I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments.
Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable.
From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted.
It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.
Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior typing experience that decreases hand fatigue and can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance.
And don't get me started on layouts. QWERTY is ubiquitous but is a piece of tech debt that has hung around for over a century. Studies have been done and layouts have been produced that are much more efficient and produce less hand fatigue, but none have taken hold because of the sheer momentum that QWERTY has.
Want to see an easy place where there's room for improvement? Why are the rows on every keyboard you've ever used staggered so bizarrely? Because on a typewriter, mechanical limitations meant that there had to be room for the linkages. But inexplicably, we continue to manufacture keyboards that preserve this fossilized layout. Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
I'm curious why. It never occurred to me that this would be a source of discomfort. If I look at how I have my hands on the keyboard, they are angled anyway - my torso is wider than the keyboard center, elbows rest on the arm rests, so the hands then kinda meet in the middle angled. It doesn't look like an orthogonal layout would be particularly advantagenous.
Otherwise, I think keyboards are a case of "good enough" and high transition costs compared to the benefits. I'm a software dev, so certainly above average in the amount of typing I do. But I can't even type with all ten fingers, yet it never seemed like a bottleneck. I can't "outtype" my thought anyway.
I've seen coworkers using 65% or less mechanical keyboards and I have no idea how they get anything done. They always seemed like a cosmetic item to me, though they seem more portable if you're connecting it to a laptop. I use a full mechanical keyboard with keypad and regularly use home, del, pg up/up keys and appreciate having the arrow keys in their own little area. I use a few of the F-keys too. To each their own, but I personally find these tiny keyboards to be far less useful than a full sized keyboard
Another angle for optimization would be QWERTY itself.
I'm going to make an argument I don't fully agree with, but I think is worth discussing: the dramatic increase in digital literacy affords us the ability to focus on aesthetics more now. When no one knew how to use a computer or what it could do, everything needed to be extremely descriptive and often needed a metaphor back to the "real world." This isn't (as) true anymore.
If you like real buttons and scollbars, KDE is very nice these days and is MUCH more stable than it used to be.
The sentiment of "looks don't matter" seems to be very common among Linux users. Or maybe they don't see the difference, but it would be like not seeing the difference between a beaten Lada car and a modern Toyota Camry.
So, both ugly, and only one with evidence of being useful and used?
You should look harder.
Makes no sense.
KDE and MATE support all XFCE does, but they have each their own community driven ecosystem of extensions that are not cross-supported:
- KDE has https://store.kde.org/browse , and non-federated too
- MATE has a variety of non-federated plugins with no centralized-store like Compiz (which has it's own plugin ecosystem https://www.compiz-fusion.org/wiki_subdomain/welcome.html), and more
KDE is fully based on graphics accelerated drawing, it is expected AFAIK. MATE is mostly software-rendered unless extended with Compiz.
Basically, yeah. They can all be made to look and feel identical to each other, and their functionalities are supersets of MacOS launcher functionality set.