite a bit lighter than MATE.

KDE 4 has been fine since 2012 or so.

I used KDE 4 from the first alpha versions (~2007) and never quit using it. However, I had friends who didn't like the mess that KDE 4 was in the beginning and who were very verbose about the good KDE 3 features they were missing and the new behavior they didn't like.

However, at some point they saw that the very few things they were still missing were neglectable compared to the good things that KDE 4 brought with it.

Nevertheless, 2007 to 2012 were 5 years during which it wasn't easy to be a KDE user ;-)

> I'd be curious to have a review of Breeze / KDE by Martijn.

He mentions KDE in the blog post:

> The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE, but I think that theming has had the same issues for way longer already and I do really like the Gnome HIG.

I would not be so sure. Sooner or later there will be a QT6 port and most of the work will be lost.

I was a happy GNOME user before the version 3 fiasco. It took years to have a usable GNOME desktop again.

Breeze is being ported to Qt 6, and from the screenshots I see (https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2022/01/15/kf6-continuous-integr..., unsure what others), there are no visual changes so far. Time will tell if they change Breeze's appearance further before/after Plasma 6's release (I didn't ask about KDE's current plans). One possibility is O2 (https://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/), a reworked theme by the author of KDE 4's Oxygen, though it's not very far into implementation yet.

> Qt 6 […] there are no visual changes so far

That's false, examine Strawberry 1.0.2 running in KDE 5. The menus have the wrong background colour. The font size is wrong.

That's because there's no Breeze theme for Qt 6, so it's using the builtin Fusion theme which is literal cow dung. If you port your theme to Qt 6, the app should look identical.

I do not use a theme. I think you have it the wrong way around. What's missing here is the Qt6 equivalent of KDE System Settings → Appearance, or configuration tool <http://qt5ct.sf.net>, and it's not my task as the end user to provide these, but the toolkit and desktop environment developers'.

You always use a theme with Qt or Gtk. On Plasma the default Qt and Gtk theme is Breeze, which has not been ported to Qt6 yet. ATM the only Qt Widgets-compatible themes I have on my system are "Fusion" and "Windows" (as in "Windows 95"), both of which look absolutely horrible. Fusion is the default, and it's what you currently see when you open a Qt 6 Widgets app (for instance, QBittorrent right now).

By the way, qt6ct exists <https://github.com/trialuser02/qt6ct>, and it's even in Arch's repositories right now. The main issue is that it's useless, because there are simply no Qt6 themes out there yet and KDE still does not support Qt6 so you have to force qt6ct manually.

GNOME 3 was a fiasco not because of GTK+ 3. It was a fiasco because they threw 12 years of work and UI/UX design in the rubbish bin instead of thinking of ways to improve on it. MATE now runs on GTK+ 3 and it's leaps and bounds better in terms of UX compared with GNOME > 3. Sure, GNOME now has all the eyecandy and stuff, but it still sucks hard compared to GNOME 2. GNOME 2 was the pinnacle of UX IMHO, it was a novel design that really showed that you could innovate without copying others, that there was a third possible way that was not either a Dock or a start menu. All wasted, I suppose.

> It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined;

Every time I see a comment like that, I try again KDE, only to leave it 15 minutes later because it is a huge mess. Everytime I try configuring the panel to my liking nothing goes where I want to and I end up with widgets everywhere.