Linux

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Yeah, some elements like the scrollbars aren't positioned well (in this screenshot, this is a bit outdated tbh).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 these straight up don't 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...

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

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.

All my homies hate libadwaita it's bad.

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.

Happiness is a distraction from perfection, let it go!

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