I'm looking at KDE 1 and thinking it actually looks better than the latest and greatest. Aesthetically I think KDE really went downhill.
KDE 1 might not look modern, but at least the design is well thought out, consistent and not full of strangely balanced UI elements with either too much or too little whitespace.
KDE seems to either appeal to people or turn them away completely. While I appreciate all the hard work the developers have put into KDE, I have always found it to be down right ugly, regardless of version.
I actually just went back to Linux after 11 years of macOS and I can't say Gnome 3 does it for me either. 10.6 was my favorite version of OS X and I think that OS has been going mostly downhill from there.
When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured.
If you want a DE that is almost as lightweight as MATE, but has a more modern feel I would recommend Cinnamon[1]. There is also a Fedora spin if you prefer that to Debian based distros.
I've been using Cinnamon as my DE for about a year now and I absolutely love it. The biggest thing that made me switch is the fact that it just works. GNOME would shit the bed every time I docked my computer into its docking station, Cinnamon handles it just fine and can even remember my monitor configurations.
Isn't cinnamon a little cpu/gpu heavy, and therefore power hungry? I tried it a year or so ago and it ate my battery for breakfast (and iirc it was pretty RAM heavy too, but my memory might be failing me here) - switching back to xmonad sorted everything out. Happy to be told I'm wrong, Cinnamon was very pretty and it'd be a nice option for tasks where my xmonad setup gets stuck on (Arduino/Processing and fullscreen VLC)
You might find LXDE to be a good choice, it is quite lightweight and I have had success with it for both of these. Extending the desktop across multiple monitors was a bit tricky though, but this was about 3 years ago so that may have improved.
The macOS issues have forced me to just not be too dependent on the DE that much. I use the hot keys to open apps (command + spacebar), and 3 finger swipe to activate app switching [1]. Other than that, what is most important to me is HiDPI rendering and seamless multi-monitor support. For the most part this works in macOS and is still hit and miss in Linux unfortunately.
[1] I'm not sure the last time I opened Finder. It's easier to manage files from the terminal.
I don't think KDE looks particularly good, but it works for me (usability wise, and it's not ugly enough to constantly barf - some details look quite nice, but the big picture kidna doesn't).
Gtk on the other hand I can't really handle. Both Gnome and Unity look not that different on a basic level, but aren't nearly as usable to me as KDE (personally I find many design features in both of them also more ugly).
Other DEs just look worse.
I recently tried Qubes (3.2) on a laptop and was amazed how ugly it is. There are literally dozens of window decorations in Xfce, and all of them look like shit. Practically nothing changed there since half a decade ago when I last used Xfce. Even some obvious graphical bugs persisted!
Color scheme support is also universally bad in Linux land (or maybe generally? Windows is poor here, too. OSX I don't know). Wrong combinations of colors (dark grey text on slightly darker background? A pleasure!), apps just not using the color scheme, inverted colors in some apps/places etc.
Some "DEs" don't try and just admit design failure. Eg. i3 which I'm using on some laptops since a couple years. It doesn't even have any design to speak of. I only use it, because it works extraordinarily well for me.
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Don't even get me started on font rendering. I know it's an utterly difficult topic, and that a lot of work went into it to improve it (and some of this is fairly recent). Still, the font rendering quality is often still rather underwhelming. And in past times, or on older or misconfigured distros (F23 on Qubes for example) the quality is just heinous.
I use KDE (in fact typing this in Kubuntu Xenial) but my main criticism is that KDE would definitely not pass a hallway testing.
Here's an example: switch the desktop theme to oxygen. Suddenly, something as mundane as switching airplane mode on and off with the default panels becomes crazy difficult because you can't see the images next to the check box (oh and for some reason all check boxes look like square radio buttons now).
I'm sure KDE works great for the people who have used it for years but they don't have newcomers complaining about usability or they don't listen to newcomers complaining about usability.
I completely switched to GNU/Linux when 3.0 came out. It was quite unstable, not very polished but extremely promising. With the further releases it always gots better and with 3.5 it was almost completely stable and polished, only details had to be improved. Everything was so integrated and with some easy configurations it could look so damn beautiful for the time.
Then was 4.0 and everything was destroyed. It was extremely unstable, missed so many features, gots ugly and everything new felt only wrong :-(
I left the club at 4.3 or so and bought my first mac where i am still caged. Tried 5.8 some weeks ago and still can't live with it, so sad... :-(
Apropos Qubes and xfce, the award for the most useless battery indicator definitely goes to xfce. They still only have a tiny static tray icon with three or four different images; the battery looks "four fifths full" all the time. To actually know the battery state you have to hover the mouse over it for a couple seconds.
This makes me fairly certain that whoever did this never used it.
- The battery is actually at 30 % in this shot (how'd you know?)
- The black box next to the battery is actually the netvm nm-applet (edit: actually it's the tray of the Qubes VM Manager; looks like nm-applet vanished - again)
- The drowned-in-white-box speaker symbol is the pulseaudio applet
- These are the "neatest" window decorations I could find
Xfce and cinnamon are the only DEs that have reliably supported multiple batteries correctly. I agree the icon itself needs to be fixed, but having two or more batteries on gnome or kde results in a situation where it is literally impossible to figure out what is going on.
I've never used KDE on a machine with multiple batteries, can't really comment on that. In fact I almost exclusively use i3 and i3pystatus, the latter has no problems with multiple batteries.
Now while trying Qubes I have that twitching in my typing hand to just make i3 work better with QVM, because seriously - xfce is... not nice to use.
Design failure. It doesn't have any design. It's has no window decorations - except an optional 1 px border line - and the title bar has no controls, and is simply text on a solid background.
This makes it what people normally call ugly, unpolished. Nonetheless it works very well. While doing that it doesn't look very well though.
IOW: I don't see it as big problem, because that absence of design / uglyness is a nameplate feature of it. Like a command line interface - it's ugly, but works.
In fact, looking at xfce right now again, I'm inclined to say that the simplicity of i3 would look better - design-wise - than what xfce offers.
KDE is a as ugly, as you configure it to be ;) Really, you can change so many aspects of the UI, that it's kind of pointless to complain that you don't like how it looks.
I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but there nothing wrong with the look as such. The, maybe controversial, problem is that the substance isn't there. Things you expect, or strive for, in modern application development like developers tools, multimedia support, security features, adoption, distribution etc. isn't up to the task. It seem like whenever Linux desktop technologies get good enough to go somewhere they reinvent themselves under a slightly different paradigm.
I've used KDE when I used Linux as my main OS (I've since moved it into VM and use mostly command line). Not because it looked nice (it didn't), but the customization options were far ahead of Gnome (not to mention Gnome2 felt like Windows 95).
And to this day Gnome has the worst "Settings Panel" I've seen. Windows 95 included. It's just.. horrible.
Those are desktops are quite riced. My experience is that it often looks good in screenshots, but then end up being constant fight to get all aspects of your DE to adhere to your now pimped desktop experience.
https://imgur.com/T5AMpdG is a good example of bad design. White space is all over the place. Distance between icon and icon description is too short. Distance between search box and icon grid is too long compared to distance of menu bar. I could go on...
Gnome (or is it Unity?) I have in my Fedora looks nice. Visually much beter than KDE. But it's like 50% empty space. Which is really, really bad. These screenshots look fine to me at the first glance.
Number 3 is actually pretty good. Of cause it's all a matter of personal taste. Personally I'm not to keen on the whole flat look, it makes it less obvious which UI part are clickable.
I'm probably not a good person to consult on these things, because I actually think the default fvwm was pretty good.
> Personally I'm not to keen on the whole flat look, it makes it less obvious which UI part are clickable.
I also don't get this why material design and flat look is so popular. I want my icons and UI elements to be visible not blend together in a awful mess and cartoonish colors. No one says that we should go back to the 90s designs but its a terrible fad, specially in the linux themes.
What's wrong with Unity? And where did they admit it was bad? It does the job, it doesn't need a lot of RAM, it's good-looking, stays out of the way. By far the best experience I've had as a developer on desktop Linux.
Do you have an example of the well thought out or consistent design? It looks very generic to me; that is, not questioning the design mistakes of the 80s and 90s like using `ctrl` for terminal and UI shortcuts.
That was my initial thought, too. But then I started thinking we should get the perspective of someone who grew up with Windows 7 rather than Windows 3.11. It could just be nostalgia talking.
KDE 1 might not look modern, but at least the design is well thought out, consistent and not full of strangely balanced UI elements with either too much or too little whitespace.