One GNOME session, multiple styles

True

i found the original in reddit, from about four years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/tffr4l/some_kde_plasma_uiux_problems/#lightbox

(i'm not saying it's related, but at least people should be able to read the text now)

GNOME: Designers trying to Develop a desktop. KDE: Developers trying to Design a desktop.

Some points are valid, but this looks more like the author (of the image) wanted to highlight as much as possible to confirm their own bias (that it's not well designed). Maybe I'm being ragebaited, but here we go:

Different font size and styles for main panel header

Yeah, one shows breadcrumbs and the other a title.

First icon is narrower than the rest

First one is the "start menu" button. The tasks could also have text labels on them, of course they can have a different width to an unrelated element.

Content not even remotely close to being vertically centred in its box.

It can show two lines of text (as evidenced by the third item in the same row). It would look pretty bad if every item was centered on their own.

This is absolutely pixel perfect alignment. More like this please!

It looks good, but the red line the author connected from the snowflake to the horizontal line of the "H" doesn't necessarily back their claim that this is "absolutely pixel perfect alignment" because the horizontal line of the "H" might not be geometrically centered to the line height of the text and you could also have different characters in different languages.

Yeah, some elements like the scrollbars aren't positioned well (in this screenshot, this is a bit outdated tbh). But there's also the concept of a visual center as opposed to the geometric center.

All of that and it's still nicer to look at for me haha.

Honestly I just want KDE to do the backbone and GNOME to do the designs.

Adwaita apps look just right, minimalistic yet powerful, pinnacle of modern simplified designs. Everything you actually need is close, and the rest doesn't clog the view.

The rest of GNOME is heavily meh. Customization is next to nothing, and generally any workflow falling outside the one window = one task paradigm is gonna be a pain. Settings are convoluted and sometimes straight up unreachable without additional tools or config edits (and sometimes they don't even apply).

I guess what unites Adwaita and GNOME project overall is the stubborn adversity to users making it comfy for themselves - it's the GNOME way, or no way. And while Adwaita is at least actually good in its defaults, GNOME is not.

KDE, on the other hand, is brilliant as a desktop environment, but menus could be so, so much better. So, when I have a choice, I use Adwaita-themed apps on KDE. With proper theming on KDE side of things, they come together just right.

Looks much better to me nowadays, although yes, I am not using the default Breeze theme. But if there are any problems in the theme I am using, they are much more likely to not be present in Breeze.
Some "issues" pointed out in the picture are not issues at all.
The "Different font styles and sizes" for example, because they are used for different things with different scopes and user interaction.

I feel it has gotten much better in recent years. The first time I tried KDE 5 it looked weird to me. But now I acutally quite like KDE 6. Or maybe I've just learned to tolerate it...

Pixel perfect doesn't mean that things will feel aligned. This is a very naive vision of UI design. I'm not saying that things can't be improved but this is not a valid point

Oh for fuck’s sake…

Actually, I don’t. What am I looking at?

Kde has mostly small padding and alignment issues instead of having a completely random design.
I can live with that.

I have a theory that if everything was pixel perfect, centered, perfectly aligned and looked the same, the thing would look too sterile. There's basically a perfect world, written down in books and texts that is being taught to students and there's the real world. In many areas, these two do not match and the above image is the result of someone's text book world view not matching the real world.

Could the discover store have a better UI? Yes. Will a centered, down-anchored, pixel perfect button make it better? Subjective.

thanks a lot for the pointers, it's so nice to see that people try to help

but it is just exhausting trying to unify everything

and the next flatpak is a new fight :)

my condolences

in fact, i removed the top bar from all apps... and i'm on kde btw

What problem does CSD solve? I'd think "some apps look and work differently" is a pretty bad tradeoff for "I want to cram custom stuff in the title bar which was more or less universally treated as owned-by-the-system for the first 35 years of GUIs at least?"

GTK/GNOME seem to be making themselves actively hostile towards customization, which seems a great way to lose enthusiasts.

Well, Wayland forces client side decorations which I’ve never agreed with.

A bit off-topic, but I really appreciate projects that respect their upstreams, and attempt to improve in their own ways (from libadapta's README):

LibAdwaita has the right to be what it wants to be and to not support what it doesn't want to support.

All my homies hate libadwaita it's bad.

seems like libadwaita-without-adwaita aur package but for Linux Mint

Happiness is a distraction from perfection, let it go!

It’s can go both ways for sure… maybe not in this case but…

Meanwhile MATE chads just sitting in the attic listening to the chaos.

You can enable native system borders in JetBrains apps. Look for it in the settings!

I find KDE works well with GTK3 and below, but GTK4 apps are set to ignore themes, which is a design decision on the GTK4 side. They invariably look completely odd and out of place as they often force the entire Gnome app UI as well as an unalterable theme.

And then Flatpaks also don't generally follow system themes as they're so sandboxed (although there are some work arounds, including making them consistent as flatpaks or allowing them access to the system theme folders to pick up themeing).

But anecdotally I've not had the level of title bar variability on KDE as that screenshot. Although admittedly I do tend to actively avoid Gnome apps as I don't like the design philosophy.

yes because kde supports client-side decorations and server-side decorations. gnome only supports client-side decorations

I find KDE looks nicer but it always runs like shit on my machine. Skill issue probably

A little? You can theme Gtk apps to match, but it's not pixel perfect even with the stock theme.

Its always slightly off on padding and margins, but the overall outcome looks more uniform

I removed all the window titlebars on KDE and I'm happy

So... Add one more window decoration style to the list

This below is windows 11 consistency, within their own os context menus. I am not even starting on the fact that window decorations there too are a non standardised mess.

I agree that lack of UI consistency is less than ideal, and very real in Linux, but let's not pretend that this is a main issue stopping people from migrating (from an equally inconsistent OS)

Edit: okay, WTF Windows is now even worse?!?

Always has been. At least since NT. Company culture encourages features and discourages fixes. Thus it got framework after framework.

How is a kernel meant to enforce anything about UI?

I think GUI development should favour server-side decorations for consistency's sake, but this is more of a cultural thing with what application developers are choosing to do, rather than anything "Linux" can do about.

It's sad that this gets downvoted to hell. As a MacOS user who appreciates beautiful UI, this is a major pain point for me on Linux. And yes, Windows is the absolute worst at this.