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In your examples, you are comparing KDE apps with GNOME apps. Though the KDE ones are all Qt and the GNOME ones are all GTK, it's not really a fair comparison since GNOME and KDE have different design objectives (KDE strives to be more feature-complete and configurable while GNOME wants to be simple to use and have a clean UI). The design choices in your comparison aren't dictated by the toolkit, but rather the HIG of each desktop. There are a lot of clean and simple Qt apps, like the official implementation of Tox [0].

[0] https://tox.im/assets/ss.png

You are right, but almost all the GTK applications I know are designed by and for people that use GNOME. The same holds for Qt/KDE.

Could you please post other clean Qt applications? This is not a provocation, just sincere curiosity.

VLC, Scrivener, Skype, Spotify for Linux; I think they all qualify as quite usable applications.

On the other hand, in GTK you have GIMP and Inkscape, which aren't exactly an UX expert's dream. In Qt you can find similar counterparts in Krita (specially Krita Sketch) and Karbon, which I think are much cleaner.

I hope they help with your preconceptions.

Even in KDE, the JuK media player/tagger (which is actually the semi-official app) is much closer in appearance to Rhythmbox than Amarok. https://www.kde.org/applications/multimedia/juk/

On the other hand I've not been having a lot of success maintaining JuK recently, but there's better-maintained apps like Tomahawk http://www.tomahawk-player.org/ and Cantata (https://code.google.com/p/cantata/, screenshots at http://i1-linux.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/Cantata_2.p...)

qBittorrent and Clementine also fit the bill.

Counter point: Dirk Hohndel explains how the Subsurface team was able to implement a much cleaner and simpler GUI in QT than in GTK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

(I've already posted this link in another comment, but here it is again just for relevance)

Maybe people don't make that many complex GUIs in GTK cause it's just too hard?

Well, I won't deny that there's some truth in what you said, but first a couple of comments about the examples.

Transmission is as much a Gnome as a KDE application. It has both Qt and GTK clients that look the same.

Brasero looks as complex as K3B.

I understand that Skanlite can look intimidating (especially on the Image Intensity properties), but Simple Scan seems simplistic. Scan source, scan mode and scan resolution are important properties when scanning and it's very useful to have direct access to them.

The default view in Digikam is not so different than that from Shotwell, a folder list to the left and the corresponding pictures to the right. The metadata widget is not opened by default.

As jstanek pointed out, even if some things could be made simpler and more polished, it's not so much that KDE doesn't have a clue about design and GNOME knows its stuff, but that they have different objectives. GNOME tries to be as simple as possible while KDE wants to give you power in the friendliest way possible. It's apples and oranges.

I feel uncomfortable with GNOME because I think it treats its users as perpetual newbies. I understand that a person's first use of an application should be made as simple as possible, but then they should be able to require more from their software if they want to. There are some things about KDE applications that maybe you won't find a use for at first, but then you need them and it's great to have them at your disposal.

I don't want GNOME to be like KDE, it's good at what it does even if I don't like it. The reverse holds true, too.

> Well, I won't deny that there's some truth in what you said, but first a couple of comments about the examples.

Well, your comments are on the screenshots, not on the applications. Try to use these applications for a while "to get the job done", you will get what I meant.

I have been a KDE user for years, I even contributed some patches back then. I still prefer Qt to GTK. But I whenever I can I use GNOME applications instead of KDE (with the exception of K3B).

I think the main problem can be traced back to when you say

> [In Skanlite/Simple Scan] Scan source, scan mode and scan resolution are important properties when scanning and it's very useful to have direct access to them.

Simple Scan (the GTK app) presents you two presets (Text and Image) and just guesses the rest of the details for you. And you know what? It gets them right 99% of the times. When it doesn't you can access the usual Preferences pane and modify whatever you want.

As somebody else commented in this thread, the KDE world refuses to have "reasonable" defaults in place, starting from the default theme to the good engineering practice of trying to guess as much as possible before asking questions.

PS: Transmissions was born in 2005 as a neat Cocoa application, GTK for Linux has been added soon after in version 0.6 (2006) and the Qt interface was started only in version 1.6 (2009). This is why it looks so like nice.

I use Transmission regularly. I have tried Brasero, Rythmbox and Simple Scan. These last three aren't bad, I just think that K3B, Amarok and Skanlite offer more and aren't that difficult. I just installed Shotwell to make a more informed opinion.

From what I can see, Simple Scan's "magic" is using a default DPI for Text (150 dpi) with grayscale, and another for Photos (300 dpi) and color. What if I want a light photo for the web, or a photo in grayscale? I think these aren't unreasonable examples at all. I suppose I'll have to use the counterintuitive Text for both examples, but now my photo looks awful on print and it's overkill (and monochrome) for the web! And if I have to go to Preferences for such common examples then it would be better to offer them right there in the main screen. Presets are good, guessing is good if you make the options easily available to tweak them. Simplistic presets and hidden options are not good IMHO.

You see, there's simple and there's simplistic. I already agreed that some options in KDE are overkill and should be hidden by default, but some of them are really useful. For example, why can't I preview a large photo while navigating visually the rest in Showell? It's something I usually do with my photos. With Digikam I just press a button and have that, I haven't found it possible in Shotwell, it's either one large photo at a time or many little photos.

Perhaps a minor point, but your default KDE theme picture is about four years out of date (for reference, around the time of GNOME 2.30: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__Y5xkuM0D24/S-e7-T3v_2I/AAAAAAAAAj... ). The most up-to-date picture of KDE I could find is https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.1/qt4_widgets_plu... .