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Comment by saubeidl

4 months ago

I agree with your assessment of KDE lacking "taste". Imo, it looks like a system designed by engineers, not designers.

GNOME has the opposite problem imo. I feel like it has "taste", but it feels like a system fully designed by designers, with no engineers giving practical pushback. It's the same issue macOS has, but amplified: Designers have some grand idea about their vision being the one true way of using the system and made it hard to impossible to customize.

I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.

I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.

[0] https://system76.com/cosmic

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saubeidl

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Flamingoat  4 months ago

> I agree with your assessment of KDE lacking "taste". Imo, it looks like a system designed by engineers, not designers.

TBF, I was linked their more up to date screenshots in a sibling thread and it does look more consistent but it still seems off.

> I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.

I don't like any of the Linux DEs tbh. They all have issues.

I might give KDE a go. But I think Debian does a poor job at packaging it and I don't really want to change distros.

> I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.

I tried compiling Cosmic on source on Debian 12. I ran out of memory on the VM I was doing it on. I also found out that on Debian 12 their rustc was broken!

  • saubeidl  4 months ago

    Do you think GNOME has similar UI issues? In my view, it's "pretty", but just doesn't let me configure it the way I want it to without hacking around way too much.

    • Flamingoat  4 months ago

      Yes. I agree. Gnome is kinda weird OOTB.

      I ended up installing Dash To Dock and Ubuntu App Indicator Icons when I was using it and I ended up with something decent. I also usually have to faff around in the gnome tweaks tool to get the old "legacy" apps and the new apps looking consistent.