Comment by amiga-workbench
6 years ago
I cant speak for them, but Gnome is far ahead on UI polish and general tidiness. I keep checking in on Plasma Mobile every few months and how nobody has fixed the god awful interface proportions yet is beyond me.
I see the same problems on desktop Plasma, wildly inconsistent padding, UI elements not lining up and bits of the interface crushed and cramped, while 100px below you have gigantic elements.
If you're going to take a swing at doing a FOSS phone right, you really need to avoid the wonky programmer art or you are not going to convince the average user that its any better or more polished than previous failed attempts.
In desktop case, Plasma is ahead of Gnome in features and functionality. Not sure what you refer to in regards to padding, but Gnome has its own UI issues like lack of server side decorations for SDL windows and such, due to Mutter being very limited.
Can't say about Plasma Mobile though, but that's the point why investing effort into that would be useful. The base is more promising than Gnome one.
> Not sure what you refer to in regards to padding
I can't find a good introduction on the topic at the moment, so I'll just quote Microsoft's succinct answer: "Alignment makes your UI look neat, organized, and balanced and can also be used to establish visual hierarchy and relationships."
They also have a nice illustration: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/layout/a...
This kind of thing matters for usability. KDE has always been ahead in technical features, but GNOME has for a long time been way ahead in paying attention to basic principles of visual design.
Look-n-feel issues sound very subjective to me. And I don't like common Gnome's attitude of "We know better than you what's good for you, because that's what some new theory dictates, so we'll make it hard for you to do it differently". MS suffers from exactly the same mindset.
Personally, I never had problems with KDE design. If anything, I prefer it to Gnome's. Plus KDE is so customizable, that if you don't like something, you can find a way to change that.