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Comment by mikevm | Hacker News Reader

The black font over the grey window. The buttons with the cartoon icons. The hideous tray icons. Sheer ugliness.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop.

Cinnamon for me. It's a gtk3 desktop, but I can actually figure out how to do things in it.

Cinnamon is nice, but it had a habit of chewing up a load of CPU for no apparent reason on my machines. XFCE is fast, easy and stable, and doesn't try to do anything too fancy.

You forgot to mention the blue shadow on the active window.

That's current with KDE 4.1x as well, with the Oxygen theme. Generally KDE looks a lot better with desktop effects enabled. All the gradients and halos make sense with transparency.

What about it?

Go in the settings and change it to vermillion-fuchsia with a hint of magenta if you so please. I'd like to know what's wrong with a blue shadow that indicates an active window.

I'll bite. It's completely over the top, looks like a radioactive comic book character.

It's useful. It displays what window is focused. It's not just there to look pretty, it's also functional.

Except it isn't pretty it's actually horrendous. Function and form are equals.

When in actuality the most polished Linux desktop is the ones that give you a simplicity experience unmatched by the competition. I would look for awesome and i3. If only somebody made one of these things easier to configure, that'd be the sweet spot.

KDE is an enormously big project. There is only one theme Oxygen that is feature full. It is a humongous task to make every element of it beautiful and it won't happen without your help.

Have you tried GNOME 3?

Not yet. Is it worth it?

It is the most polished Linux desktop IMO.

I thought Gnome 3 wasted a lot of screen real estate. I recently tried going back to XFCE and found I missed Unity. They dragged me kicking and screaming, but I've come to like it afterall.

I thought Gnome 3 wasted a lot of screen real estate

Fonts are quite large by default. I usually set the font scaling factor to 0.9 with gnome-tweak-tool, this also reduces the size of the top panel.

Since 3.10, the tendency for apps is to save space by placing buttons directly in the window title bars. For example, this is what Nautilus looks like in 3.12:

http://imgur.com/3a4zIfQ

Have you tried Cinnamon? It also uses gtk3 but it's a more traditional layout. Cinnamon desktop is my favorite out of the desktops I've tried.

Probably all of the options waste a lot of screen by default. Elementary would be an exception. I was thinking more about just general polish.

I really do like Unity, but I just can't stand the default choice of colors; and finding a good scheme seems difficult for me.

Pretty hard to believe that this is the best that the KDE Visual Design Team - http://vdesign.kde.org/index.html could come up with. Are they even trying hard enough ? This is 2014, the post PC era and they are delivering something that looks like windows 95. UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.

Window 8 was clearly a mess but at least Microsoft is trying something.

Ignore everything that's not the wallpaper or the taskbar, those are the only items that got touched by the KDE VDT for now. The Windows are still using the old Oxygen theme.

You can see some of the work going on in the widget/decorator theme in some blog posts of the VDT: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/05/monday-report-14-lazy... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-12-amaz... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-11-go-t...

Awesome! That theme looks like a huge step forward. Overall KDE still feels a bit cluttered to me, but at least that clutter won't be so ugly anymore soon!

Do they have an ETA on these upgrades? Seems I can't find it in these reports.

No ETA, as far as I know. I think the plan is to ship it with the second release of KDE5, but it's information gathered from the forum, not official words.

Do we need UX innovation? Whenever I hear about something lacking "UX innovation", the specifics just point out where it's ugly. I'd like to know what the problems are that you'd like to have solved; I've been using KDE for the last several months, and my experience as a user has been excellent.

It's a bit like using GIMP. (Despite still not being able to promote it in most social situations because the name sounds offensive in polite conversation) I've got used to GIMP, I find it comfortable and logical enough to get things done. Similarly with KDE, I've been using it well over a decade - I don't want the interface or UX to alter drastically. It's a DE, it needs to show me system data, enable config and otherwise tie the ends together whilst keeping out of the way of the applications being run.

I don't really care if it's ugly in default. I'll add an icon pack and a theme a few seconds after a new install anyway. It's not like a console is exactly beautiful - except in a minimalist tech aesthetic sort of way - but I still use it and it does the necessary.

This is one of the great things about open source, the choice. If you want fancy-schmanzy UX innovation go with Ubu' default mainstream offering.

That said KDE is innovating - eg with Activities, and with PIM integration - but in ways I can thankfully ignore.

UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.

That may well be a Good Thing. Not all "innovations" are useful or desirable. Sometimes something that "just works" is all that's needed.

Me, I like KDE just fine the way it is. shrug

> I can't believe I'm saying this, but Unity 7 is the most polished looking Linux desktop.

And I can't believe I'm saying this on hacker news but there is a difference between "polished" and "subjectively ugly".

What's wrong with the "cartoon icons"? They look like Windows 7 icons. You know Windows 7, right? A lot of people called it "Microsoft's most polished desktop ever".

Yeah..those people are not me and probaly anyone i know, so don't even care.

The point is that this confuses a purely subjective statement that is more about the observer than the observed (such as, "I don't like the style of the icons"), with an attempted objective statement (such as, "KDE is not polished") which is supposed to be purely about the thing being discussed rather than the tastes of person making the comment. AFAICT this is at the root of pretty much all pointless arguments about anything remotely technical on the Internet.

Put another way, if X is designed to do Y, you can't say "X sucks" just because Y isn't interesting to you. You might say, "X is a bad implementation of Y". You might say, "I don't like Y therefore I don't use X". You might discuss whether or not Y is a valid goal, or whether or not X does a good job of achieving Y, but any serious discussion about anything requires that everyone involved make an effort to recognize that X and Y are two completely different things.

The key here is "serious discussion". If people don't want to seriously discuss this, then by all means just post opinions about whether or not something is good at what it does based on how well it matches up with your particular tastes and requirements. But the whole point of HN ought to be that everyone makes at least a token effort to seriously discuss this stuff. You can go anywhere if you just want to have conversations about what sucks and what rules and leave it at that.

You draw a lot a words out my comment just for the sake of comment something that you got on your mind even before i commented on this thread. Regardless i am mostly agree with you. But i don't have the energy nor mood to discuss anything that i am not even involve with, and there is nothing wrong to feel that way.IMHO,if you truly want to bring a meaningful discussion go to the source of this project and with the poeople that are interested on working on it, instead something so ephimeral like this thread.

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