You are not alone. Typography is questionable but the worst parts are padding and alignment.

I have to apologize in advance because it's going to sound like a harsh comment and I know this is volunteer work. I really think that KDE is technically very good. The amount of basic design mistakes however is just unbearable as far as I am concerned.

I mean, let's take a look at this improved notification panel. The closing and setting icons seem slightly lower than the icon on the left of the title. The large hamburger menu icon is actually two pixels on the left of the closing icon. There are 17 pixels of top padding but only 12 pixels of left padding. The large image is one pixel of center (232 pixels on the left, 230 on the right). Every single line of text has a different interline.

And it's same for every application of KDE. They really need a design team to polish it up.

Yeah, this is the real tragedy of KDE, and it's been like this forever: technically, it's fantastic, but the design and polish are really lacking. Instead, all the people good at visual design are working on Gnome, which has technical underpinnings that are crap by comparison.

GNOME does terrible waste of screen real estate so if those "people good at visual design" are responsible for that, i'd rather them stay in GNOME instead of infecting other desktop environments.

Design quality for a UI, ordered easiest to hardest:

1) Information dense

2) Looks good in screenshots

3) Information dense and easy to use

4) Information dense and easy to use and looks good in screenshots

An awful lot of designers stop at 2 because a 4 is way harder to achieve, yet a 2's pretty easy to sell (to "stakeholders"). The result is at least sometimes (sometimes) better than a 1. They may also drop a 3 to a 2, though, and it's really hard to later turn a 2 into a 3 (since it's "uglier", so harder to sell) and a 2 is so different in character from a 4 that it can't even really be considered progress toward it (a 3 might be).

There already is a very active design team: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design

For progress in polishing stuff (not only visual), see the blog https://pointieststick.com/ for weekly updates.

There is some good stuff there.

I kind of feel bad about my first comment because I know it takes a lot of time to do these modifications, the new interface is a clear improvement from what was there before and UX wise it's not bad at all.

It's just that every time I use KDE, I have this feeling that great work doesn't shine as it should because of padding, alignment and box in a box in a box issues. I know these adjustments are a pain to make and that it's a very ungrateful work but it shows.

So, thank you to the design team I guess and keep up the good work.

What are your design bonafides? It's easy to apply naive heuristics to visual design, but usability is key, and maybe you just don't recognize it.

This has always been the problem with KDE and the reason I can not switch.

KDE UI never gets Typography, spacing/padding, or alignment correct.

It's a shame because they are so close on most other criteria.

KDE let's me setup myy font sizes, I always use huge fonts and I hate with a passion when devs pixel allign things and break the GUI when I use larger fonts.

I also get exasperated when I get asked to pixel perfect align checkboxes and the labels in web pages, each browser has different checkbox dimensions and styles, and aligning them how the designer wants means a lot of extra styling that will break on users that don't use the defaults(but the designerr wants his pixel aligned stuff on his Mac screen... also rewording messages to align in message boxes or labels

I agree. That said I switched to KDE a few weeks ago and turned into a fan boy during the configuration process. I'm very happy with my current configuration (probably a mix of it actually being good and the Ikea effect). I love that you can just configure almost anything almost exactly to your liking with not all that much effort.

I'm not a huge fan of the default configuration, but the ability to completely change it (with the many panel options) is just amazing (kind of contrary to GNOME).

I think I have figured out at least part of the reason for the spacings always feeling just a bit (or very) off (although I think it's bearable with my theme):

Their Kirigami design support library has a set of pre defined spacings and sizes developers are advised to rigidly stick to. These probably break down in many contexts and might not even be chosen well in the first place.

Another reason might be that KDE doesn't have a design group that is as strong as Gnome's and KDE might not be organized top-down as much (which is probably related to financing).

I think you can fix or mitigate well a lot of the mistakes (Qt is great) by using a good Qt curve theme.

You're correct that KDE's design group isn't organized from the top down. While that might be a problem for a company, I think it's actually a good thing for a community of volunteers because communities need to grow. Everyone has their own lives outside of the work they do for KDE, so it's important that the work load is spread across many people. Anyone can start start designing for KDE, you just need to talk to other KDE designers and submit patches.

I am a fairly new KDE designer who started contributing icons in the spring of 2018 because it was easy and fun.

Glad I’m not alone, KDE’s design system (or lack of such) has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. GNOME takes it a bit too far in the other direction but is more tolerable (especially with a compact theme). XFCE is probably my favorite and because it strikes a great balance between design, readability, and info density.

Xfce is great, and by far my favourite. But it's harder to sell to the average user because it looks so much older than windows and Mac. At least by default

On the other hand, one thing they do really well is theme support and configurability. I agree with you that out of the box it's pretty bad and they need an real designer to redo Breeze, but themes are allowed to adjust margins and it's possible to make KDE look really nice.

Personally I find that using Source Sans Pro as the font and the Arc theme for most of the rest works well.

What do you use that respects these principles?

Not trying to be snarky but MacOS.

That being said, on Linux I think Elementary OS is at least trying to create a coherent visual design language. Maybe there are others?

Most GTK based DEs are pretty decent in this regard (GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie). Qt based DEs tend to be more utilitarian and weaker when it comes to design.

I apologize, but I don't understand how anything you wrote in any way responds to what I asked, who I asked it to, or could be considered "helpful" in any way.

Please don't inject meaningless flag waving platform propaganda into genuine conversations.

Pretty sure they're just pointing out the polished typography, padding, and alignment of MacOS, which is what the GP's comment was about.

All the UI and UX in general looks like it's from 2007. I know that it's volunteer work and I don't want to downplay the generosity of those who contributed to it, but I do wonder what's causing the delay in catching up to modern aesthetics. Is it a technical issue? Is there too much bureaucracy to overcome? Is there a shortage of UI and UX developers?

Basically creative people by and large never subscribed to the idea that they should give away their creativity for free. So all the talented designers are employed and happily working on paid projects, especially less established ones get approached with ridiculous low offers all the time.

In short outside of the bizarre software/tech world very few subscribe to the idea that intellectual property should be shared and used freely.

You don't really debug a painting. That's why Open Source is big and Open Art isn't (to my knowledge)

I'd bet that isn't true and that plenty of artists can and do peruse places like deviantart and quickly improve upon someone else's images.

But design for a GUI is more like industrial design. Getting a designer to help improve KDE's look-and-feel would be like squatters in a dilapidated hotel convincing an interior decorator to spruce the place up for fun.

Actually, that sounds like it would be a blast. Perhaps open source people are simply terrible at marketing.

Actually, there are many things I like a lot better about the 2007ish KDE/Oxygen/Breeze style than about more modern approaches like for example Windows 10.

I am not saying it is perfect, it is not, but especially in design terms, 'newer' isn't always better. And in general, I like KDE look very much.

I agree with you that newer interfaces (Windows 10 in particular) are mostly not very good. But I wouldn't say personally that KDE is a good example of 2000s era design. I think Gnome 2 was the absolute pinnacle of PC GUI design, actually. Having instantaneous access to Applications / Places / System (with text labels!) makes so much sense; it's one of the few desktop environments that pretty much any competent computer user could sit down at and immediately use.

Actually, I have my KDE set up to be an approximation of Gnome 2 with a few tweaks that work better for me, but I'm not under any impression that it approaches the immediate usability of Gnome 2.

It even looked nice! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Ubuntu_8...

> Having instantaneous access to Applications / Places / System (with text labels!) makes so much sense

I don't really get that. I suppose I've just never gotten used to it, but I just find that typing the name of the application is so much easier and faster. If I know I want to e.g launch Nautilus, why would I first spend time thinking about whether it's a "place" or an "application" or a part of the "system"? Is my text editor an "educational" program or an "office" program or an "accessory"? Or maybe _that_ is a "system" tool?

I'm actually genuinely curious about this; how is it better to mouse through hierarchical categories and look for an application, instead of just hitting super and typing the first couple of characters? Especially something like KDE's start menu, where you can hit super and start typing, or hit super (or click the icon) and mouse through similar categories to not lose the discoverability benefits of categories.

>I don't really get that. I suppose I've just never gotten used to it, but I just find that typing the name of the application is so much easier and faster. If I know I want to e.g launch Nautilus, why would I first spend time thinking about whether it's a "place" or an "application" or a part of the "system"? Is my text editor an "educational" program or an "office" program or an "accessory"? Or maybe _that_ is a "system" tool?

Well, there are several aspects to this. For an ordinary user, who's just started with the system, they don't even know the file manager is named "nautilus", so they wouldn't know to type it in. The Gnome 2 system aids discovery. Second, a user might not even know they could search for things, or be less comfortable with the keyboard. (Personally I do set things up this way: I have caps lock mapped to KDE's search widget, in the style of Chromebooks. I don't have a "Application" menu at all.)

But maybe most importantly, one usually thinks "I want to look at my pictures", not "I want to open the file manager." In Gnome 2, you would open the Places menu and click Pictures. Which, of course, would open Nautilus already pointed at the correct directory. I have a Places widget with a folder icon on my KDE taskbar for this purpose.

To each his own, I guess. I find modern aesthetics to be a downgrade for the most part from what we had at the turn of the century.

Personally I prefer Windows 95-98 era UI/UX, it was the right balance between pretty and useful. Too bad those days are over.

> All the UI and UX in general looks like it's from 2007.

Yeah. That probably KDE's most compelling feature.

I don't know what theme he was using but my setup looks so much nicer. It depends a lot on the theme, font choice and rendering.

I never could use KDE, because it systematically mistreats words. It's not only typography (few WMs get it right, tbh), but as a language user, I feel uneasy everytime I have to use "Konsole" or "Konqueror".

Maybe the notification heading should be bigger and/or bold? IDK about the app title.