> We’ve removed all of the colorful 3rd-party app icons from the Breeze icon theme. This was a complicated decision, but ultimately we reasoned that overriding 3rd-party app developers’ branding was rude, and we also realized that even if we didn’t care about that, we lacked the interest and resources to maintain the icons as those developers changed their apps’ branding over time. Anyone who feels sad about this is welcome to create an icon theme containing only the old colorful 3rd-party app icons which inherits Breeze, and stick it up on https://store.kde.org for others to use. (Nate Graham, link)
Honestly I'm fine with that decision. Personally I'm using the Papirus icon theme and the kde store - completely free AFAIK - is a good option for this kind of customization.
I'm not a KDE user, but reading the article, it looks like theme-specific colourful icons for third-party apps will just be falling back to whatever icons originally shipped with the app.
You'll still have colourful icons, and hopefully, in most cases, they'll still be easily recognizable.
It makes sense: Easier to just let people make their own icons for their software, rather than maintain your own, especially when the number of programs is basically endless, so you'd always have to work on it
Icon themes modifying the developer-provided icons was always a strange thing to me in many Linux distributions.
Even often hard or hidden to disable this behavior.
My workaround already was using Breeze, since it does the least modification compared to other themes available by default. Glad to see it continue in this direction.
Well, the point of custom icon themes is, you know, customize an icon theme.
That being said, it's expected the default icon theme does little to nothing about customizing a third party icon. When I was involved (briefly) with the KDE VDG back when 5 was about to be launched I proposed a icon style that looked completely different of what Breeze looks right now - maybe something in between of what Oxygen looks like and Breeze looks like. But Jens Reutenberg told me it couldn't go in that direction since they needed to ship certain icons "as-is", like the Firefox one, so it was better to do something that could fit anything so those "special" icons wouldn't look out of place.
Some people like to diss on flat/minimalism styles but for some situations there is a reason they look that way.
It takes me at least 3 times as long to find what I need with these minimalist monochrome icons, though. I always opt to the more colorful ones, if possible.
Can't you just right click an icon, set it to whatever you want (including the original one), and then lock it so subsequent theme changes won't change it? DE people are moving in all the wrong directions :/
The submission title makes it a bigger deal than it is, the article clarifies that "The team reasoned that overriding another developer's branding is rude, and it also lacks the resources to maintain the icons as branding changes over time." and "Anyone who misses the old look is welcome to create a new icon theme and upload it to the KDE Store.". Nothing has really changed, especially not newsworthy.
I meant independent of this change about monochrome icon sets in general. Like in settings dialogues the menu on the left side. I'm fastest just going by the colors before I have parsed anything else. But yes, also the same applies in the context menu -> open with. So I welcome them not replacing the original app icons with monochrome ones. At first I read the news the wrong way around.
As I understand it from reading the original post, they are leaving the third party apps default icon. They're not overiding with monochrome icons. Bad title by a probable AI rewrite, please read the original KDE blog post linked elsewhere in the thread.
This is KDE's decision on their Breeze theme. Distributions can ship the icon set with third party icons if they want.
I love KDE, I am using it for 2 decades, I can't see the margins or font issues this other people see and I spend my time at the PC looking at the browser, Kate, Intellij and the deskotp panel and maybe a bit at the file manager Dolphin.
Why i love KDE is because I can customize it to work as I want not as it wants me to work, I do not bend my fingers to use what soem dude with GIANT ego wants me to use as key shortcuts, I remap them to fit my preferences, and I have a fucking tray icon where I can see if I have unread messages and guess what you can remove the Tray if you are that kind of fascist that hates it because the GIANT ego dude said that tray icons are not cool.
Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really need a professional designer.
Surprised this is upvoted on top and many comments agreeing. Every time on HN I said Linux Desktop ( KDE or GNOME ) still has that linux looks and unpolished, I get told off and even at one point being told I have no taste and most users wont notice it.
Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals.
On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.
Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-)
As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy.
I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except.
Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
There’s definitely no shortage of armchair critics, but particularly when it comes to design, some amount of the criticism comes from having tried to engage with open projects to help improve them only to be snubbed, downplayed, ignored, etc. Of course this is a complex issue since these kinds of interactions vary wildly between projects and individuals in those projects, but you can see how that might bring frustration.
Incidentally I think this has also been what’s inspired many of the numerous forks and new projects within the Linux desktop space: people who initially intended to contribute to existing projects find themselves unable to effect substantial or sufficient change, become frustrated, and go start their own thing.
This is definitely a thing, but I hope KDE specifically on average has a rep of being easy to get into and owning our mistakes. At least this is really the culture we try to cultivate broadly.
For example, we also have some devs who proactively read or watch negative reviews and extract the good points into tickets (it's a nice low cost source of one form of user testing), and we've over the last half-decade or so built a strong culture of paying attention to user pain points, change defaults to match expectations, etc.
I know this thread reads pretty negatively, but I can say confidently our userbase has never been happier and the total number of users we serve well has grown significantly. You can even see it in the metrics - our monetary user donations have tripled in the last couple of years.
Gnome may not be perfect but it’s sooo much better than kde. kde is just awful, it’s an eternal mockup, as if they let the code writers also design the interface. They have no idea what they are doing. And they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better.
> they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine.
I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
It’s very easy to become blind to UX issues even after just a few exposures to it. Once you “figure it out”, it’s not a problem anymore. The thing is that you can easily lose many potential users who don’t want to give any time atall to “figuring it out”.
I am one such user. KDE Plasma has been my daily driver ever since the early days of version 5. Admittedly am not someone with a keen eye for design. There might be some rough edges and the occasional annoyance, but you quickly get used to it.
The desktop/windowing system for me is just a means to launch an application which is where I spend most of my time. This often happens to be a browser, a terminal and IDE etc. The design of such apps takes more precedence for me than some margin of the control center items where I couldn't recognize what the problems were if you asked me to.
What bothers me more than the visual design is the interaction design ... am trying to find a way to move a sticky note which has been on my desktop for quite some time and the method I used previously no long works. Also some releases ago they mapped 'Alt-F' on the Konsole terminal app to a Find input box, whereas the binding is normally used on terminals for "move cursor forward by a word". This is not a sane default and has caused me to pick Wezterm as my preferred terminal app.
Yeah. I’ve used KDE on and off a few times, but this aspect of it always bugs me. It can be dampened a bit by changing themes but ultimately fixing it would mean fairly major changes to almost everything, at which point you gotta start wondering if you wouldn’t be better off building your own thing.
While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.
After all those years I still don't understand this argument. Have you looked at windows since vista? Don't they have designers? What difference does it make?
The user controls system font and size. It looks fine to me? KDE is also basically the only usable non-power user desktop environment these days. The margins/padding are a little big, but it's better than most modern applications that professionals produce.
It looks like most of the margin differences you complain about are due to icons not filling out their square canvas/bounding box depending on the depicted object. This is generally how icons work, unless you go Android and slap a circle/squircle background on all of them.
Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course.
There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.
The screenshot from the article is for a single application that doesn't really have settings. The system settings panel does have a sidebar with separators, including group labels and contrast/color to make it easier to find things instead of a big panel of gray on gray. So... better than GNOME. Here's a screenshot I found:
You can also see that the KDE settings screen can fit more than 3 options at a time without scrolling, which is appreciated.
That said like I said I do sometimes feel that their more modern themes have random extra spacing that would be nice to be able to remove. Better then all the other modern DEs though (except for power user window managers like i3), so in that way they've done a fantastic job. KDE is vastly more usable than the alternatives, including commercial.
I am not a designer, just a dev with a bit of a visual inclination, but I think what makes KDE’s typography feel “off” is missing steps in visual hierarchy due to how the different sizes relate to each other in screen (e.g. header vs body text), as well as font weights being a bit too homogenous. So its differentiation is too great in one way and not enough in another, which feels awkward. The font sizes being modifiable isn’t the issue.
There's a community effort underway to develop a next-generation appearance based on a design system (and a new theme engine) that also includes a properly designed set of font weights.
I agree this will be a big improvement. I love type design, and our typography in KDE being relatively scattershot has always been one of my pain points as well.
The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.
At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)
Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?
Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
>The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme.
It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.
> The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
I might be wrong, but I think in this case it has the same coded margin, but ends up as a different visual margin because the usb stick image is probably square shaped png or svg with a transparent area, and this makes it look like it's not aligned. So, it might be case where you need the dev to have an eye for it and intentionally manipulate the paddings to get visually satisfying spacing. Usually developers just set the same value in code and think it's good enough.
Yes, adjusting margins for every icon's amount of padding doesn't seem to be the right solution. I guess the solution would be to have icons without any padding, and where they should be shown centered inside a standard-sized box, that can be done in the layout code.
It's going to take quite a bit of work to switch everything over.
Honestly the second screenshot with Sticky Notes is definitely ugly, but that one? It looks fine for me. The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me. I would rather complain about the settings icon which feels bigger than the close button, if anything.
> The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me.
Well, it is visible, and the professional solution for this would be to have icon design guidelines and enforce them, such that the actual visible/non-transparent icon contents are always in the same "box", and then include the padding in the icon itself in the calculation for element spacing. The fact that one component is text and the another one is an icon is not a valid excuse, these things can be planned in advance, especially for a desktop environment that has been around for close to 29 years now.
Oh, and now that I've looked the image more, even more alignment/padding issues:
- the main text isn't vertically aligned in the (I assume) fixed size vertical window
- similar story for the KDE icon and the KDED text in the titlebar
- the settings icon is bigger/the "content box" of the icon is bigger than that of the windows close (x) icon, such as that the visible contents are not padded the same amount, vertically
As I said, I guess the solution at this point is to not care and just accept that KDE is KDE, that weird but kind uncle at every family Christmas party.
To be fair to KDE, it feels a hell of a lot more polished when you use it.
The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change.
The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.
Personally I dump on both Windows and macOS for being UI and UX dumpster-fires today, compared to how they used to be. macOS in particular used to have really good UX, but as times goes on, Apple seems to ignore the actual design of software more and more, for reasons that elude me.
And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.
IMO, software should look unpolished, to match the quality of the code and set realistic expectations. Almost all code for general purpose use is broken in some way. Writing non-trivial correct code without formal verification is a hopeless task. Consider that even SQLite, which goes to extraordinary lengths to test for correctness [0], is still often found to be incorrect [1]. Correct code is rare and generally doesn't have a GUI.
This kind of thing would be less likely to happen if designers didn't (probably inadvertently) mislead people into thinking software is usually correct.
This article seems to just be a rewording of this one: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/08/16/this-week-in-plasma-a-lot-o...
> We’ve removed all of the colorful 3rd-party app icons from the Breeze icon theme. This was a complicated decision, but ultimately we reasoned that overriding 3rd-party app developers’ branding was rude, and we also realized that even if we didn’t care about that, we lacked the interest and resources to maintain the icons as those developers changed their apps’ branding over time. Anyone who feels sad about this is welcome to create an icon theme containing only the old colorful 3rd-party app icons which inherits Breeze, and stick it up on https://store.kde.org for others to use. (Nate Graham, link)
Honestly I'm fine with that decision. Personally I'm using the Papirus icon theme and the kde store - completely free AFAIK - is a good option for this kind of customization.
The colors help me to more quickly recognize the icons!!
I'm not a KDE user, but reading the article, it looks like theme-specific colourful icons for third-party apps will just be falling back to whatever icons originally shipped with the app.
You'll still have colourful icons, and hopefully, in most cases, they'll still be easily recognizable.
Yes, thank you. I somehow read it the wrong way around at first. facepalm
It makes sense: Easier to just let people make their own icons for their software, rather than maintain your own, especially when the number of programs is basically endless, so you'd always have to work on it
Icon themes modifying the developer-provided icons was always a strange thing to me in many Linux distributions. Even often hard or hidden to disable this behavior.
My workaround already was using Breeze, since it does the least modification compared to other themes available by default. Glad to see it continue in this direction.
Well, the point of custom icon themes is, you know, customize an icon theme.
That being said, it's expected the default icon theme does little to nothing about customizing a third party icon. When I was involved (briefly) with the KDE VDG back when 5 was about to be launched I proposed a icon style that looked completely different of what Breeze looks right now - maybe something in between of what Oxygen looks like and Breeze looks like. But Jens Reutenberg told me it couldn't go in that direction since they needed to ship certain icons "as-is", like the Firefox one, so it was better to do something that could fit anything so those "special" icons wouldn't look out of place.
Some people like to diss on flat/minimalism styles but for some situations there is a reason they look that way.
It takes me at least 3 times as long to find what I need with these minimalist monochrome icons, though. I always opt to the more colorful ones, if possible.
Can't you just right click an icon, set it to whatever you want (including the original one), and then lock it so subsequent theme changes won't change it? DE people are moving in all the wrong directions :/
The submission title makes it a bigger deal than it is, the article clarifies that "The team reasoned that overriding another developer's branding is rude, and it also lacks the resources to maintain the icons as branding changes over time." and "Anyone who misses the old look is welcome to create a new icon theme and upload it to the KDE Store.". Nothing has really changed, especially not newsworthy.
I meant independent of this change about monochrome icon sets in general. Like in settings dialogues the menu on the left side. I'm fastest just going by the colors before I have parsed anything else. But yes, also the same applies in the context menu -> open with. So I welcome them not replacing the original app icons with monochrome ones. At first I read the news the wrong way around.
As I understand it from reading the original post, they are leaving the third party apps default icon. They're not overiding with monochrome icons. Bad title by a probable AI rewrite, please read the original KDE blog post linked elsewhere in the thread.
This is KDE's decision on their Breeze theme. Distributions can ship the icon set with third party icons if they want.
Yeah, I indeed read it the wrong way around at first.
I love KDE, I am using it for 2 decades, I can't see the margins or font issues this other people see and I spend my time at the PC looking at the browser, Kate, Intellij and the deskotp panel and maybe a bit at the file manager Dolphin.
Why i love KDE is because I can customize it to work as I want not as it wants me to work, I do not bend my fingers to use what soem dude with GIANT ego wants me to use as key shortcuts, I remap them to fit my preferences, and I have a fucking tray icon where I can see if I have unread messages and guess what you can remove the Tray if you are that kind of fascist that hates it because the GIANT ego dude said that tray icons are not cool.
> some dude [...] wants me to use as key shortcuts
Hahaha
Damn, those screenshots. It’s been so many years and everything looks so unpolished still. Wrong margins, wrong font size, bad font choice, etc. They really need a professional designer.
Surprised this is upvoted on top and many comments agreeing. Every time on HN I said Linux Desktop ( KDE or GNOME ) still has that linux looks and unpolished, I get told off and even at one point being told I have no taste and most users wont notice it.
Design may not be all about how it looks, but consumers are absolutely attracted to aesthetics and visual appeals.
On another note, the Chinese are doing surprising well on Linux Desktop front. Although I guess that is mostly funded by Chinese Tech Giants.
Honestly, I'm surprised you get told off a lot. My own subjective experience is the polar opposite :-)
As a Linux desktop dev, getting hung out to dry over this in HN threads is my usual experience, and it's pretty frustrating and dispiriting. People tend to take the free output of FOSS communities for granted a lot and have zero inhibitions at heaving ridicule or even more mean-spirited things at your work output - especially at HN as a "how to make money with tech" forum where the non-profits rank fairly low in the hierarchy.
I'm still surprised at how prevalent this is in the HN setting however. FOSS is generally not popular on HN, but a lot of HN posters also style themselves as founders, leaders, business developers, side project-ers. Yet despite this outlook the debate very rarely takes a can-do constructive perspective a la "How do we make large FOSS communities better at this area of SW eng?" or "How can we develop this capability in this paradigm", etc. as you would maybe except.
Instead the discourse rarely rises above the level of just asssuming devs are dumb or lack essential capabilities, which is bold about a generally fairly smart and intrinsically motivated demographic.
There’s definitely no shortage of armchair critics, but particularly when it comes to design, some amount of the criticism comes from having tried to engage with open projects to help improve them only to be snubbed, downplayed, ignored, etc. Of course this is a complex issue since these kinds of interactions vary wildly between projects and individuals in those projects, but you can see how that might bring frustration.
Incidentally I think this has also been what’s inspired many of the numerous forks and new projects within the Linux desktop space: people who initially intended to contribute to existing projects find themselves unable to effect substantial or sufficient change, become frustrated, and go start their own thing.
This is definitely a thing, but I hope KDE specifically on average has a rep of being easy to get into and owning our mistakes. At least this is really the culture we try to cultivate broadly.
For example, we also have some devs who proactively read or watch negative reviews and extract the good points into tickets (it's a nice low cost source of one form of user testing), and we've over the last half-decade or so built a strong culture of paying attention to user pain points, change defaults to match expectations, etc.
I know this thread reads pretty negatively, but I can say confidently our userbase has never been happier and the total number of users we serve well has grown significantly. You can even see it in the metrics - our monetary user donations have tripled in the last couple of years.
You can teach this pony new tricks!
Gnome may not be perfect but it’s sooo much better than kde. kde is just awful, it’s an eternal mockup, as if they let the code writers also design the interface. They have no idea what they are doing. And they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
I'm not a huge fan of KDE, but I prefer it strongly over Gnome. Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better.
> they are so used to bad interfaces they have no idea what a good one looks like.
What is a "good" or "bad" interface has a huge amount subjectivity to it. Just because you dislike a certain UI doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it's bad for you.
> Not because of aesthetics, but because Gnome is a pain for me to use and it's very hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to be better.
That’s good, but not what I was discussing here
I use KDE every day. It's totally fair if people notice that stuff; I have many friends who do, but not everyone does (like me). I care more about functionality. In which case KDE is just about fine.
I guess the people who use KDE don't maybe care about this sort of polish enough, which is why it doesn't get fixed?
It’s very easy to become blind to UX issues even after just a few exposures to it. Once you “figure it out”, it’s not a problem anymore. The thing is that you can easily lose many potential users who don’t want to give any time at all to “figuring it out”.
I am one such user. KDE Plasma has been my daily driver ever since the early days of version 5. Admittedly am not someone with a keen eye for design. There might be some rough edges and the occasional annoyance, but you quickly get used to it.
The desktop/windowing system for me is just a means to launch an application which is where I spend most of my time. This often happens to be a browser, a terminal and IDE etc. The design of such apps takes more precedence for me than some margin of the control center items where I couldn't recognize what the problems were if you asked me to.
What bothers me more than the visual design is the interaction design ... am trying to find a way to move a sticky note which has been on my desktop for quite some time and the method I used previously no long works. Also some releases ago they mapped 'Alt-F' on the Konsole terminal app to a Find input box, whereas the binding is normally used on terminals for "move cursor forward by a word". This is not a sane default and has caused me to pick Wezterm as my preferred terminal app.
Likewise, none of that bothers me as much as Apple's design over function madness lately.
I dunno how to explain it, but to me, Plasma looks "bad" in a "good," or should I say "consistent," way.
Like, it looks "bad," but it's honestly not that bad.
I do not care much.
I do use third party themes but I suspect they have the same problems. I just have some colour preferences and like pretty icons.
I prefer to have third party apps icons overridden by the icon theme, but then I can just use another icon theme.
Yeah. I’ve used KDE on and off a few times, but this aspect of it always bugs me. It can be dampened a bit by changing themes but ultimately fixing it would mean fairly major changes to almost everything, at which point you gotta start wondering if you wouldn’t be better off building your own thing.
While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.
After all those years I still don't understand this argument. Have you looked at windows since vista? Don't they have designers? What difference does it make?
The user controls system font and size. It looks fine to me? KDE is also basically the only usable non-power user desktop environment these days. The margins/padding are a little big, but it's better than most modern applications that professionals produce.
https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png
Here's why no amount of mere customization can "fix it"
Last screenshot is from Gnome settings serving as a strong contrast to the rest (KDE screenshots taken from the OP article)
It looks like most of the margin differences you complain about are due to icons not filling out their square canvas/bounding box depending on the depicted object. This is generally how icons work, unless you go Android and slap a circle/squircle background on all of them.
Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course.
There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.
The screenshot from the article is for a single application that doesn't really have settings. The system settings panel does have a sidebar with separators, including group labels and contrast/color to make it easier to find things instead of a big panel of gray on gray. So... better than GNOME. Here's a screenshot I found:
https://static1.ahelpme.com/public/media/tutorials/review-fe...
You can also see that the KDE settings screen can fit more than 3 options at a time without scrolling, which is appreciated.
That said like I said I do sometimes feel that their more modern themes have random extra spacing that would be nice to be able to remove. Better then all the other modern DEs though (except for power user window managers like i3), so in that way they've done a fantastic job. KDE is vastly more usable than the alternatives, including commercial.
I am not a designer, just a dev with a bit of a visual inclination, but I think what makes KDE’s typography feel “off” is missing steps in visual hierarchy due to how the different sizes relate to each other in screen (e.g. header vs body text), as well as font weights being a bit too homogenous. So its differentiation is too great in one way and not enough in another, which feels awkward. The font sizes being modifiable isn’t the issue.
There's a community effort underway to develop a next-generation appearance based on a design system (and a new theme engine) that also includes a properly designed set of font weights.
I agree this will be a big improvement. I love type design, and our typography in KDE being relatively scattershot has always been one of my pain points as well.
It won't ever happen.
KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE.
They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born.
Look at this image:
https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423...
The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.
At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)
Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?
Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
>The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme.
It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.
> The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
I might be wrong, but I think in this case it has the same coded margin, but ends up as a different visual margin because the usb stick image is probably square shaped png or svg with a transparent area, and this makes it look like it's not aligned. So, it might be case where you need the dev to have an eye for it and intentionally manipulate the paddings to get visually satisfying spacing. Usually developers just set the same value in code and think it's good enough.
That's the reason but it's ugly. And obviously the developers don't care enough to address such things.
This is the correct explanation.
Yeah, but even that leads to another issue, icons should be standardized so such a thing can't happen.
Yes, adjusting margins for every icon's amount of padding doesn't seem to be the right solution. I guess the solution would be to have icons without any padding, and where they should be shown centered inside a standard-sized box, that can be done in the layout code. It's going to take quite a bit of work to switch everything over.
> It's going to take quite a bit of work to switch everything over.
KDE has been around for 29 years, it will probably be around for 29+ more years.
I'd say that warrants "a bit more work", as something you can show your grandkids as being something you've built :-)
Why did you have to say this!? Now I will noice! never did before!
:)
Welcome to my world, since circa 2005! :-p
Honestly the second screenshot with Sticky Notes is definitely ugly, but that one? It looks fine for me. The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me. I would rather complain about the settings icon which feels bigger than the close button, if anything.
> The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me.
Well, it is visible, and the professional solution for this would be to have icon design guidelines and enforce them, such that the actual visible/non-transparent icon contents are always in the same "box", and then include the padding in the icon itself in the calculation for element spacing. The fact that one component is text and the another one is an icon is not a valid excuse, these things can be planned in advance, especially for a desktop environment that has been around for close to 29 years now.
Oh, and now that I've looked the image more, even more alignment/padding issues:
- the main text isn't vertically aligned in the (I assume) fixed size vertical window
- similar story for the KDE icon and the KDED text in the titlebar
- the settings icon is bigger/the "content box" of the icon is bigger than that of the windows close (x) icon, such as that the visible contents are not padded the same amount, vertically
As I said, I guess the solution at this point is to not care and just accept that KDE is KDE, that weird but kind uncle at every family Christmas party.
To be fair to KDE, it feels a hell of a lot more polished when you use it.
The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change.
The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.
The funny part is that articles dumping on Windows UI get ranked up all of the time (like presently), but the alternatives are all 10x worse.
Personally I dump on both Windows and macOS for being UI and UX dumpster-fires today, compared to how they used to be. macOS in particular used to have really good UX, but as times goes on, Apple seems to ignore the actual design of software more and more, for reasons that elude me.
And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.
I disagree. macOS and gnome are really good. Even xfce is better than kde
macOS makes me feel like I’m on an Xwindows terminal in 1993, and not in a good way.
Agreed, still better than Windows 11 ^^
Eh, judging by what happened to gnome + gtk apps I’d rather keep designers as far away from kde as possible.
IMO, software should look unpolished, to match the quality of the code and set realistic expectations. Almost all code for general purpose use is broken in some way. Writing non-trivial correct code without formal verification is a hopeless task. Consider that even SQLite, which goes to extraordinary lengths to test for correctness [0], is still often found to be incorrect [1]. Correct code is rare and generally doesn't have a GUI.
[0] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/src/rptview/1
EDIT: Consider the Horizon IT scandal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
This kind of thing would be less likely to happen if designers didn't (probably inadvertently) mislead people into thinking software is usually correct.