I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. I've used TDE for years (on the Q4OS Linux distro). It excels at being a low-resource requirement virtual desktop for teams needing a modern distro/kernel/browser but want it to run as lightly and cheaply as possible. My company uses it on virtual server infra accessed over Nomachine. It runs perfectly well with <1GB RAM and even in 500MB RAM it does well. The DE it's updated worked great on a Pentium III with 128MB back in the day.
The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.
I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.
Amarok was the first app in Linux that was better than the Windows counterpart. My non-technical friends would ask how could they use it. It was the killer app for the Linux Desktop at the time.
> Also, dcop is probably the best GUI automation tool I’ve used.
Everytime I have to use dbus from the CLI I think to myself, dcop died for this?!
To me the best GUI automation tool (in Linux at least) was Kommander, another KDE app that didn't survived the KDE3-4 transition. A pretty decent 'low-code' tool that unfortunately didn't make it to KDE4.
I used KDE4 up to 4.2, when it supposedly 'got good'. It wasn't bad by any means. But KDE3 was better.
The first few years after KDE4 came out I spent a lot of time on getting Amarok to work on my system. Such an amazing music player.
It got harder, and eventually I switched to spotify too. (And even though you have nearly every piece of music at your fingertips, it still pales in comparison to what you could do with Amarok)
Oh wow. After the Amarok team dropped v1 for v2, I continued to compile v1 for years on any distro I installed. Eventually that became extremely tedious. I tried a few remakes (Clementine, Strawberry etc) but none of them kept the column view on the left sidebar! The tree layout sucked!
Unfortunately I discover this a little late because MusicBee now works flawlessly in Wine (with some small tricks) and absolutely blows Amarok v1 away. A few years ago I downloaded an ancient archive of Ubuntu (8.04?) and turned it into a docker image, found a still-online deb repo, installed as many development packages I could find, and managed to compile a static Amarok 1.4. I got it running on my desktop! But it was a disappointment - I remembered it being waaay better than this. I'm pretty sure I had a patch I made to tweak how the left sidebar worked in columns mode too.,
I once wrote an entire application around dcop. Actually it was a tool for plotting your amarok songs on a 2D kde window grid and it allowed you to make little gestures and squiggles to determine what songs amarok would play. It was a pretty fun project.
Sounds like this version finally has FreeBSD ports set up. That's a huge improvement; I suspect a lot of people who like Trinity would like FreeBSD and vice versa.
I knew about Trinity right from the beginning of project (back then it was available in one of the Gentoo's overlays), but I am genuinely surprised it is still running and they actually introduce new features to the DE and applications. It is remarkable effort.
KDE 3.x was really great, at 3.4, pretty much all the bugs you'd hit were gone, not that earlier releases were mega buggy, but one did encounter bugs here and there.
I dont feel like we have moved 20 years forward, even though plasma is good and all
It might spend more time pushing pixels around since 4k is 10x as many pixels as 1024x768, and I'm not sure if single-threaded processese that are memory-intensive are 10x faster.
TQt3 (TDE's Qt3 fork) uses X graphics primitives and the X render extension (if available), both of which are hardware accelerated on modern Xorg via GLAMOR (OpenGL-based 2D graphics acceleration) - at least for the open source drivers which are part of Xorg (i don't know if Nvidia's proprietary driver uses it but chances are if not, they're using their own 2D accelerated graphics anyway), so it shouldn't spend more time pushing pixels around than anything else that uses a HW accelerated API.
> Why does it seem basically impossible for a Linux desktop environment to not look like it’s frozen in time from the early 2000s in terms of sharpness/polish/slickness?
I mean, whatever you think about modern linux desktops, but this comment seems a bit strange here, as this appears this is a project with the exact goal of delivering an experience of an early 2000s Desktop that some people seem to like.
Dude this is trinity desktop: That’s kinda the point. Trinity desktop is basically a kde fork from the early 2000s that’s still maintained for use in modern distros by some guy.
I gotta say with so much slowdown in newer windows, macos, Linux desktop ui toolkits compared to stuff that ran lightning fast in 2004 stuff like this is refreshing.
There's quite a few people maintaining Trinity, and the team was even larger previously.
But the rest of your point stands. Like MATE, the entire point is to maintain a UX standard for a group of people that grew attached to the old UI. Similar to people that ran Classic Theme on Windows XP/Vista/7.
When I see a desktop with the clunky UI idioms and design ideas of the 2000s that also transports me back to my stuffy student dorm room, "refreshing" isn't the word that comes to my mind.
I am as well, but I am refreshed by a world where computers were literally so shitty they still stayed on desk. And despite that they still had better interactivity than they do at times today.
> Why does it seem basically impossible for a Linux desktop environment to not look like it’s frozen in time from the early 2000s in terms of sharpness/polish/slickness
I agree with you, but I don't think age or time are the fundamental issue here.
Windows 98 is is 25 years old, and still looks better than almost all Linux desktop environments today, or Linux environments 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Hell, it looks much better than Windows 10.
In my opinion, the visual appeal of an interface has little to do with age, and everything to do with: consistency, spacing and density, care for detail and, over everything else, good taste.
Sure, today we have a higher "ceiling". i.e. the best possible interface today is better than the best possible interface 30 years ago, thanks to better display technology, better input devices, etc. But we are nowhere near reaching that ceiling. It doesn't matter if my screen has 10 million pixels and can output 8 billion different colors if the UI that I display on it was developed by someone with the aesthetic sense of a 12 year old.
The linked DE is specifically a fork of a DE from 2002[0], so that would be why it looks like a DE from the 2000s. I imagine anyone wanting to use something like this has a fair bit of nostalgia for that style.
KDE Plasma[1] is the more modern-looking solution, but the aim of the DE is to do one thing well: provide a solid desktop environment. The stock styles look okay but can be customized in almost any way you like.
And, like it or not, KDE Plasma is hardly something from the 90s/00s. It's conservative in breaking some old paradigms (something Windows is also guilty of and what many of it's users enjoy), but it's interface, features and capabilities are decidedly modern.
The problem I have with plasma is that it's easily configurable but not easily extensible. I have tried multiple times to write a widget to run on the panel, but QML is so different from traditional Qt that I haven't been able to make sense of it yet.
Why can't I just write I widget in PyQt and have it run without learning something completely new?
I agree with your point in general, but to be fair in this particular, situation, QML is very very close to existing stuff as opposed to being something completely new
Think of it as JavaScript with different Qt widgets.
This comment makes me think you haven't used a modern Linux DE in a while. TDE is not, by design, one.
IMHO GNOME looks more modern and refreshing (and definitely more innovative) than macOS or Windows. Sure, its UX is debatable, but no one can deny Microsoft and Apple haven't been plucking ideas from GNOME since 3.0 came out (given that I find GNOME 3 stupid, i think this is a bad thing).
Not sure if copied specifically from GNOME, but macOS was really late to the party with features like virtual desktops and window snapping/tiling (and all of this is still at best half-assed).
Those features predate GNOME 3 by decades, and aren't unique to it at all. Virtual desktops were in CDE back in the 1980s, and window snapping was in KDE 2 I think, back in the late 1990s.
Budgie has the same problem XFCE and LXDE did for me. They look nice in static photos/screenshots, but they feel much more cludgy and hacked together in actual use.
I am curious. I used Xfce every day for 4 years, and for me, it's the best FOSS desktop. In what way does it feel cludgy or hacked together to you? Can you be specific and give some detail?
Why do DEs have to look modern and slick? In the end you can work the most efficient if your work environment is fast and configurable. All the rest should be up to you. I am running the same DE configuration with Xfce for many years and I never changed it. Its pretty much Windows95 workflow. No need to adapt to some shiny new features, ads or stuff that gets in your way but still up to date. If you were a carpenter, you would arrange/configure your workshop the way you can use it most efficient, easy to clean, tools at the right place,... and you wouldn't probably every 2 years just to get a more modern feeling.
Because they don't care. The vast majority of programmers are people for whom practicality triumphs over aesthetics. If you ever tried to polish something endlessly you know it's a lot of work. Most programmers see it as useless work.
As an open-source developer, I decided to change this state of affairs and create an ecosystem of open-source apps that focuses on user experience and aesthetics while not compromising power users. I've been doing this with my note-taking app Notes[1].
KDE Plasma not only looks great but is arguably the most powerful desktop environment on the market right now, in terms of features and configurability. Windows and Apple are not even close. Its downside is that there are some bugs, which is understandable because there is no single corporate body behind KDE. At the same time there is a big push to eliminate bugs, and it gets more polished and stable with every release.
Unsure what you're talking about. Most Linux desktops are absolutely saturated with modern "flat" themes and have all the "slick" flourishes: Disappearing microscopic scroll bars, incomprehensible monochromatic symbols, buttons with virtually no relief, zero-contrast layered windows for maximum confusion.
I would welcome a return to early 2000s human interface design. Everybody trying to emulate or surpass Apple took us down the road to ruin.
Besides, I think the sentiment that if it isn't flat and minimalistic then it is old-fashioned, betrays a bizarre lack of imagination on designers' part. Any time I mention skeuomorphism, 2.5D, shadows, density etc, people say I live in the 90s. Why? Are these features so onerous that one cannot conceive of a modern, or even trend-setting design that employs them? To me, this seems ludicrous. Designers brag about innovation and creativity. OK, then, here is a challenge: stop aping Apple and design tomorrow's skeuomorphic, dense, slick, rich Desktop UI.
The problem with a design field becoming established is that, in pursuit of fads, status, or inflated sense of self-importance, the designers begin to pursue design for design's sake. Looking backwards for ANY reason becomes taboo, and they start to conflate their ridiculous ideas with "progress." Without a clear line to the end-user it becomes a goal-seeking exercise that only claims to be user-oriented.
I just want a really solid, wholly original 90's style high-relief theme for GTK/Cinnamon and Qt. I used to use the old 2000 theme on Windows XP and 7 with some darker colors, it looked and felt great.
UI trends are likely similar to fashion in that they are cyclical. I'm sure the old-school skeuomorphism will be back soon, hand in hand with the maximalist interior design trends du-jour.
For me the Gnome 2/3 split was when I felt Linux became unusable, but thankfully alternatives arose. Same for windows after 7. I have to use macOS daily, and still find it less ergonomic than my cinnamon desktop. In macOS there are areas where it’s meticulously designed to the smallest detail, and glaring holes where obvious easy wins haven’t been sought. There’s a lot of polished jank.
My biggest pet peeves in Linux desktop land are with the polish, not the behavior. But then again, I’ve standardized on 1080P across the board for years, so I’m not the kind of person too caught up in visual minutiae.
> Why does it seem basically impossible for a Linux desktop environment to not look like it’s frozen in time from the early 2000s in terms of sharpness/polish/slickness?
Have you seen modern GNOME 44 or KDE 5? This is just patently false.
Gnome 3 is not too well liked, but I think it looks absolutely great and has probably the best ergonomics out of any desktop I have used (including osx.. seriously, what’s up with their window management?!)
For me, it has the worst ergonomics of any desktop I've used.
Since I asked somebody else to be specific, I feel that I should be specific.
The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable.
A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually hidden, minor feature. That's bad design. GNOME is actively hostile to beginners and less proficient users.
In the meantime, its fans claim that it is very keyboard centric, but it does not respect the existing keyboard controls established by Windows and indeed GNOME 2. I was already keyboard power user, but GNOME 3 breaks my workflow for no good reason.
Keyboard centric design is good, but you need to respect existing keyboard controls and existing user interface conventions before attempting to improve upon them. It seems to me that the designers of the GNOME 3 desktop had a very little knowledge of the existing keyboard controls, and simply invented a new set without understanding the existing tooling. Given the extremely fondness and respect for legacy editors such as VI and Emacs, which have heavily keyboard centric design which has not been changed in 40 years so as not to inconvenience skilled users, the same principles should apply to a graphical desktop.
People looking for an editor are told to just learn these 1970s user interfaces. Well, people designing a desktop should just learn those 1990s user interfaces.
The removal of true title bars is a significant impediment to usability. I am using a WIMP desktop and I want to be able to minimise, maximise, roll up, and send windows the back of the stack; none of these possible with GNOME.
I read and write in English language, using the Latin alphabet. This reads from top to bottom of page. Therefore after I have read the contents of a dialog box, that is when I make a decision what to do. Therefore after the contents of the dialogue box is the correct place for the action buttons. Putting them in the fake title bar at the top, before I decide what to do, is a reversal: it is putting the cart before horse.
I do not normally store files on my desktop, except the temporary holding place, but I do use it as a convenient place to store convenient shortcuts to my normal working folders. It's my computer, and therefore I get to choose where to store things. It is not the position of the desktop designers to decide that I cannot store things on the desktop.
One of the major innovations of user interface design in the mid 1990s was a hierarchical view of my folders in the file manager. GNOME removed this. To remove important working features is bad design. To decide on behalf of users which features are important or not and remove some them without soliciting feedback is bad design for an allegedly community centred project.
While having global system search is a useful facility, defaulting to searching for existing files inside the Save dialogue is a deeply stupid move which inconveniences me every single time that I use a GNOME based application.
Intentionally removing features from the underlying GTK toolkit, and making substantial changes which substantially inconvenience third-party apps using that toolkit, is a community hostile move. This is the sort of behaviour that I expect from proprietary software vendors, not allegedly open source projects.
Those are just a few of the first irritations that come to mind in what I consider to be an extremely user hostile design.
Of course many of these things are subjective, and likely post-facto reasoned by people, because we get very fiery over these things, but here are some of my “rebuttals”:
> The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable.
OSX has a similar toolbar, windows has a much bigger one at the bottom. It is valuable space, but I think it is well-used, will come back to it later.
> A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually hidden, minor feature. That's bad design. GNOME is actively hostile to beginners and less proficient users.
It is available by a single flick of the mouse (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized) for beginners/when you are constrained to mouse/(minor point but even on touchscreen). For power users there is the super key, and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab. Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
> titlebar
I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim. Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days. I don’t find it useful. Minimization is also an interesting question - there could definitely be improvements here (maybe the sketch area of i3 and alia be a better option?), but it is absolutely usable. I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
> I do not normally store files on my desktop, except the temporary holding place, but I do use it as a convenient place to store convenient shortcuts to my normal working folders. It's my computer, and therefore I get to choose where to store things. It is not the position of the desktop designers to decide that I cannot store things on the desktop.
Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
> file manager
You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE, just because it runs under the same project. The same is true for your criticism of GTK.
As you would probably expect, I reject all of those, but let me explain why.
> OSX has a similar toolbar
No, it does not, because it's not similar.
It may look similar but this is not about looks, it's about structure and function. ("S&F" is a specific term in evolutionary biology.)
The OS X top panel is a menu bar. It is a core part of the UI. It contains 3 functional areas, none of which GNOME has.
1. The leftmost entry is the Apple system menu. Click on it, and you get system-wide options such as "about this Mac" and so on.
2. Then there is the app menu. The name tells you useful info: the current app. It has options global to that app, such as preferences and quit, in a standard place.
3. Then there is the app's own menu bar, which varies app to app.
4. Then at the right is the system's notification area, which has global applets, a clock and so on, visually separated. GNOME has a vestige it's trying to banish.
That's 4 important functions, just one of which GNOME implements badly.
Not the same thing. MacOS gives me a lot in return for that strip. GNOME wastes it.
> Windows has a much bigger one at the bottom.
Again, not even comparable. Until the broken Win11, you could move it. You can't in GNOME. It does a tonne of stuff; it's a launcher and a switcher and an info display and a status monitor. That's efficient use of space. GNOME moves less than 50% of this to the favourites bar and then hides it. That is not efficient: that's wasteful.
> It is available by a single flick of the mouse
No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it. Hiding info from a person is called lying. I do not want my desktop to lie to me.
> (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized)
Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality.
> For power users there is the super key
Bogus.
1. I don't have one.
2. How should I know that? Where does it tell me?
3. Why is the keyboard for power users?
> and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab.
Easily the best? Prove it. That is an assertion of fact. That means it needs evidence.
Personally I loathe gestures and I turn off my trackpad. I know how to use all 3 buttons on my mouse; the GNOME devs do not, because they have removed the core "send to back" function that is far quicker than any PITA gestures.
> Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
Good for you. Me, I read words. I want words over pics.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
>> titlebar
>
> I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim.
False comparison. The space is still wasted.
> Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days.
Speak for yourself. I did.
> I don’t find it useful.
I did. I want it. It's been taken from me. Says who? Why is that right? Why wasn't I asked? Is this a community project or an autocracy?
> I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
I only use them on laptops when I have just 1 screen. Normally I have 2 or 3 screens. GNOME sucks at multiscreen.
Forcing me to use a kludgy replacement for missing hardware is bad design. Not supporting the hardware properly is worse.
> Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
No.
1. Extensions break GNOME upgrades.
2. It is again stealing functions I want from me. Bad design.
3. The bolted-back-on functions are crude and only half functional.
4. Chesterton's fence: don't remove something if you don't know why it's there.
> You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE
False. It 100% is part of the GNOME DE and so it is fair target. It is a poor design if the user has to fix it. Assume I have no root privs. Make what is bundled work. Don't lean on others.
Gnome includes many of the OSX menus in its right hand panel. Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).
> No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it
With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs. Otherwise why would you roll up your window? Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?
> > (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized)
> Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality
That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.
The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key. Also often called Meta. You can achieve the same through the UI. Keyboard is often said to be for power users because they are not self-documenting. What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.
> Is this a community project or an autocracy?
It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..
> GNOME sucks at multiscreen
Literally every OS and distro suck at it.
Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point, so I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.
> Gnome includes many of the OSX menus in its right hand panel.
It used to. Now they are all collapsed into a single drop-down thing. (Which is not a panel, BTW. A panel is a toolbar that is permanently attached to the edge of a window or screen.)
Why? Who decided this? Who got to vote on it? What is the benefit?
Of course, GNOME broke it in a later release. This is why no amount of extensions are an answer: they break. Extensions do not work from one release of GNOME to another, and when they fail, the whole desktop often fails.
> Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).
False. Gtk exposes this; Unity didn't have stored metadata on lots of apps, it just displayed the existing controls' contents somewhere else. If you run brand new Gtk apps on Unity today, they get panel menus. This was not some clever hack.
> With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs.
I disagree.
1. I want to choose what is shown or not. In order to choose, I have to be able to see it.
2. In other words, it needs to be there at first, and then I can choose whether I want to show it or not. If I can't see it in the first place, then how am I to know it's there?
3. It's the users' choice what is shown or not. It is not up to the developer to say "they don't need to see this and I'm going to hide it away."
Any piece of software that does that is user hostile.
> Otherwise why would you roll up your window?
Again: it's my choice. I get to choose. It's my computer. They are my windows. I choose if they are shown or not.
That is the point of free software: Choice.
GNOME says it's free, but it takes choices away from me. I object to that.
> Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?
To save space for my document. You can't show everything all the time: that is why you leave it up to the user to choose what they show and when.
(Incidentally, this is also why in my opinion the Microsoft ribbon based fluent interface fails. It tries to show far too much all at once, and the result is that it wastes a huge amount of screen space, and is actually more difficult to hunt through for what I need when I need it.)
> That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.
By the way I do have a clue about this stuff... for example here is a screenshot of a piece of software which I designed about a dozen years which makes use of Fitt's Law.
> What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.
The problem here, as I'm attempting to spell out, is that there were existing conventions for this stuff, and GNOME does not respect them.
> It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..
No. What I do is, I write about it for a living. I analyse this stuff, I draw comparisons, I point out weaknesses and strengths. That's my job.
In my professional capacity, the GNOME foundation invited me to its GUADEC conference about six or seven years back. I asked a lot of awkward and difficult questions, because that's my job, and I didn't get invited back.
> Literally every OS and distro suck at it.
False. For example, using most other interfaces, such as XFCE, I can treat a multiscreen desktop as one big space. I can have one panel at the far left, and one on the far right, of the entire multi-monitor desktop.
But GNOME doesn't let me do that.
Why not?
> Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point
Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased?
Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you is biased?
Have you considered that perhaps I have opinions, and can draw upon years of knowledge and experience, and make reasoned arguments based on evidence, and that is not the same thing as being biased?
> I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.
So because I can counter your arguments with examples and reasoning, you don't think that it's fruitful discussion?
Personally, I think that the arguments where people can defend their points, and produce evidence to back them up, are the most fruitful kind.
> Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased
Not because we disagree, because you are talking out of emotion, while I am not. Also, many of your supposed arguments/evidences are just hand-wavy emotional statements.
I’m fine with disagreeing with someone, or even if someone can change my mind, but I don’t see it happening here, and mind you, I simply like Gnome’s UX more or less, but not to a degree where I would get blinded by it.
No, I like Gnome, period. That’s a subjective fact. My arguments are reasonable. That’s true, but has no relation to the former.
You do not like Gnome. That’s completely fair, subjective opinion - though you seem to be actively hating it, which is I believe way too strong of an emotion to feel, but you do you.
Your arguments are not logical, and don’t conclude what you say they do. That’s a fact. Just look at the bullshit you wrote about menus and how they are good, while what gnome does is bad — menus also don’t show you what they hide! They don’t start out opened, like come on! They are exactly analogous to what gnome does with the task bar - you just have been using one for decades, and the other is new. But then say that you don’t like new things — completely fair, and feel free to use xfce or whatever! People really dislike change, being a designer is not a kind job, no matter how objectively good your work is. But let’s not post-facto “reason” yourself into that position, because that’s just made up bullshit brains are very good at — we like to build up a reasoning from the emotional conclusion backwards, and not the correct way.
IDK, my Linux desktop looks pretty nice, sleek, sharp, and utterly usable. It looks definitely better than my wife's gaming machine that runs Win10. In particular, it lacks visual rough edges, and is way, way more consistent. It also does not imitate macOS.
I dislike many UX decisions that Apple have made last 15 years. But I greatly appreciate their consistency and a presence of a design language. Last time I saw a consistent design language on Windows was Windows XP.
I don't like current whitish or-and low contrast flatly thin-linear current desktops and UIs.
They look like sketches more than finished products. They are eye tirying and have low usability, like you don't know what area is clickable or not.
Google released material design with styling mentioned above and in latest interactions they go back to more shades of gray, contrast and properly highlighted interaction areas.
In addition to the other replies, there are even whole new operating systems that are built around 90s aesthetic and idioms. One such is SerenityOS. I am watching their Ladybird web browser closely. Not so much the OS itself since I personally do not miss the old interfaces. But CDE and Windowmaker did have a weird charm that I can't deny.
Counter-question: why should the UI style even be defined by your platform, and not by the user?
Why can't I install UI themes which makes the UI look like whatever I want? Why does the user interface of the Apple user next to me have to look exactly the same as mine?
(I'm also mainly an Apple user, and I don't like some 'traditional' Linux desktop clunkiness - mainly related to the touchpad - but criticizing a desktop environment (which the user is free to install or uninstall) for its looks is a bit ridiculous - especially from a user of a system where replacing the desktop environment isn't even possible).
In most distros a simple default install (like Kubuntu or Ubuntu) things are consistent. Even RedHatEnterprise linux is very consistent. Sure a mac looks nice as it is always available in a 2K> glossy display.
Once you go to install stuff things are made of different tool kits. In principle it is the same for macOS. Yes, all Apple stuff mostly are consistent. There are lots of dialogs inside System Preferences that seem old and not migrated. Also, once you install MS office, and other dev. stuff from macports things go weird.
I hadnt noticed, but I know I like KDE best, followed by the MacOS on my m1 MacBook, and I hate using windows since 7. I use the fork of classic shell when I have to use windows 10
I think it's a matter of taste; they all kind of blur together after a while and offer roughly equivalent functionality. And if I were to pick any macOS look it'd probably be from 5-10 years ago in terms of layout and use of screen space....
I miss the macos input controls about a hundred times more than I miss the window manager.
Most of the major desktops can be configured to look very similar to macOS by changing the fonts, icons, themes.
This is the case for Gnome, KDE, XFCE and probably others too.
You can install whatever font macOS is using, then get icons that look like the ones from macOS, cursors, then a GTK or Qt theme. And now it will look essentially the same.
KDE 3 dates to around 2000. Definitely not novel, but it was pretty slick at the time, and on even remotely modern hardware, it should be extremely fast. It had some great features that are still unmatched even in the latest KDE, like 'pseudo' transparency for terminals and standard (real) virtual desktops.
The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.
I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.