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.