I loved KDE 3.5, but ever since KDE 4 and plasma, I've tried multiple times and never liked it.
I also don't like Gnome, doesn't fit my workflows well, it doesn't support moving windows between multiple desktops well, no window list enabled by default, ...
https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...
What's a theme and customization if the DE/app forces 'themes' on the user?
Getting downvoted over this further prove my whole point
-Allow to choose theme for the window decorations (titlebar etc...) and the desktop itself in its settings and have this applied consistently in the desktop (all applications use same window decorations on the outer part of their windows, ...).
-Let application have their own icons inside of the window (I have nothing against applications reusing icons, but let the developer choose them, not desktop-dependent since that's clearly not working out). Like say the "save file" icon in a text editor: I'd rather have a well-chosen one by the developer of this text editor, than one that either doesn't work or look completely out of place but was enforced by some desktop standard.
What I don't like is:
-applications changing / removing the outer window borders. They have no business changing that, only the inside content of their windows. E.g. a browser removing the title bar of its window can make some menus the desktop provides there inaccessible, make it invisible which window is focused, etc...
-application using external theme (e.g. based on some desktop standard) icons for its internal contents and then not working properly because the creator of the application could not know what the external theme would look like. This does not work out for various reasons: having 1 desktop setting makes it impossible to fix individual programs since changing theme to fix 1 may break another, e.g. say you have themes "adwaita" and "greybird" in your desktop setting, theme adwaita breaks program A (e.g. it shows black text on black background; just arbitrary example, not saying adwaita actually does this but I know at least one epub reader that showed black text on black background for some desktop settings in real life) but works in program B, and theme greybord works in program A but breaks program B (e.g. its icons will be invisible or whatever): If program A and program B just had their own inner contents, this problem would not exist.
Also, different applications having to be consistent across each other for their inner contents is something I couldn't care less about, so it's not worth all the problems it causes.
Use of CSS in GTK for theming (maybe Qt too, not sure?) doesn’t help matters since both user applied-themes and developer-applied CSS can screw things up by overriding things in a half-baked way.
But no matter what theme I choose, there will always SOMETHING be broken. In one theme some part of an application will have black text on a black background. Another theme fixes that, but them makes in the alt+tab application switcher the part that highlights which application you're selecting invisible. Other themes have almost invisible scrollbars. Various applications have missing icons because they no longer have their own built-in ones.
I wish every application just had its own actually working built-in theme, rather than trying to shoehorn a global desktop theme inside of everything. It used to be like that in the past and it looked perfect compared to the mess now. Desktop theme settings should just be about the outer window borders and stuff.
Also, does there even exist ONE theme still today that actually visually distinguishes the selected and non-selected windows well? They're all super subtle about this now. Give me a bright blue selected window, gray non-selected window titlebar please so I can tell at a side-eye glance what's focused.