That always comes up and I and many other KDE aren't bothered at all by it.
That said, I guess Open Source as a whole could always need more talented artists as long as they don't try to insert themselves as arbiters of anything UX related, for example demanding to remove every configuration option or make everything work like in Mac/iOS.
Edit, also: I guess they have multiple graphic designers/artists and if it was possible to measure I'd bet $20 that they are more skilled than the majority of people complaining :-)
Yes we have many skilled designers and we are planning a big update of the default theme for Plasma 5.21 and a part of it is already in the master branch. Unfortunately it is often more complex to implement the mock-ups and we always need more manpower. See the mockups https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891
That mockup still looks bad! It may be moving in the right direction, but it's not the destination we need. Spacing is inadequate in many places, such as left padding on the window title, left padding on the sidebar text (this should line up with the title text btw), the window chrome colours are too pale, the font is too small, the view change icons are confusing, what is all that empty space in the path bar?... sigh the second screenshot link is even worse.
Don't take this the wrong way, I appreciate the work the KDE team is putting into this, but the UI just make me cringe when I try to use it. I have used all versions of KDE and IMO KDE 1 and 2 had the most consistent UIs. I think you guys should really focus a release on just the UI, rework it entirely to give it a polished, unique feel that can really push the experience forward. Something more like BeOS maybe? That had a nice polished, clean UI. All this transparency/blurring by the way, is unnecessary, the next UI should not be full of it.
Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.
> Also, would like to see widgets (and other bloat) removed and the bottom bar is not a nice thing to use either. Again, BeOS has a nice Deskbar that has a far nicer feel. Something along those lines would be awesome.
Basically you are saying you want KDE to be something it isn't.
You don't need to use widgets if you don't want to, why do you want to remove them from everyone else?
That said, I guess Open Source as a whole could always need more talented artists as long as they don't try to insert themselves as arbiters of anything UX related, for example demanding to remove every configuration option or make everything work like in Mac/iOS.
Edit, also: I guess they have multiple graphic designers/artists and if it was possible to measure I'd bet $20 that they are more skilled than the majority of people complaining :-)