Isn’t this mostly a Gnome problem? Gnome isn’t the only DE

No, it's not mostly a Gnome problem. The default KDE theme, Breeze, is equally tablet-quality, and unless you want to fiddle with old QtCurve (which is nowhere near as space-efficient as macOS anyway) you're largely stuck with Qt's Fusion, which is itself barely tolerable.

As for Gnome applications, it's not a Gnome problem, it's a GTK problem, that affects all GTK applications, regardless of what DE they run under, and all GTK-based DEs, like XFCE.

There are many desktops for Linux running the full gamut from large intrusive window dressing to nothing at all and all levels of efficiency in between.

I don't mind window dressing, it's touch-sized buttons, tabs & co. on a desktop monitor that makes it all suck.

This is actually the main reason I can't stand Big Sur and after - why is so much space wasted on touch interfaces if my Macbook has no touchscreen? The Quick Menu is the best/most frustrating example of this, but it's also apparent in the new widget design and settings app.

Pure no, from me. KDE feels much more natural to me now that I've settled in.

Ubuntu Unity still works. It's basically the Mac desktop but better.

You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM. A lot of them don't bother with window chrome or even have a status bar with a clock out of the box.

> You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM.

If you try to run the numbers on e.g. sway/i3, that barely makes a dent. Realistically, you can squeeze maybe 6-8px out of a sane window decoration before it gets impractical.

Meanwhile you can get like 10px of vertical space just by halving the vertical padding of a default Adwaita/Breeze button, and it's still larger than the equivalent macOS button which non-technical users can click just fine. Sane sizing on three stacked widgets saves more space than any tiling WM.

We can have nice things without going back to 1980s UI paradigms.

Then just don't use Adwaita/Breeze themes if that bothers you so much? And yes, it's tied to the theme. Ubuntu Unity's default "Ambiance" theme uses much less space. XFCE's default theme also uses less space. You can get themes like Chicago 95 for XFCE which also use less space.

You could also just use MATE!

Having visited the third circle of hell before, and having actually gone as far as writing my own theme before giving up the whole charade, I would rather avoid revisiting the fourth circle of hell that GTK theming is.

Edit: also, both Greybird and Ambiance are both really large compared to anything you get on other platforms. It's through no fault of their authors, GTK's layout rules break (or at least broke, I was on GTK 3.24 last I tried it) at low padding values, and it's extremely hard to keep alignment afloat on small widgets. I'm also not exactly young anymore, the text contrast in Greybird's unfocused windows is pretty awful, and fixing anything related to GTK's :backdrop attribute is a very long-winded affair.

Have you tried https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 or any of the similar themes by that project? There's a bit of extra padding still but it's vastly more usable than the Adwaita default. (And of course you don't need to bother w/ the retro icon packs shown in the screenshot, the basic GTK+ theme is plenty enough.)

(The best UI with that kind of widget style today is arguably SerenityOS, but the repo I linked above tries to provide something similar for existing GTK+ apps.)

I have, I've actually written my own GTK theme years ago, before I gave up on it. B00merang Project's stuff is cool -- still way larger than it ought to be but indeed better -- but GTK theming is a raging dumpster fire.

Not just GTK themes but all of the tweaks and extensions that are apparently necessary to have a UI usable by an adult. Even then it's a moving target and some GNOME update will break random shit or remove some control. It's absolutely infuriating.

I find the server 2003 theme to be much more eye pleasing, mainly because it is designed to use more than 256 colors. https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic

While I like the overall feeling of those themes for nostalgia reasons, they've got all sorts of quirks. E.g. toolbar icons aren't correctly aligned (you can see that in the screenshot, on the "forward" and "back" buttons in the left corner) -- both the horizontal and the vertical margins are wrong. It's not the authors' fault. I've poked at GTK's CSS before -- you can't make it work, not at the current abstraction level.

Also, for comparison, a Finder sidebar item is about half the height of the (unresizable) Nautilus sidebar item in the screenshot. Thank God for Thunar at least :-).