I have a visual impairment that make it really hard for me to distinguish objects where the is little contrast. This new UI trend of one pixel borders is a big annoyance for me. I constantly click the wrong window.
I actually wrote a Windows app to do something like this. It's sitting in my unfinished folder because I ran into too many issues to fix for a hobby project. The rectangle data for Windows apps seems to vary widely. I needed a bunch of different formulas to correct for the rectangles I was getting back from the WinAPI calls.
One of my features was a different border color for each app. I tried various color rules, such as multiple copies of VSCode would each get their own shade of blue, or cycle through colors of the rainbow.
Microsoft Windows is abysmal on this front - I have to use Microsoft Windows 10 periodically, while most of my life is spent in KDE, and the disjoint is jarring.
In KDE I can precisely control and set window border thickness and colour.
In Microsoft Windows 10 (and I assume 11 has continued the trend at making this even worse) I can enable a very thin border, of a themed colour, and that border disappears when the window is no longer in focus. This means a couple of terminal windows (eg gitbash) have near impossible to discern edges when they're overlapping.
On top of this, some Microsoft applications seem to break their own styling rules (Office apps, say) which I suspect is the kind of issue that stalled your project.
Yeah, I recently started to use KDE Plasma with Fedora (after Gnome left a sour taste), and the amount of customizations it allows is mind-blowing. This may be common knowledge, but as a newcomer to KDE, these very precise controls are quite a fresh breath from OSs like Win10/11 and Mac OS.
Reminded me of those Windows 98 shell customizations. Windows seems to be going backwards when it comes to customizations; there are only a few customizations allowed in Windows 11 now.
Windows 11 seems a bit better on this front than 10. I don't use either very often (mostly for gaming and sometimes at work) but I have yet to see the active window having the same color as a background one, or even be unable to tell where one window stops and the other begins.
It does, under the accessibility options. 'Contrast themes' allow fairly fine-grained customization, still, and a lot of legacy values that have been there since Windows 95 are still supported otherwise to some extent albeit sometimes hidden.
I've hunted through Ease of Access (as it's called in Win10), and trawled through forums, trying to find a superior solution -- but the best I could find, and manage, is shown here:
Obviously with a busier amount of text on fore / rear terminals, and more than just two terminals -- that lack of a clear border becomes a massive confusion.
If you've found a better configuration, please do share.
> I have a visual impairment that make it really hard for me to distinguish objects where the is little contrast. This new UI trend of one pixel borders is a big annoyance for me. I constantly click the wrong window.
I have excellent vision and constantly struggle to figure out where GUI elements begin and end.
Like... Windows 95 has distinguishable UI elements figured out. They had clear borders, and it was easy to figure out if something was a button or input field, if it was enabled or disabled, buttons had icons and text, the use of depth was great too.
When and how did it go so wrong? It's not like there's a sudden shortage of screen space. That was a GUI that worked on a 640x480 monitor.
Windows has several high-contrast themes built-in (and in Win11 they are quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing than they used to be), you can actually even toggle between normal and high-contrast via a keyboard shortcut.
I'm glad that windows have outlines, but I'm still disappointed KDE has switched both foreground and background windows to light titlebars by default. This is something I change out of the box on both Windows 10 (dark gray accent color for title bar) and KDE (Breeze Classic color scheme).
It’s always nice to read about someone contributing to open source.
Looking at the screenshots I have a question for the KDE users here. I am surprised by the incorrect kerning and strange padding on display in the interface. Is that normal or is it a consequence of it being so customisable the author likes settings which leads to this result?
I can't speak to the kerning (it looks fine to me, I guess I'm not a font nerd) but in those screenshots, the user has selected monochrome subpixel rendering and either no or very light hinting. These together make the text a bit more blurry than it does on my own machine.
And of course, it's also possible that using a better font would improve things.
Eventually you get used to it, and start ignoring it. Sadly. I'd switched to Gnome for many years, but in the end - being able to easy tweak the desktop to my liking drove me back to KDE.
Can you please point out what that means in that sceenshot? Fonts generally got pretty good with fontconfig, but I suppose there are always some edge cases.
It’s very obvious if you look at "Documents" in the first screenshot. The spacing between D, o and c is a lot larger than between t and s.
For the padding, you can see that the spacing is strange under and over the toolbar icons. There is a lot of space between the icon in the title bar and the icon in the toolbar. Alignement between icons and texts in the file browser sidebar seems suspect to me too especially for "Pictures".
I know some people don’t care about that kind of things but I find it unsettling. Looking at it I know I wouldn’t be able to use KDE.
A common trick on css is two add two shadows. The first one is more intense, but has a very small radius. The second one has a larger radius, but a less intense colour.
This is a play on how shadows work on real life; where objects may have a strong shadow from an overhead lamp, and a softer shadow via lighting bleeding in from windows or other rooms.
The results of this are very subtle -- an untrained eye sees just "a shadow" and not two (I can only recognise this because a designer friend taught me this trick).
I wonder if applying a similar technique on window borders could work. But instead of the inner shadow being less intense, it would be a higher contrast one. It's definitely worth exploring.
Personally, I'm prefer simple borders instead of shadows. They take up just 1 or 2px (e.g.: maximise space efficiency), and are super clear.
KDE uses gpu acceleration for its ui. So that should be a negligible impact on performance. I am unsure about if you even have shadows with CPU rendering.
That kinda is the whole point of static releases like debian stable, ubuntu lts, red hat or windows ltsc? That you actively don't want to have any changes like these but want stable (=static) foundations to build on. (currently writing this on old stable; don't feel bothered to upgrade right now)
> I think Plasma has something like "Decorations" - can a custom decoration be used? Can one use scripts in the "Decorations"?
The software under discussion seems to be a change to the breeze window decoration so for this one probably not (yet), but e.g. for aurorae
compiz is famous for including all sorts of fancy/over the top effects like windows going up in flames, so stuff like glowing window borders should be no problem at all.
By now compiz seems mostly unused, but many effects are also available in kwin.
For instance
system settings -> desktop behavior -> desktop effects -> dim inactive
Kinda the opposite of outlines, where it just dims everything else instead of highlighting one, but maybe it works for you?
Because it does something different? The new one changes colors depending on the background color, for a different window decoration, outline instead if borders (rounded corners etc.)...
This is nice. One of the reasons I still stick to the "Plastik" style and haven't moved to Breeze is the "smoothness" of the interface. This seems to bring in some definition to the interface.
I know plastik feels so old and out of date. But it feels more tactile to me because of the higher gradients.
And Oxygen (the default theme), used a depressing gray. On KDE 4, I used Fusion or Cleanlooks (a port of the Clearlooks GTK theme).
KDE 5 went the other way and Breeze looks great. I sometimes try other theme but always come back to Breeze. I even used Breeze on GNOME and found it better-looking than Adwaita.
This can be accomplished on Windows11 with a custom Visual Style. Ive seen it done before on some deviantart themes. Would be cool if someone could release a stock Windows11 Visual Style with only this modified.
I haven't touched KDE in maybe 15 years. I just always defaulted to Gnome when I'm on Linux desktop. But this looks more macOS like. Just curious, is there any reason I should try KDE today?
KDE dev here. From a developer perspective, something I really love with Plasma (the 'new' branding for KDE) is that it's really modular by design. Everything on the screen is pluggable with a very simple api and can theoricaly be be swapped out or experimented with. This includes the widgets but also the visual effects. For example, Marco (a prominent Plasma hacker) just worked on a new basic tilling extension and with a public api that allows other to build more advanced tilling scripts: https://notmart.org/blog/2022/10/kwin-and-tiling/
From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
Oblivious if you are fine with GNOME, this is also fine. We have some different vision on how a open source desktop should look and behave but we do share a dream to someday be a good replacement for Windows for a large part of the population (not nerds).
> From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
The overwhelming majority of the people I know who use KDE also try to not change too much from the default settings, but the settings we change are all different.
It's similar with the bells and whistles in Plasma; I probably use a single-digit percentage of them, but they are probably different set from what other users use. I am grateful for those who maintain these features, because I'm sure both that developing would be easier with fewer features and there is probably nobody who uses all of them.
To be fair, I believe KDE is already a better desktop than Windows explorer. My fave features are "Wobbly Windows" effect and "Animated Hue" wallpaper. But I'm a nerd, so my needs are likely different from majority of the population, I guess :)
I don't know if I'm a "normal", but I kinda hate this trend to stick everything in tabs.
For example, I hate having to jump through hoops to disable tabs in Firefox. Which means using a janky extensions that usually is able to split the tab into a new window. Doesn't always work. I also have to go and manually tweak the browser chrome to hide the tab bar.
The way I see it, tabs and whatnot are a window manager's job. I don't want to have several levels of window management, each being handled differently by a separate app.
If you want to provide tabs, go ahead, but please don't force them on me and let me disable them. I'm OK with having to modify some obscure config file if you insist on removing preferences from your UI. Heck, if I could compile firefox with a special feature flag, that would still be better than the current situation.
Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
What window manager are you using? And how many windows can you comfortably manage with it? On my current machine (KDE on 1366x768 screen), after 10 open windows their titles disappear, leaving only window icons. And "comfortable" number for me is even lower - no more than 5 windows on a single virtual desktop.
But I'm a tab user, and would like to hear about other approaches.
I use i3 (standard, no gaps), so the tabbing mode works particularly well as a replacement for window tabs. I can probably go up to twenty windows open on a given virtual desktop in tab mode with no issue. I usually use a 24" 3840x2160 screen in 100% mode and zoom in the content. This works well enough even on my 14" 1920x1080 laptop, but I avoid doing "serious" work on it, since I don't like being hunched over and the screen is a bad joke.
Yes, when there are many tabs open, at some point, I can't distinguish them easily anymore, especially on the laptop. But the same happens with tabs. At least I can scroll my mouse wheel to change between them, which didn't use to work with tabs.
My coping mechanism is saving the tabs I want to keep for later as bookmarks. Getting back to them has the same kind of probability as when I used to use tabs. But the win of this approach is that I don't have open webpages hanging around eating resources.
I've also found that there are basically two ways I use my computer:
1. I'm just randomly browsing, and I am going to open a zillion tabs (say while browsing HN) but then I'll read them and close them sequentially. No jumping from one to another, so the tabs being small is not an issue.
2. Having several windows open that I all need while working. In this case, I'll set them up in some tiling setup, usually an editor / terminal where I work on one side of the screen, and multiple browser windows in tabbed mode on the other. I then jump back and forth between the two sides. If I need to access a specific browser window that's not visible and there are too many open to know where to click (which does happen, but rarely) I'll just use the jump to window function of rofi in fzf mode where I type in a part of its name and press enter. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. Since i3 doesn't have an included "go back to previous window", I had to hack this on my own [0]. This could also be implemented by using window marks, though I've never tried that.
> Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
Ah right, I remember reading that and noting that they always seem to playing catch up with KDE Plasma’s features. I doubt I have this update yes, but someday my work’s IT will thrust it upon us.
This is one of the thing that (surprisingly, to me) I miss on other operating systems. Yakuake manages to be featureful, stay out of my way, and integrate perfectly with the default terminal emulator for my environment all at the same time.
I'd come to take the availability of such a dropdown terminal for granted on Linux, but it turns out that most dropdown terminal solutions are quite clunky, slow, or not well integrated compared to good ol' Yakuake.
If there are any Yakuake or Konsole contributors browsing the thread: thank you for your work!
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm mostly a Windows user and terminal Linux user, but at odd times I find myself on Linux desktop. I'm currently fine with Windows 10, but since I have my task bar at the top of my screen - for accessibility reasons - I don't want to update to Windows 11. So IMHO my Windows future is unsure, that's why I'm looking at alternatives whenever I can.
I was just very curious and was hoping that someone like yourself responded to my question. You have peeked my interest and I will try and play with KDE in the near future. Thanks!
I've always had a soft spot for KDE but haven't actually used it much in the last decade because I kept running into show-stopping bugs.
But this week I decided to try out the latest KDE plasma release on Debian testing and it's all going quite well so far. I love having the ability to configure things how _I_ want them to be, while adhering to a more traditional desktop experience.
The easiest way to try out the latest KDE release is to download Neon (https://neon.kde.org), flash it to a thumb drive, and boot it up.
If you like MacOS, you might be presently surprised with the direction KDE has been heading over the past few years. Many apps support a global menu (eg. Mac-like menu on arbitrary panels/docks), and the trackpad support with Wayland is almost 1:1 with MacOS (only missing Force Touch). I'm very happy with how things have been headed recently, and have been using it ever since GNOME 40 dropped.
I love the look and feel of macOS and other Apple things, mostly because they just work and seem polished. Also since Apple moved to ARM, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to start something like an Hackintosh. That's why, when looking at some screenshots, KDE has really peaked my interest. It looks like the team has gone in the same direction.
On AMD/Intel hardware, you can expect near-Apple levels of stability and polish on Wayland. Nvidia hardware is still getting brought up, but I'd totally recommend checking it out if you're interested.
KDE isn't perfect but it's nice. GNOME is like some project that wanted to be like the Mac but nobody ever used it, they just saw pictures of it and they worked off that.
Modern KDE is closer to the experience and usability of GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is. (And that’s a good thing.) If you prefer a traditional desktop with some configurability over iOS, it’s worth a try.
They're different beasts. In fact, they're different enough that they have their own niches. Gnome is the boring, serious, stop-fiddling-and-get-things-done UI. KDE is the quirky uncle that lets you play with his porcelain figures.
These days I prefer KDE, and I accept quirky behavior like losing a widget panel from external monitor 1 if you unplug external monitor 2, because I know it will come back after reboot/relogin. In exchange for that, I get different wallpapers for each monitor, custom/extra panels, several alternatives for application menus and taskbars, lots of widgets, and a few small QOL perks I can't remember right now.
If KDE becomes too quirky, I can always go back to Gnome, but right now I'm happy with KDE.
Gnome as DE is extremely poor in a "non-windows management" software. Native file manager has no two panels mode, no tabs, thumbnails are too small to be useful. Pdf reader is nothing in comparison with Okular. Terminal... terminal is outdated in comparison with Konsole (no ligatures, for example).
The all good points about Gnome are in windows management. KDE's WM is very flexible, of course, you can tune it as you want, or not tune it at all, but Gnome has some hard explained _cuteness_ of windows management. But no more. Because we need more applications than a cute windows management :(
Last time I tried to Gnome I had to copy a file to `/opt/`, but that location wasn't listed in it's file manager, Nautilus. Clicking on the current location didn't work and I couldn't find an address bar anywhere. On a whim I've tried to CTRL+L, which worked, to my surprise. Something like that makes your product feel extremely unpolished to a novice user. While it was probably made that way with a reason.
I don't know if the submitter here is the author of this, but if the author is here, I have just two words for them:
THANK YOU!
Over the past few years, UI design has been trending towards removing ALL visual cues of how to interact with software and programs. It's intensely weird that we are actually making computers HARDER to use, not easier. Need some examples? Okay!
* Menus containing frequently-used program functions are hidden away behind abstract, arbitrary icons.
* There is no separation between parts of a UI that do different things. It's all "flat."
* Buttons that perform actions are just text now, and usually look like all other text on the screen.
* Icons are now all monochrome, except for branding purposes.
* Scrollbars, when they even still exist, are thin lines that only appear while you scroll, making them effectively useless for grabbing with the mouse to quickly navigate through a document.
* On Windows and GNOME, titlebars are effectively no longer a thing anymore. Each program implements their own, leading to an inconsistent look and behavior between applications. The only explanation that I can come up with is that most developers these days either use tiling window managers or just fullscreen every application.
Lack of window borders is another item on this list. My monitor is quite often filled with overlapping windows and lack of border means it's often hard to tell at a glance where one window ends and the other begins. Shadows can help sometimes but aren't as useful for "dark mode" or windows with dark backgrounds.
KDE is better than most other desktop environments about retaining useful desktop functionality while all the others are trying their damndest to throw it all away. I hope this makes it into a release!
>It's already usable today, so I don't see why you'd need to wait for a decade.
No, it's not usable for me.
I still can't share my screen in Slack or Teams making calls with Windows and Mac colleagues an embarrassing mess.
Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04 has Wayland disabled by default (why though, if Wayland is so usable?)
No scroll acceleration settings.
Currently, Wayland is one step forward, one step back. Especially that many highly used apps still haven't made the switch and that Wayland has not yet feature parity to what X11 offered.
>I still can't share my screen in Slack or Teams making calls with Windows and Mac colleagues an embarrassing mess.
Works fine in at least all wlroots compositors (via xdpw) and in GNOME (via xdpgtk). The Electron versions presumably don't use PW so they'll only share Xwayland windows. The browser versions will be able to share everything through xdp since all major browsers support PW.
>Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04 has Wayland disabled by default (why though, if Wayland is so usable?)
Dunno, works for me. Firefox isn't exactly the poster-child of intelligent decisions.
>No scroll acceleration settings.
Depends on the compositor. sway supports them. Not a Wayland problem.
>Currently, Wayland is one step forward, one step back.
Nope.
>Especially that many highly used apps still haven't made the switch
Yes they have. For starters, every GTK3+ and Qt 5+ program will already use Wayland if it exists.
>Wayland has not yet feature parity to what X11 offered.
> >I still can't share my screen in Slack or Teams making calls with Windows and Mac colleagues an embarrassing mess.
> Works fine in at least all wlroots compositors (via xdpw) and in GNOME (via xdpgtk). The Electron versions presumably don't use PW so they'll only share Xwayland windows. The browser versions will be able to share everything through xdp since all major browsers support PW.
> >Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04 has Wayland disabled by default (why though, if Wayland is so usable?)
> Dunno, works for me. Firefox isn't exactly the poster-child of intelligent decisions.
> >No scroll acceleration settings.
> Depends on the compositor. sway supports them. Not a Wayland problem.
> >Currently, Wayland is one step forward, one step back.
> Nope.
> >Especially that many highly used apps still haven't made the switch
> Yes they have. For starters, every GTK3+ and Qt 5+ program will already use Wayland if it exists.
> >Wayland has not yet feature parity to what X11 offered.
> Yes it has.
Wayland still doesnt support color managment and tearing updates (the latter might not happen because wayland people dont understand the usecase)
I actually wrote a Windows app to do something like this. It's sitting in my unfinished folder because I ran into too many issues to fix for a hobby project. The rectangle data for Windows apps seems to vary widely. I needed a bunch of different formulas to correct for the rectangles I was getting back from the WinAPI calls.
One of my features was a different border color for each app. I tried various color rules, such as multiple copies of VSCode would each get their own shade of blue, or cycle through colors of the rainbow.