I run LO on KDE on Ubuntu 24.04 at work. The menus were hiding lots of stuff with a weird gray on slightly less gray color scheme. It felt like they hate users, but then it hit me: The Gnome and KDE styling are somehow infighting. A 5 minute journey in the LO settings menu turned it from a hunt-the-label game into not-productivity-damaging good enough UI.

I have copied over the config for a few Ubuntu versions so I assumed some setting got wonky, but reading this thread, I wonder who else has to suffer this.

It's easy to make something look nice when you drop "being useful" as a requirement.

Libadawaita apps look good as graphic design, but at the cost of usability. KDE apps (real Qt, not Kirigami) always have some standout icons, mismatched margins or strange styling decisions, but all the features are more or less where you'd expect them to be and, more importantly, they actually have all those features because they weren't cut for the sake of design.

Frankly Gnome apps are very strange. Things are hidden in weird menus in odd places with barely noticable icons. Like... it's pretty and things are there but it makes no sense to me. It's like the mental model going on whiffles over my head. It's nice but whoever this is designed for does not even remotely think like I do. If that makes sense. I don't know if I'm just overwhelmed with UIs being different everywhere (Android vs iOS vs Windows vs MacOS vs every website doing it's things to be unique) but it feels like an extra and unnecessary puzzle that somehow hasn't gotten the memo about what's "common" or "typical" or emergent in the pile of visual chaos. Don't get me wrong, some parts they do the best (mostly shell related) and I miss them instantly on Windows or MacOS but some things (mostly in individual apps like the text editor and PDF viewer) really leave me scratching my head.

It doesn't matter. Most people go with the defaults. If your default is ugly, your app is uggly.