Go in the settings and change it to vermillion-fuchsia with a hint of magenta if you so please. I'd like to know what's wrong with a blue shadow that indicates an active window.

Fonts are quite large by default. I usually set the font scaling factor to 0.9 with gnome-tweak-tool, this also reduces the size of the top panel.

Since 3.10, the tendency for apps is to save space by placing buttons directly in the window title bars. For example, this is what Nautilus looks like in 3.12:

http://imgur.com/3a4zIfQ

Window 8 was clearly a mess but at least Microsoft is trying something.

You can see some of the work going on in the widget/decorator theme in some blog posts of the VDT: http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/05/monday-report-14-lazy... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-12-amaz... http://wheeldesign.blogspot.se/2014/04/monday-report-11-go-t...

I don't really care if it's ugly in default. I'll add an icon pack and a theme a few seconds after a new install anyway. It's not like a console is exactly beautiful - except in a minimalist tech aesthetic sort of way - but I still use it and it does the necessary.

This is one of the great things about open source, the choice. If you want fancy-schmanzy UX innovation go with Ubu' default mainstream offering.

That said KDE is innovating - eg with Activities, and with PIM integration - but in ways I can thankfully ignore.

That may well be a Good Thing. Not all "innovations" are useful or desirable. Sometimes something that "just works" is all that's needed.

Me, I like KDE just fine the way it is. shrug

And I can't believe I'm saying this on hacker news but there is a difference between "polished" and "subjectively ugly".

What's wrong with the "cartoon icons"? They look like Windows 7 icons. You know Windows 7, right? A lot of people called it "Microsoft's most polished desktop ever".

Put another way, if X is designed to do Y, you can't say "X sucks" just because Y isn't interesting to you. You might say, "X is a bad implementation of Y". You might say, "I don't like Y therefore I don't use X". You might discuss whether or not Y is a valid goal, or whether or not X does a good job of achieving Y, but any serious discussion about anything requires that everyone involved make an effort to recognize that X and Y are two completely different things.

The key here is "serious discussion". If people don't want to seriously discuss this, then by all means just post opinions about whether or not something is good at what it does based on how well it matches up with your particular tastes and requirements. But the whole point of HN ought to be that everyone makes at least a token effort to seriously discuss this stuff. You can go anywhere if you just want to have conversations about what sucks and what rules and leave it at that.