KDE Plasma 6.0 Is Enabling Wayland by Default
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
* Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
* Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
* enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
* I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue.
None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).
One thing is that the correct environment variables should be set, but all the wayland compositors have been setting these for ages AFAIK
Seriously though, it's been a while since I've had serious issues with AMD cards on Linux. I was very annoyed with the state of my rx5700 when it first launched back in 2019. We've come a long way
On Linux it's basically the opposite now. Nvidia should basically be seen as unsupported, which to be clear is 100% Nvidia's fault.
X11 + Nvidia is still one the most common and functional configurations for people who want to use their computer instead of beta testing.
> * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
I'd rather have to worry about adding a few extra flags than worry about X11. X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient...
Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11.
> * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
See argument above for Chrome.
> * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either.
> * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
One more reason got added to use Wayland from now onwards.
> * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Give it a couple of years for every combination to get ironed out. X11 is hardly the answer here. If you're going to gripe about Wayland, X11 is never the answer.
Vulkan is 7 years old by now. That's the same time span between Direct3D1 (1995) and Direct3D9 (2002).
Wayland is 15 years old now btw.
7 and 15 years should be more than enough time to create stable and robust software libraries.
Direct3D versions 1 – 9 were indeed released at a rapid pace, more than one per year on average. However, it took a whole five years before D3D9 was superseded by D3D10, and subsequent releases have also been relatively slow.
Direct3D 12 is eight years old, even older than Vulkan. However, it still feels to me like a "new" API, I think because even now, many games still use DirectX 11.
I'm not sure why this is. Probably some combination of the flattening of the technology curve (hardware used to change more each year than they do today), and the fact that once a technology is more complex, it takes more time to change it, and to adopt those changes. And also, legacy compatibility becomes a concern: in 1995, we didn't have multiple decades of existing code, libraries, tooling, and complete consumer software to migrate and support.
It's because Windows.
DX9 remained on the frontline for as long as it did because Windows XP was supported from 2001 all the way to 2014 due to usage share. Similarly, DX11 remains on the frontline because Windows 7. I guess it's more apt to say they are because Windows Vista and Windows 8(.1) failed spectacularly respectively, but my point remains.
Since Windows 7 and 8(.1) are both EOL now, more games should start using DX12 Ultimate.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, for example, would often crash on me under dx12, until I switched to dx11. Not everyone is id Software or Epic.
Yeah, if it were goddamn Apple forcing the ecosystem to make the change. Linux is the bazaar, no one forces anything, but it also comes with disadvantages, like not adapting new tech.
My experience here is that this used to be true more than ten years ago. At some point in between that though X11 managed to get to 0 config. At least, I installed Arch & didn't have to touch the X config at all and things just worked (on NVidia at least).
I'm not trying to say needing flags is something bad. That stuff will get ironed out for sure. But if you want to avoid Xwayland, you need flags (& it's not just Chrome & Firefox - Electron needs similar things) AND Xwayland on Nvidia is a mess right now with no end in sight.
> Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either.
Some apps don't even support Wayland and likely won't for a long time and I think you're underestimating how long XWayland will be a thing (e.g. Tcl/TK which is powers a surprising number of developer tooling UIs doesn't have Wayland & doesn't seem to have enough interest to really push this to production though previous ports have been attempted & made progress). FWIW, this argument has been made since Wayland started 15 years ago. I won't even have the same machine in 5 years.
> X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient...
It's funny the kind of arguments that get made because you think I'm against your position. I agree with you and think Wayland should replace X11. But there are very real problems with it today & there's a reason anyone with an NVidia GPU goes "uggh. Wayland". The problem is not just on Nvidia's end and I see cultural problems from Wayland's side too (likely because they've faced so much drive by attacks). I feel like Nvidia is stepping up on their side though - I don't see the same from Wayland/XWayland camp.
Genuinely curious -- what stepping up should happen from Wayland/XWayland ? Intel and AMD seem to work well on it so is it because they have some accepted some ugly hacks that Nvidia are not willing to do ? Something else ?
I don’t know the details on the Xwayland BS (which is the main visible issue I’m seeing as unhealthy). I have not done the technical research to fully understand whose position is actually justified. Heck it might be that both sides are correct on the facts (it doesn’t make sense to add the support that makes other GPUs work and it doesn’t make sense yet to add the new way for Nvidia) but the net outcome is that Xwayland on Nvidia’s propietary drivers remains broken for the foreseeable future. Both Intel and AMD both support something called implicit synchronization. But apparently explicit synchronization is “the future” because it enables more performance and Nvidia has clearly communicated they’re not going to support implicit. Xwayland only supports implicit synchronization and refuses to add explicit synchronization (I think strong arming their position is that the explicit synchronization protocol is isn’t ready or not popular enough yet in the ecosystem? I’m not sure). Nvidia has contributed some patch to fix Xwayland to use explicit synchronization when running on the propietary driver (or something like that).
X11 is not ideal but I don't think it'll really die. The big benefit of UNIX/Linux is choice. Including for a graphics stack.
I'd use Wayland if it worked with KDE on FreeBSD but it doesn't yet. But I'm not in a hurry anyway.
Can we stop with these useless conteos? No one goddamn cares about linux desktop, this is the unfortunate state of things. X could be maintained, but no one goddamn cares about doing that ugly work, because they don’t get paid Cobol-bank money for maintaining an ugly legacy software that was designed at a time when GPUs didn’t exist.
They've done the same to CentOS of course - just taking it over to kill it because it's in their way of selling paid licenses.
I'm surprised how much support they have been getting from the community. They managed to frame perfectly normal open source users as "freeloaders" during the whole CentOS and closing source debacle surrounding RHEL. And the community seems to be happy parrotting this twisted narrative. The whole reason for FOSS is to share.
It's one of the main reasons I moved to FreeBSD, I don't want my OS to be a stringpuppet for big tech.
But ofcourse, Wayland isn't the problem...
There are many reports of such bug. It's common on Wayland, but happens on X11 to some folks. The only constant is it happens on devices with Nvidia cards.
I tried pretty much everything and I gave up on solving it.
X11 often gets patched by a proprietary nvidia blob (the nvidia driver), which uses a separate, non-standard, X-specific API.
Every thread about wayland has people claiming it's broken yet they aren't reporting bugs or providing useful information at all, just vague complaints.
Many people experience no issues with wayland, and some people do experience issues, but without any information nothing can be done to even attempt to fix things. It's possible in many cases that something is misconfigured, or a known issue that has been fixed in newer releases of whatever you are using, or a genuine bug that hasn't yet been discovered. Nobody will ever know though.
I take my bug reports a bit more seriously, and I don't use instances of success to discount instances of failure. A bug's a bug, a good proces cares about outliers (and as you say, Wayland erroring does not seem like an outlier) too.
I understand not all combinations of hardware can work flawlessly, but Intel machines with Intel hardware seems like a good baseline to ensure always works before you mainline Wayland.
Asking users to contribute to fixing their own issues is the quickest way to make sure nothing ever gets done. I’m an extremely technical user but im using Linux for my day to day engineering needs. I have other SW that needs my attention and debugging my personal desktop issues is not what I’d like to be doing. If it gets bad enough I’ll reinstall the OS from scratch or switch back to Mac and figure out how I can make Linux work in a VM so I can test the software I need. But right now the SW I’m working on is Linux-only and if I can solve and figure out a workaround for the problem by myself without having to pause and follow up about some bug is not where I want to spend my energy. I have enough trouble keeping track of conversations on GitHub. I just hope any bugs I can’t figure out myself will eventually get solved without me having to do anything. And I do follow up some times but the value of that has been hit and miss enough that I do it as rarely as possible.
When you have to register on a website to report bugs, you just switch back to X (path of least resistance).
Here on HN I see a lot of popular opinions on Intel and their drivers. Even today, proposing it as a baseline for Wayland. But could it perhaps be that Intel is just really good at marketing? AMD might be less about marketing and just delivering good drivers.
Also, NVIDIA nukes the open drivers by providing a crippled firmware for them, but this is another story.
I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care.
Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.
The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try.
I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.
Hear, hear !
I have been stucked with awesome for years now and even though I lost some functionalities between v2 and v4 I still can't switch. I tried i3 and regolith (was really looking for all the niceties of a DE: volume, bluetooth, screen, etc.) but tiling operations are not the same.
This article from september goes into wayland (and KDE) much deeper and is worth a read: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...
On the one hand, this is impressive. On the other, this is a vague indictment of modern software. Plasma logs you in, draws a background and the taskbar thing across the screen. There shouldn't be seconds involved in that to shave.
This must be a recurring feature, every few years someone goes through and fixes up load times.
That'd seem to me like a sweet spot between what was before (making the whole system startup slower), and what you mention will be now (probably making the first search to load noticeably slower).
Wasn't the whole initial selling point of systemd parallel startup?
Why can't this launcher thing just get set to start up as early as possible, with lowest priority, and be set to not block initialization of anything else?
A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade.
If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it.
Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?).
The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.
Some of the other bug might be nix-specific? On debian sid with KDE I haven't seen those, at least
I also use Wayland + KDE full time and have not experienced any of the issues you described.
I've also reproduced these issues on Void Linux, and on 3 separate machines. So it's not a hardware or distro specific issue, nor particularly rare.
If an app uses one of the normal GUI toolkits, they don't normally have to do anything crazy to support wayland, so I'd be suprised if you need to swap to a whole new ecosystem (and there's always XWayland for those that do).
I really haven't had major gripes with X for many years. It mostly just works, and is rock solid. Long gone are the days when you had to manually craft the perfect config file depending on your setup. It also works great with multiple monitors, though I think there are still some color management issues, which don't particularly bother me, and lack of HDR, obviously. Plus the client/server architecture is super useful, to this day. IME Wayland feels like a usability regression, forcing me to change many of the programs I use, and it has critical issues, which seemingly only affect me...
Regarding the panel I have no idea. Mine is at the left and I have no problems to move it wherever I want. No idea for that.
That’s not really the case, basically every framework supports both X and Wayland, out of the box. It is just sometimes marked as experimental/non-default by some software, e.g. firefox (which is not your average GTK/Qt app).
For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..).
On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.
I used it first with XFCE and later with i3.
The other feature for me is security. Sandboxes can access the wayland socket and run GUI stuff, without the ability to read the entire screen or run commands that effect outside of the sandbox.
The wayland socket is a unix socket, exists as a regular file. Gating access to the socket works like any other file.
X11 has some interesting issues here. It creates an "abstract socket". These exists as files on the file system, but they are not regular files.
An interesting exmaple: A sandbox that starts with a fresh root and bind mounts in only what is required. Even when you don't bind the socket into the sandbox, the sandbox can still access it!
There are ways to prevent sandboxes from accessing the x11 socket, but this is definitely not what I would have expected!
With wayland, if the socket is not bind'ed into the sandbox, it can't be accessed, it behaves as expected!
This might not seem that important, but these features bring Linux desktop out of the 1900s with regards to security. Software like flatpak would not be able to effectively sandbox GUIs at all without wayland, a feature other platforms have supported for at least a decade or more!
The Linux desktop isn't making great use of this and related technology yet, on the standard distro, by default, applications can read your GPG keys and other important data, or even delete it. Wayland is a step towards fixing this!
Coming from a long time 'minimalist' linux users, my biggest issue with it is that there's no ~/.config/kde that you can just copy between machines and get set up the way you like it. It's spread out all over the show.
The absolute state of desktop applications in 2023. Everything is a web browser. God help us all.
Also, Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland.
So I'm still stuck with Xorg.
I've used Linux desktops on and off for the past 20 years, and it's incredibly frustrating how everything is perpetually in a state of semi-brokenness as they move on to the Next Thing. I still think about the early years of KDE4, which were a horrible regression from the stable and usable KDE3.
To state the obvious, though: only if you use Nvidia. And honestly, the Linux community not going out of their way to support an uncooperative hardware vendor is a good thing for everyone who doesn't use that vendor; it reduces scope.
Agreed on the frustration of chronic semi-brokenness though.
It doesn't scale the rest, because those are electron apps that either ship with old electron version, or disable wayland. Special mention goes to vscode, which ignores *-flags.conf and provides no other way to enable wayland, except for command line argument.
So basically it is maintainers of these apps dragging their feet.
KDE Plasma Wayland by default applies Xwayland fractional scaling for X11 apps, which while less good than Wayland-native scaling mostly works. (If it's broken for you/an app you use, you can toggle it to let the DE scale up from 100%.)
It doesn't work those, that call XGetImage on X11 root window and think, that they will get away with it.
I hope they address this kind of thing prior to making it a default.
For example, a persistent bug that hasn't gone away in all this time is flaky wake from sleep. Sometimes, one of my monitors breaks in such a way that it drops down to 640x480 res and can't be changed back unless I do a list of different rituals. Another bug is that KDE's "Night Color" feature doesn't work, and whenever it turns on it completely freezes the display every few minutes (although unfreezing it is just a matter of pressing the Meta key, so it's not a big deal). I keep sleep and Night Color on, even though they're broken in the hopes that I'll one day wake up to an update that fixed them. I'm 99% sure those are Nvidia driver bugs, and Nvidia has been working to improve their Wayland support recently (for example, there's an upcoming Night Light fix that I'm excited for: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/gnome-night-light-nvidia...). Being able to follow progress like this is fun for me.
I'm sure there are some other issues that I'm not remembering, but overall the desktop is completely 100% usable and reliable (for both working and gaming). My only other machine is a laptop, and that too is running KDE+Wayland (though no Nvidia). I have not switched back to X11 once in the months (year?) since I switched to Wayland, and have not missed anything.
EDIT: also, I should mention that I'm on Fedora Kinoite. I feel like a lot of problems people have with KDE/Wayland/Nvidia comes down to bad configuration somewhere. If you're on a similar machine, I recommend you try switching to Kinoite since it's designed to just work out of the box, and is pretty much impossible to break.
# normal steam with experimental HDR enabled, native resolution for my laptop and 165hz refresh rate.
alias steam 'steam-run gamescope -f --hdr-enabled -e -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 165 -- steam'
# full screen gamepad ui
alias steam_gamepadui 'steam-run gamescope -f --hdr-enabled -e -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 165 -- steam -gamepadui'
One of the main reasons I went back to Gnome was the out of box support for RDP.
Hoping this transition to default will get the attention of developers at Zoom, and they can get screensharing to work in their native app without resorting to browser mode or some virtual camera hack. My biggest gripe for sure.
Wayland tracker issue, https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/109
HDR is a major missing feature in Linux, which makes it not ideal for HTPC usage.
You can pry Plasma out my cold, dead hands. Gnome, Macos, and Windows: now that's amateur hour.
Yeah, even as a GTK developer I'm gonna throw a yellow flag here. I've got both Qt and GTK apps that I really love and daily-drive, but none of my GTK3, GTK4 or Libadwaita apps even remotely approach the information density of a Qt app. There's nothing wrong with that; simplicity is nice for a lot of software. But programs like Cutter, Okteta or even music apps like Eliza cannot be built with the GNOME HIG. I'd even argue that certain GNOME apps like Meld, GIMP and Glade/Cambalache suffer from relying on the GNOME HIG too much.
That said, I find MacOS frustrating at times because basic things can feel like a pain. Switching between several windows of the same application isn't a simple Alt-Tab; the green button enters full screen mode (KDE/Windows F11 Full Screen is equivalent) instead of leaving just the menu bars and application bar on screen; tiling windows isn't as simple as ramming the application against the border you want to expand to. These are simple things I do often in other OS's that have tedious menu workflows in MacOS. I still like a lot of MacOS though.
I find it better than Context.app, which i did buy and used on a few machines for a few years.
it's like navigating within a sparse table.
columns are the apps, chosen by cmd-tab.
rows are the windows of an app, chosen with cmd-` .
Please feel free to answer these questions (I think I already know the answer so this is to illustrate a point, but I will also be happy to learn a better way):
1. How do you cut and paste something on a Mac using the keyboard?
2. How do you cut a file in one folder and paste it into another in Finder using the keyboard?
3. How are you supposed to know the answer to 2. except by learning it by discussing with Mac users?
4. I haven't tested recently but it used to be that there was no single consistent way to get to the start or end of a line while selecting the text in between. CMD-shift-arrow left/right worked most places, but not everywhere. Ctrl + a/e always worked but couldn't be used to select text, only to move the cursor.
PS: I already asked for a Mac as my next machine at work. But as someone who uses and have used almost all major desktops (Gnome 2, KDE 3, 4 and 5, Windows 95 - 10, several iterations of Mac OS X) for significant time, I do feel the "attention to detail" argument for Mac is a bit overblown.
PPS: I planning to get a Mac because it has good hardware, is silent, fast and because I want to try it again after a few years. Also I have migrates my whole family to Apple phones since last I used Mac at work.
The example of whether to use the same command for ready-a-file-to-perhaps-move-but-leave-it-otherwise as for definitely-remove-this-thing-now-and-maybe-put-it-somewhere-else is more a matter of taste than one or the other representing better attention to detail.
2. You don't.
I realize that's not a very satisfying answer, but it's quite obviously a conscious UX choice, and IMO not a bad one. The problem is, where does the file go in between the time you cut and you paste? If you accidentally copy something else to your clipboard, do you loose the entire file? Does the file appear in the Trash or is it deleted perminently?
You can use cmd+c and then cmd+alt+v to copy a file to your clipboard and then move it to a different directory, but moving is distinct from cutting in that it's a synchronous operation. There is no in between point where your file is lost in the ether.
3. Assuming we're referring to "how do you move a file with the keyboard", you open the "edit" menu in Finder's global menu bar, then hold down "alt", at which point "paste" will change to "move item here".
I agree "hold down option" is not particularly discoverable. However, it's a standard across all of macOS for enabling alternative options. For example, holding down alt will also change "Minimize" to "Minimize All", and "Quit" to "Quit and Keep Windows" (or "Quit and don't keep Windows" depending on your default preference). Once you know this basic idea, it's consistent.
4. To my knowledge this works in all apps that use Carbon/Cocoa. If apps reimplement these views and disregard Apple's design guidelines, what is Apple supposed to do?
P.S. I think modern macOS is a poorly thought out mess but I love how it was a decade ago (up to OS X 10.9).
I am waiting for a Mac as my next machine and the bit about alt in the menu should help quite a bit.
I am stil a bit annoyed from last time I used Mac a decade ago and all the things I couldn't figure out without extensive web searches or asking coworkers but I have still figured out it is time to try it again :-)
1. So to cut in applications (or anywhere anything is selectable other than Finder), it's cmd+x, as it has been since the early '80s; likewise, paste is cmd+v
2. In Finder, you'd use cmd+c to copy the file, cmd+v to paste a copy and cmd+opt+v to move the file. This was introduced, I think, in Lion (OS X 10.9).
3. Erm, using the menu bar to begin with? Reading the built-in help? Searching the internet? How do you learn it in Windows and/or any other $desktop or $wm?
4. *Emacs keybindings work in most places in macOS, and they have since the first beta of OS X.
Edit: *most...
anyway, kde is very configurable so most likely you might bend it to your liking, had you been somehow forced into kde.
> KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to
have you considered XFCE ? to me it's the best so far: it does all the things i need, it's fast and it isn't dumbed down like gnome.
It's not on wayland yet, but frankly I don't care much about the X11 vs Wayland debacle (though i slightly side with Xorg). Essentially I run whatever XFCE needs.
When XFCE will run on wayland, I'll run on wayland I guess.
You're not the only one. Ah, the poignancy of reminiscing about loves that we've lost.
The only real issue with that, for me (and it's not poorly rendered, not sure what that means) is the time it takes to activate. You have to hover over it for like a second before the pop-up shows up; this is especially frustrating when items are grouped.
Just look at the desktop wallpaper or any font choice of the average person. It's no wonder Comic Sans and Papyrus are the most common fonts in the world, even for formal business documents.
Which is perfectly fine, and design challenged people would enjoy a well-designed desktop environment as well, the issue is that they are ready to defend bad design choices to the death. So mention KDE having lower design standards than GNOME and you get a ton of people telling you "it looks fine to me, I don't know what you're moaning about."
You'd get the same answer telling the average person that, no, Comic Sans is not appropriate for an obituary.
---
That said, KDE is slowly growing on me, but the default GNOME look is much more slick, even though GTK4 does 1/20th of what QT does. All modern GTK4/Adwaita apps are a flat, slick blob of grey list widgets.
Colour theory and the use of accent colours or non-monochrome icons is unknown to the average GTK developer.
The complaints are mostly "fun fonts are not appropriate for a business" and everyone jumped on hating it. But those who are not that stuck-up don't hate it with a passion...
Not only do you defend it, even your defense proves that Comic Sans is a bad design, because matching the needs of what it’s used for (in this case a business setting, where fun fonts are not allowed) is one of the highest factors in good design.
And you display another behavior which is common among Linux users that the parent hasn’t mentioned. Finally resorting to complaining that the Users are wrong.
Here’s the usual 3 step that prevents a lot of progress in the Linux world.
1. Have bad design ideas. 2. Defend those bad design ideas. 3. Insist users and the people who want better design are wrong.
Among designers the idea that comic sans is a very decent font is a very uncontroversial opinion.
Also, Comic Sans is not even something rebellious, it's literally a good-looking, quirky font, people just hate it because it looks distinctive and it stands out.
This is a bit dystopian to scream "NO FUN ALLOWED"....
It’s beyond awful, just get yourself some link to Google Fonts at least, and explore the myriads of much better looking fonts in every possible way. That’s exactly the problem with aesthetics perception of the FOSS community, having this subjective ‘oh but I like it’ stand on absolutely mediocre shit. I’m very happy that by some (unknown to me) reason modern Gnome (45) looks (and works) so good.
Not sure if you're right or not about Linux, but what you've laid out there has been Apple's approach for the past 20+ years and it's been working out pretty OK for them!
Yes, my god is KDE ugly, but just because they don't prioritize aesthetics doesn't mean they don't know better.
Linux users (and developers) prioritize functionality above all else. Meanwhile the entire discipline of visual design is just not very consistent. There are far too many subjective little rules and exceptions to maintain and they change all the time. Who cares?
Deliberate oversimplification of how things are displayed from the perspective of the implementer rather than the designer is its own aesthetic. It's the choice of reason and a rejection of the imperfections of human perception. It's rebellious and edgy. It's not a mere rationalization of laziness or ignorance, but a middle finger to business types and their marketing henchmen with their annoying design guidelines and requirements that just get in the way of the actual product. KDE was not made by people getting paid to smile and nod while staying quiet in their cubicles (at least not during the hours they worked on it). Very rock and roll. I'm all for it.
> Visual soup is hard to organize and make sense of.
Initially yes but once you know where things are, having everything be visually distinct can sidestep a lot of unnecessary GUI features (search boxes, configurable views, toolbars, etc.) to overcome the impenetrable and dishonest sameness that comes with "good design". If there's a way to avoid writing more code to maintain, they're going to find it. Why obscure the reality of the underlying logic and data when it just gets in the way of progress towards more functionality?
In a production setting desktop environments are rare anyway and that's where applications are at their most complex. That should be proof enough that visual design isn't functional. You want functional and accessible? That's a simple 1KB config file on a server somewhere that you edit from a terminal instead of an endless sea of GUI menus and a lifetime of wrist and eye issues. The ultimate "contoured handle" is a copy of vim! If you don't see the equivalence then you don't understand how much of an unnecessary and tortured metaphor the desktop really is. It's a concession, not a requirement.
Away from KDE, away from GUIs, a dense text readout of key value pairs with no new lines presents a lot of information, but is functionally useless. A tiny dash of design - pairs on new lines, some boldness for keys, indentation for values that wrap to new lines - drastically increases the readability. No matter how familiar you are with this particular text dump, this remains true. You can't escape design by running off into the terminal.
In GUIs, having movable, modular panels can be good design. Blender's design is quite good, especially among its peers, and everything about it can be shuffled around in ways most apps with modular panels can only dream of.
Again, we're not talking about a 1 dimensional spectrum between design and density. Design isn't just "add padding" and "remove customizability."
This is just saying that people who don't share your taste are wrong (and worse, just don't know any better). I dispute that. Aesthetics are highly subjective, and things that have an aesthetic sense that I dislike are not wrong, and the people who do like it are not ignorant or idiots.
Are you sure you don't feel this way because Windows and Mac go out of their way to prevent you from changing anything about the UX at all?
I'm not blind to it, but it certainly comes way down on the list compared to other things, like actually working.
As an example, my SO recently bought a new egg timer. She picked it solely based on it looking good. Turns out it's completely useless because you can barely hear it even if it's right in front of you.
Sure, if I'm buying something purely decorative, like a statue a painting, then aesthetics is all I'm going for. But for things I have to use, the thing has to do its job above anything else.
This is something a lot of designers seems to miss. Just look at Windows 11 when it launched, and the completely idiotic decision to force icons to group without text. Sure it looks less cluttered, but it's just like the egg timer, completely useless.
Sadly, that's going to fall on deaf ears, as most people still can't tell aesthetics and design apart.
KDE has all the features and all the buttons. It's what I'd expect a prototype to be like.
Gnome simply reaches good design by just omitting everything that'd be hard to design. One way to do it, but obviously missing a lot of functionality.
Truly good design is making all the bells and whistles feel intuitive. Good design isn't about looks, it's about information hierarchy and structure.
Which is why I love the Windows 9x design so much.
KDE (perhaps surprisingly) does have a design group, but I have to imagine them not being taken seriously in the slightest.
Have you tried getting to know their contribution process, looking at their current design guidelines and submitting a new, well-thought-out and complete design guideline proposal to KDE? Having someone who notices the current problems with that aspect, like you, actually do the work and help fix it could really make a difference! :)
Would appreciate if someone can help me to get quicker at understanding with their system, so I can actually contribute and not just complain about it being inconsistent here and there. Even though I not use KDE myself, I use it from time to time on other’s machines and enjoy playing with it. I would consider a switch only if the DE would highly reconsider itself towards simplifying and making other defaults. At the moment, Gnome looks like it to me.
I'm not a kde contributor myself, but they seem to have a matrix channel for that purpose at [ https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#new-contributors:kde.org ], where the contributors themselves can probably point you to the relevant resources and get started.
About your second point: From what I've been reading on their blog, a large focus of Plasma 6 is making the defaults more sane and simplifying them a good bit.
It's obviously a huge challenge to design systems that are simple and polished to understand and use on the surface, but powerful to customize underneath, and I'm interested to see how it will be tackled.
Edit: Also on this site [ https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved ] they point to resources for the KDE Visual Design group
^ While writing this, I came up with loads of concrete suggestions relating to Transformers, but kind of beside the point.*