KDE is an unopinionated Windows clone built of a shitty proprietary base. Stuff mostly works well though, I can’t deny that. It just looks and feels like crap.
GNOME development is stupid. They have a binding for every language you can imagine, but the widgets leave you up shit creek and Gnome thinks it’s smarter than you. Gnome looks pretty good, but after trying in earnest I don’t want to work with it.
Here – here’s how you configure it to have all the decorations left-aligned if you want that for some reason. Took me all of 20 seconds:
sandwich buttons on sidebars
Not sure which sidebars you’re talking about … and not sure whether you’re complaining about having the sandwich buttons there (and apparently not being able to get rid of them?) or if you’re complaining that the sandwich buttons aren’t somewhere else instead.
no native toolbar widgets
Again, not sure which toolbar you’re talking about? Must be talking about some app’s toolbar, right? Because if you want ‘toolbar widgets’ on the desktop, you could easily add an extra ‘panel’ at the top, call it a toolbar, and put various widgets in it.
You can do some light theming, but the overall way it works is the same.
Eh… I think you just haven’t really gotten into it. You can do a lot to change how KDE works. Like … crazy a lot. It’s kind of (in)famous for being so customizable.
If you go into specifics about how you want it to work, I bet I can figure out a way to make it work like that.
I’d not heard of this, and it actually sums up a lot of my issues. KDE just never felt thought out. Dolphin is basically unusable
KDE Plasma has never had a system like this to organize design around the UI. Because of this, designers haven’t really made a ton of inroads into the system and this limits users in the way that we can deliver design for them. In essence, we designers, were never organized enough to provide a proper, development-ready, graphic design that could be used for Plasma.
Apple abandoned 3rd party quick look plugins a while ago
remote connections suck
and it hides important things like ~/Library inconsistently (it’s not a dot file, why is it hidden?)
Apple added tags and forgot
.DS_Store
But Finder is by far the best file navigator on Windows, Linux, or Mac. You can’t honestly say it’s unusable dogshit. Cmd+G file jump is great, all the file key binds are good, solid view configurations that are all polished, inspectors, etc.
I actually kind of hate both.
KDE is an unopinionated Windows clone built of a shitty proprietary base. Stuff mostly works well though, I can’t deny that. It just looks and feels like crap.
GNOME development is stupid. They have a binding for every language you can imagine, but the widgets leave you up shit creek and Gnome thinks it’s smarter than you. Gnome looks pretty good, but after trying in earnest I don’t want to work with it.
But … you can easily change how it looks?
Not really.
You’re still stuck with right aligned decorations, sandwich buttons on sidebars, no native toolbar widgets, etc.
You can do some light theming, but the overall way it works is the same.
It’s not sufficient.
Uh … no you’re not.
Here – here’s how you configure it to have all the decorations left-aligned if you want that for some reason. Took me all of 20 seconds:
Not sure which sidebars you’re talking about … and not sure whether you’re complaining about having the sandwich buttons there (and apparently not being able to get rid of them?) or if you’re complaining that the sandwich buttons aren’t somewhere else instead.
Again, not sure which toolbar you’re talking about? Must be talking about some app’s toolbar, right? Because if you want ‘toolbar widgets’ on the desktop, you could easily add an extra ‘panel’ at the top, call it a toolbar, and put various widgets in it.
Eh… I think you just haven’t really gotten into it. You can do a lot to change how KDE works. Like … crazy a lot. It’s kind of (in)famous for being so customizable.
If you go into specifics about how you want it to work, I bet I can figure out a way to make it work like that.
I’m pretty sure he’s talking about client-side decorations.
Never tell a Linux user you can’t change something…
What’s your poison?
Currently I use KDE plasma but I’d like to migrate off.
Proprietary base?
I think he is posting from 1999, objecting to the use of the Qt libraries under the GPL-incompatible QPL licence.
It’s the best guess I have.
And indeed, KDE 1.0 didn’t look all that good.
The mascot used to be way better though
Where’s the 200 porn pictures of Kandalf
QT
I don’t want my DE to have opinions. I just want it to do what I tell it to.
kde is unopinionated because youre meant to opinionate it yourself with your own opinion
KDE is unoppinionated because it’s designed to be a shitty Windows clone.
There isn’t any deep thought about how it feels.
nah theyve talked about their design
like the new WIP Ocean theme
there is deep thought
https://planet.kde.org/andres-betts-2026-05-31-what-even-is-ocean/
Is this what you’re referring to?
I’d not heard of this, and it actually sums up a lot of my issues. KDE just never felt thought out. Dolphin is basically unusable
nah dolphin is peak
one of kdes best apps
No image album view, no column view, no file preview, and the tree view feels like it’s from 20 years ago.
It needs some love, and after using macOS Finder it’s just unusable.
image album view for folders is what the kdes Gwenview image viewer does
i came from macos and i think finder is barely usable dogshit
Finder has issues:
But Finder is by far the best file navigator on Windows, Linux, or Mac. You can’t honestly say it’s unusable dogshit. Cmd+G file jump is great, all the file key binds are good, solid view configurations that are all polished, inspectors, etc.