FOSS and OSH will always sit a few years behind companies which are investing billions of dollars in R&D. But we can try to lift what we can and catch up sooner or later.
FOSS UI/UX is at least two decades behind and the gap is growing.
A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
i disagree, KDE has one, if not the best ui out there. it is consistent, customizable and not a resource hog.
windows's UI has been a mess since the XP days, and osx is atleast consistent, but hides a lot of functionality in name of clean design.
And I disagree with you. And it’s not because I think KDE is horrible… it’s not. I prefer the Gnome style but KDE is quite polished.
But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.
Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!
So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.
But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.
I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
> it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux
I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style.
The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
> So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed
You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).
Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.
Open any actual application on a pinephone and you'll see that whatever fanciness/usability KDE has falls short instantly. There's quite a way to go still.
I would argue it's the other way around - FOSS UI/UIX is two decades ahead, because it didn't participate in the UX regression that has plagued us in those past two decades.
This isn't entirely true, because e.g. Gnome has been an enthusiastic adopter of all those anti-patterns. But, unlike other platforms, you still have other DE options to choose from.
We can all discuss whether or not a certain UI/UX pattern is appropriate or not (and I certainly agree that many of the changes Apple have made in the last decade have been for the worse). But all personal preferences aside, Linux UI/UX feels to me at less consistent than macOS - both aesthetically/visually (between different UI toolkits etc) and in terms of behaviour (keyboard shortcuts, how well they work with touch screens, etc).
I would agree with this sentiment across different DEs/toolkits, but the reality of the modern Linux desktop of a normal user is that it's just not that common. And within a single DE, they're plenty consistent. More so than Win10, say.
