> UI/UX designers work happily and feel welcome on Windows and Mac OS systems
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "feel welcome"? AFAIK neither of those systems is open to contributors: if a UI/UX designer wanted to improve some aspect of the design, they're either limited to whatever config/theming the company decided to allow, or they must go and convince the company of their idea (especially sales, marketing, etc.), sign NDAs if they want to see/fix any of the implementation details, and so on.
With FOSS they could just post to a mailing list or something, which I would imagine is more welcoming. Maybe the difficulty is social: FOSS projects certainly suffer from toxicity, but their transparent processes also make it more visible. Companies are better able to hide toxicity using firewalls and private/internal communication channels.
Toxicity, tooling and commercial ideas regarding IP.
In Windows and macOS systems, and even on Google platforms, you go to a conference, there is a wealthy set of talks and discussion forums about UI/UX ideas.
We just get to use Sketch, XD, Photoshop, whatever gets the job done to transmit the ideas and how users interact with the platforms.
On UNIX world, or what is left of it BSD/Linux, GNOME and KDE designers get bashed and something like xmonad is considered the epitome of GUI experience.
A similar conference will be about filesystems, network protocols, graphics drivers, kernel modules and very seldom about anything UI/UX related.
So the designers that still try to contribute to GNOME and KDE apps do so in spite of community, because they believe that they can still make a difference.
Everyone else just moves into places where they feel welcome.
I am still wondering how long elementary OS is going to be around.
Not true for KDE. We (the developers) like the UI/UX people. The main criticism from users seems to be that KDE UI isn't polished enough, which is not exactly sending away those who want to improve it.
