I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.
Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite “Guys Live In Apartments Like This”. Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the “beauty tax” for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it’s very slow progress.
And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, “All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features”, blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss… Yes, it’s all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don’t want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn’t worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.
I’m sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there’s a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, “this is fine”. And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.
It’s also a bit sad when it has a facade that looks like a competitor’s proprietary offering, but you then peek under the hood a bit further and the finer details of polish, functionality, and taste are missing.
Love it all the same, but I can’t pretend it’s not a shortcoming.
Win11 feels like a half built facade placed over the Win10 interface. For example, to compress a file from the right click menu you have to click “show more options” which just switches to the Win10 menu. Also, moving away from text in context menus and replacing with an inconsistently formatted icon only menu is an assault on the user IMO.
I don’t feel like saying plasma 6 or gnome is cherry picking. Plasma, at least to me, feels very polished. The theme management is incredible, diverse, and easy too. I feel it’s better aesthetically out of the box, but with negligible effort a theme can be installed to exceed commercial competition.
Windows 10 felt decently fleshed out and very clean, but often you still had to use the old control panel and other menus.
Android is clean and polished but limiting in customizability. Android UI apps seem to break completely every couple updates until the maintainer patches. There’s no consistency between devices/manufacturers either.
I haven’t used an Apple product since 2006 so i can’t speak for those.
I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.
Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite “Guys Live In Apartments Like This”. Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the “beauty tax” for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it’s very slow progress.
And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, “All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features”, blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss… Yes, it’s all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don’t want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn’t worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.
I’m sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there’s a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, “this is fine”. And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.
It’s also a bit sad when it has a facade that looks like a competitor’s proprietary offering, but you then peek under the hood a bit further and the finer details of polish, functionality, and taste are missing.
Love it all the same, but I can’t pretend it’s not a shortcoming.
Win11 feels like a half built facade placed over the Win10 interface. For example, to compress a file from the right click menu you have to click “show more options” which just switches to the Win10 menu. Also, moving away from text in context menus and replacing with an inconsistently formatted icon only menu is an assault on the user IMO.
I don’t feel like saying plasma 6 or gnome is cherry picking. Plasma, at least to me, feels very polished. The theme management is incredible, diverse, and easy too. I feel it’s better aesthetically out of the box, but with negligible effort a theme can be installed to exceed commercial competition.
Windows 10 felt decently fleshed out and very clean, but often you still had to use the old control panel and other menus.
Android is clean and polished but limiting in customizability. Android UI apps seem to break completely every couple updates until the maintainer patches. There’s no consistency between devices/manufacturers either.
I haven’t used an Apple product since 2006 so i can’t speak for those.