I see the whole fabric like design is taking off. Maybe fabric like windeco would look cool. MAYBE. But it should be worth it to look into alternatives to the grey backgrounds, which people also complain about.

@Moult I agree that it's getting better, and I think QML will make it easier for designers to get involved. I really hope so!

Yup, KDE is ugly. Sorry but it's true. People posting screenshots of their cluttered, headache-inducing desktops and claiming they look great is irrelevant; good design is objective.

Don't get me wrong I'm not bashing the KDE devs. Apple raised the design bar by making design the top priority and by paying top designers lots of money to work for them; of course KDE is going to suffer by comparison.

spoovy, is there a specific look you're going for? I find that though some of KDE's defaults can be argued (reading text on default plasma backgrounds? Almost impossible with a dark wallpaper!), KDE does seem to do a very good job in giving the user enough customisability to edit the desktop to what they feel looks nice. And this ability to configure is unsurpassed in any other desktop environment as far as I know. There is always a tradeoff between dogmatic "great design" as Apple presents it, and flexibility.

I know you claim posting deskshots is irrelevant, but here's one to contrast the other "cluttered" ones: http://wipup.org/updates/view/552/

You can definitely get a long way by customising it, and my desktop does look pretty nice now . I suppose my statement that KDE is ugly boils down to two things - one being the poor default look. Yes you can hack the font settings with additional packages, fiddle with the rendering etc, but all this involves customising it. Most people don't want to do this - I don't either for that matter. And you have to judge any product on how it performs out-of-the-box IMO, not after some hacker has been fiddling with it for hours.

Secondly the devil is in the detail - and that screenshot you posted shows some of the typical problems. Mismatched icons in the systray by the look of it - if it's a monochrome theme that's desired why is one of them in colour? The padding is uneven on the 'University' icon - several pixels are padded above, but none below. Square-look icons are used with a round-edged theme in the taskbar. The KDE menu icon - is is rounded or right angled like the terminal icon next to it? That konsole window - seems to use a hell of a lot of window for very little terminal. Many (most?) people would say that these are all just nit-picking, but these are the little details that determine quality design or the lack of it. Some people just aren't sensitive to this stuff and some are. I assume you're not - well you're lucky!

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the difficulty of competing with you-know-who in design terms - it must be practically impossible to be honest. But the fact remains. I would be happy with less customization but a higher quality default look. Just one theme - tight integration of icons, boxes etc. Better font rendering (like Gnome's for example). I realise I'm probably in a minority here though and I'm not complaining.

spoovy wrote:But the fact remains. I would be happy with less customization but a higher quality default look. Just one theme - tight integration of icons, boxes etc. Better font rendering (like Gnome's for example).

Well, it seems that providing good looking defaults with little customization capabilities is what GNOME is all about right now. It might better suit your needs, then.

Honestly, I don't care that much about little padding issues as I do about customizing my desktop to workflow that suits me best. Apple may have great design, but I believe that I know better how I would like to use my computer.

It's not about saying that KDE is great and there is no need of any changes. Perhaps resolving these little issues you are pointing at would do KDE SC only good. But I think that the most important thing is that there is variety of choice and everyone can use tools (s)he likes most.

if it's a monochrome theme that's desired why is one of them in colour?

Only Status Notifier icons (i.e. the new systray specification) icons can be themed. The old XEmbed way can't have this feature. And it can't be removed due to compatibility.

I am a bit late to this topic, but this topic just appeared the day I thought of saying something about the current KDE design. KDE has always something innovative and a very good developer base. But the problem is the user interface of it is not as elegant as Gnome. I am a regular Gnome user who frequently tries KDE and ends up not liking the cluttered design of it. The thing I like about Gnome is how its buttons, menus are padded well. Caution: I am not talking about Gnome 3, where they "OVER" padded, but at least like Gnome 2, KDE needs a bit more padding, or like the poster says, at least give an option to change the padding settings.

For reference, I have added an image that shows the difference between the buttons that are in KDE forum vs the KDE settings window. Which one do you think looks elegant?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13 ... ot1qc.png/

Another suggestion for KDE would be to find a better way of presenting settings/options for different applications, don't ask me which application please. Most KDE applications I use provide so much options, but I feel they should improve the way they are presented to the user as well.

yep and nopes. the default theme really really needs a face life. it is really not apealing.

Customized KDE even in 5 mins look awesome. But since official KDE blogs use default KDE theme, it will appear really ugly and as if unmaintained

Nayar wrote:yep and nopes. the default theme really really needs a face life. it is really not apealing.

Customized KDE even in 5 mins look awesome. But since official KDE blogs use default KDE theme, it will appear really ugly and as if unmaintained

This. KDE has always been my favorite GUI, because the customization it allows is amazing to say the least.

I'm a fairly new KDE user, who comes from Gnome. And to me, KDE is elegent.

Needless to say, beauty is mostly a subjective matter. However, there are practical criteria too. I agree that Oxygen isn't the most beautiful style ever but, to me, it's nice exactly beacuse of its simplicity. I tried fancy styles like Bespin for a few months but, after a while, I got tired of them. Then, I remained with Oxygen and got used to it: no boredom at all. This is a very good thing for a default theme, in my opinion.

Nayar wrote:yep and nopes. the default theme really really needs a face life. it is really not apealing.

Customized KDE even in 5 mins look awesome. But since official KDE blogs use default KDE theme, it will appear really ugly and as if unmaintained

I agree to this statement. Every time I make a fresh install of KDE I change my colour scheme to "Evening Lelac", because it's good on my eyes and is very sharp and crips, especially fonts. I do have to accept the fact that some web pages do no not work well with this colour scheme.

Why other KDE colour schemes are so **** in many places, beats me. I've been using Sabayon linux for the past 6-7 years. This distro is considered the best looking in the world of Linux and yet KDE still seems stuck in the past.

Developers, stop telling us that other people just like to moan about how thinks are , just take our comments seriously and look at them from our perspective.

As an add on, an interesting article I found today:
http://www.zdnet.com/will-90-percent-of ... 000012348/

Regards

richlion wrote:

Nayar wrote:yep and nopes. the default theme really really needs a face life. it is really not apealing.

Customized KDE even in 5 mins look awesome. But since official KDE blogs use default KDE theme, it will appear really ugly and as if unmaintained

I agree to this statement. Every time I make a fresh install of KDE I change my colour scheme to "Evening Lelac", because it's good on my eyes and is very sharp and crips, especially fonts. I do have to accept the fact that some web pages do no not work well with this colour scheme.

Why other KDE colour schemes are so **** in many places, beats me. I've been using Sabayon linux for the past 6-7 years. This distro is considered the best looking in the world of Linux and yet KDE still seems stuck in the past.

Developers, stop telling us that other people just like to moan about how thinks are , just take our comments seriously and look at them from our perspective.

As an add on, an interesting article I found today:
http://www.zdnet.com/will-90-percent-of ... 000012348/

Regards

And please take my comment seriously and stop telling us about this link to zdnet in a dozen posts. One is simply enough.

Let me dredge up this old post, if I may. Probably it's already been said, but two huge visual improvements to default KDE would be the following.

1. Either a new plasma theme or tweaking the current one so that it's usable. White text/icons on a white panel doesn't work, ever. Either make the panel icons black (e.g. in the tray) or, even better, come out with a better default dark plasma theme. A dark plasma theme works better given that most window contents are, by default, a light color, like grey or white. Here, black plasma popups, etc. look better over a white background than white popups do.

2. The glossy icons (forward/back buttons, plus/minus, etc.) don't go with the rest of the Oxygen icon theme. It's unfortunate since these glossy icons show up everywhere. They should "flatten" them, remove gloss and other visual effects that might look ok when blown up, but look terrible at their typically used (small) size. Monochrome buttons look good, but don't work well in theory, at least not when you plasma theme is dark and your system color scheme isn't (or conversely). You end up with black on black or white on white.

On the practical side, the Oxygen Style has just one drawback: the pressed state of toggle butons isn't visible enough with dark color schemes.

I think Kde looks slick out of the box but I honestly am not a fan of the way the gray/slateted windows are handled or the window buttons...
The only sad part is that KDE uses QT(I personally find it a lot more powerful than GTK/+) but GTK looks simple pretty but very polished. I'm using Ubuntu's Unity as an example, it's slick right out of the box and any app even qt apps look great without any configuring.

KDE is the most configurable of any of the desktops available and that's why I use it, the downside is... GTK integration is really not that great (compared to QT integration on any GTK based desktop environment..)