The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.
At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)
Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?
Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
>The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
That's the thing that always made me feel KDE is ugly. It was never about the themes, the colors (as in palette choice), or the icons. It's that. Everything feels chaotically misaligned in ways I don't see in other software. The fonts don't look nice. Text never has the "right" alignment, or spacing between lines. Elements don't have enough different classes of color attributes (look at a screenshot of Dolphin and how the toolbar and sidebar have the same exact shade of background color and no transition between the two UI elements, not even a separator bar ala _________. Thunar doesn't do this, Gnome Files doesn't do this, Windows Explorer doesn't do this) You can't "fix it" just by installing an alternative theme.
It may be a "people willing to volunteer for KDE" problem but it's not a general open source volunteer problem. The average GTK program these days is almost perfect in that regard. Gnome has a very polished look and so do most apps written by its users/developers.
> The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin.
I might be wrong, but I think in this case it has the same coded margin, but ends up as a different visual margin because the usb stick image is probably square shaped png or svg with a transparent area, and this makes it look like it's not aligned. So, it might be case where you need the dev to have an eye for it and intentionally manipulate the paddings to get visually satisfying spacing. Usually developers just set the same value in code and think it's good enough.
Yes, adjusting margins for every icon's amount of padding doesn't seem to be the right solution. I guess the solution would be to have icons without any padding, and where they should be shown centered inside a standard-sized box, that can be done in the layout code.
It's going to take quite a bit of work to switch everything over.
Honestly the second screenshot with Sticky Notes is definitely ugly, but that one? It looks fine for me. The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me. I would rather complain about the settings icon which feels bigger than the close button, if anything.
> The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me.
Well, it is visible, and the professional solution for this would be to have icon design guidelines and enforce them, such that the actual visible/non-transparent icon contents are always in the same "box", and then include the padding in the icon itself in the calculation for element spacing. The fact that one component is text and the another one is an icon is not a valid excuse, these things can be planned in advance, especially for a desktop environment that has been around for close to 29 years now.
Oh, and now that I've looked the image more, even more alignment/padding issues:
- the main text isn't vertically aligned in the (I assume) fixed size vertical window
- similar story for the KDE icon and the KDED text in the titlebar
- the settings icon is bigger/the "content box" of the icon is bigger than that of the windows close (x) icon, such as that the visible contents are not padded the same amount, vertically
As I said, I guess the solution at this point is to not care and just accept that KDE is KDE, that weird but kind uncle at every family Christmas party.
KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE.
They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born.
Look at this image:
https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423...
The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.
At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)
Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?
Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.