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Yeah, some elements like the scrollbars aren't positioned well (in this screenshot, this is a bit outdated tbh).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

Oh for fuck’s sake…

I have a theory that if everything was pixel perfect, centered, perfectly aligned and looked the same, the thing would look too sterile. There's basically a perfect world, written down in books and texts that is being taught to students and there's the real world. In many areas, these two do not match and the above image is the result of someone's text book world view not matching the real world.

Could the discover store have a better UI? Yes. Will a centered, down-anchored, pixel perfect button make it better? Subjective.

my condolences

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 :)

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.

Well, Wayland forces client side decorations which I’ve never agreed with.

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.

This below is windows 11 consistency, within their own os context menus. I am not even starting on the fact that window decorations there too are a non standardised mess.

I agree that lack of UI consistency is less than ideal, and very real in Linux, but let's not pretend that this is a main issue stopping people from migrating (from an equally inconsistent OS)

How is a kernel meant to enforce anything about UI?

I think GUI development should favour server-side decorations for consistency's sake, but this is more of a cultural thing with what application developers are choosing to do, rather than anything "Linux" can do about.

Edit: okay, WTF Windows is now even worse?!?

Always has been. At least since NT. Company culture encourages features and discourages fixes. Thus it got framework after framework.

You can enable native system borders in JetBrains apps. Look for it in the settings!

yes because kde supports client-side decorations and server-side decorations. gnome only supports client-side decorations