Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really need a professional designer.
I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
Like, it looks "bad," but it's honestly not that bad.
I do use third party themes but I suspect they have the same problems. I just have some colour preferences and like pretty icons.
I prefer to have third party apps icons overridden by the icon theme, but then I can just use another icon theme.
The desktop/windowing system for me is just a means to launch an application which is where I spend most of my time. This often happens to be a browser, a terminal and IDE etc. The design of such apps takes more precedence for me than some margin of the control center items where I couldn't recognize what the problems were if you asked me to.
What bothers me more than the visual design is the interaction design ... am trying to find a way to move a sticky note which has been on my desktop for quite some time and the method I used previously no long works. Also some releases ago they mapped 'Alt-F' on the Konsole terminal app to a Find input box, whereas the binding is normally used on terminals for "move cursor forward by a word". This is not a sane default and has caused me to pick Wezterm as my preferred terminal app.
KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE.
They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born.
Look at this image:
https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423...
The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.
At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)
Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?
Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
:)
That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme.
It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.
I might be wrong, but I think in this case it has the same coded margin, but ends up as a different visual margin because the usb stick image is probably square shaped png or svg with a transparent area, and this makes it look like it's not aligned. So, it might be case where you need the dev to have an eye for it and intentionally manipulate the paddings to get visually satisfying spacing. Usually developers just set the same value in code and think it's good enough.
KDE has been around for 29 years, it will probably be around for 29+ more years.
I'd say that warrants "a bit more work", as something you can show your grandkids as being something you've built :-)
Well, it is visible, and the professional solution for this would be to have icon design guidelines and enforce them, such that the actual visible/non-transparent icon contents are always in the same "box", and then include the padding in the icon itself in the calculation for element spacing. The fact that one component is text and the another one is an icon is not a valid excuse, these things can be planned in advance, especially for a desktop environment that has been around for close to 29 years now.
Oh, and now that I've looked the image more, even more alignment/padding issues:
- the main text isn't vertically aligned in the (I assume) fixed size vertical window
- similar story for the KDE icon and the KDED text in the titlebar
- the settings icon is bigger/the "content box" of the icon is bigger than that of the windows close (x) icon, such as that the visible contents are not padded the same amount, vertically
As I said, I guess the solution at this point is to not care and just accept that KDE is KDE, that weird but kind uncle at every family Christmas party.
Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals.
On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.
> they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
That’s good, but not what I was discussing here
As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy.
I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except.
Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
Incidentally I think this has also been what’s inspired many of the numerous forks and new projects within the Linux desktop space: people who initially intended to contribute to existing projects find themselves unable to effect substantial or sufficient change, become frustrated, and go start their own thing.
For example, we also have some devs who proactively read or watch negative reviews and extract the good points into tickets (it's a nice low cost source of one form of user testing), and we've over the last half-decade or so built a strong culture of paying attention to user pain points, change defaults to match expectations, etc.
I know this thread reads pretty negatively, but I can say confidently our userbase has never been happier and the total number of users we serve well has grown significantly. You can even see it in the metrics - our monetary user donations have tripled in the last couple of years.
You can teach this pony new tricks!
Because the HN I read, ""how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy" was only between 2008 to ~2012. Most of the time how to make money wasn't even a thing from 2014 onwards. Broadly speaking It wasn't until recent two to three years did it came back. As a matter of fact most of HN at some point hated companies that makes profits and not giving back. HN's pendulum swings back and forth.
I generally dont think critics are about dev or FOSS at all. But this reminded me I need to be careful with critics as it could be dispiriting. At least my view it is just lack of recourses or funding, the hardest part in FOSS. But any discussion on the topic will obviously turned into Google funding Mozilla type of argument. Which then turns into philosophy and political battle.
While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.
And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.
I agree this will be a big improvement. I love type design, and our typography in KDE being relatively scattershot has always been one of my pain points as well.
Here's why no amount of mere customization can "fix it"
Last screenshot is from Gnome settings serving as a strong contrast to the rest (KDE screenshots taken from the OP article)
Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course.
There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.
https://static1.ahelpme.com/public/media/tutorials/review-fe...
You can also see that the KDE settings screen can fit more than 3 options at a time without scrolling, which is appreciated.
That said like I said I do sometimes feel that their more modern themes have random extra spacing that would be nice to be able to remove. Better then all the other modern DEs though (except for power user window managers like i3), so in that way they've done a fantastic job. KDE is vastly more usable than the alternatives, including commercial.
The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change.
The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.
[0] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1
EDIT: Consider the Horizon IT scandal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
This kind of thing would be less likely to happen if designers didn't (probably inadvertently) mislead people into thinking software is usually correct.