>>110081790
KDE4 was last peak skeuomorphic KDE and after that it goes flat.

Fuck Plasma. That's all I have to say.

>>110081790
Plasma is the only desktop that's truly getting better every release. Not perfect, but better.

>>110081790
3 was the best overall. 4 had a nice look, but was too low contrast. everything after 3 was a severe downgrade in terms of features and/or usability. kde needs to /goback/ but it can't because it is a slave to the qt toolkit.

>>110081790
3 was really fucking good
4 fucked everything up but looked pretty
5 shit started to get fixed and picking up steam
6 was 5 but more polished

>>110081790
The one that comes out in 10-20 years

>>110081925
It was downhill after kde2 but it became obvious after kde4.

>>110082376
Severe brainrot!!! Doctors recommendation: immediate amputation of the brain

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>>110081925
>skeuomorphic
It's making a comeback but you have to drop KDE.

>>110087642
Kind of crazy how modern UI designers can make skeumorphism look just as gay as the flat garbage.

IMO that's why flat stuff became popular to begin with. People gave up and said they wanted less because they were tired of the bad ideas so everything except the bad ideas were removed.

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>>110087642
>you have to drop KDE
Not anymore. KDE brought back the old Oxygen and Air themes from KDE 4.

>>110089163
>>110089174
Gawd why is KDE so fucking ugly

>>110087642
kek that's cool. Which DE is that?

>>110089189
I hate these shitty themes that try and fail to look like other OS. They always get things like the padding between elements or icon sizes wrong, causing something not unlike the uncanny valley effect.

old KDE before the woke showed up. I heard these days they have konqi shoving a dildo up his ass and moaning when the OS starts up

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>>110081790
Anyone know what happened with that GTK fork of KDE? Their logo resembled my favorite moscato.

>>110081790
plasma 5 or 6 is the tits
1 2 3 was shit

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>>110081790
KDE2

>>110089251
Yep. Is it even possible to get it 100%? I'd like to see someone with the autism take it all the way.

>>110082376
Good Morning Saar

>>110089834
This looks comfy.

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>>110089846
This is best I have found:
https://github.com/comdlg32/ice2k

>>110087551 >>110089834
I have always thought KDE2 and other old versions like Windows 95 etc. look super flat and have simple single color flat areas. KDE4 is skeuomorphic and everything is 3D and even shadows feel realistic instead of 2D flat sharp shadows or most of the time, no shadows at all. Even icons are super flat low color 2D stuff.

>>110089197
cuz ur a gnome troon

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>>110089846
Maybe on Trinity since it has an UI paradigm similar to classic Windows and WinXP, but all GTK desktops and modern Plasma do things like the placement of buttons and icons too different from old Windows to look convincing in those retro themes. They are like trannies with wide shoulders and large hands, it's impossible for them to pass.

>>110089163
>>110089174
It doesn't look as polished as the original on KDE 4. Anyone else notice this?

>>110089907
This looks pretty fucking close.

>>110089163
>>110089174
Looks kinda bad 2bh. Also why does dark mode have gradients everywhere but not in the light version? Aqua and aero were the only ones that ever made this aesthetic actually look good and cohesive

>>110091031
>Also why does dark mode have gradients everywhere but not in the light version?
Because they are different themes that represent different materials (metal and glass in the light theme, shiny plastic in the dark theme).

>>110089163 >>110089174
Why did they makle the taskbar float above the lower end? It wastes space.

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>>110089915
Flat is cleaner, less distracting and doesn't eat screen area for those useless 3D effects.

>>110081790
5.27.5
the most stable piece of shit DE that I've daily driven. Never had a hiccup back on my X270 running Debian Trixie for 2 years

>>110095284
It docks to the bottom edge if a window wants to render there. And it looks like absolute garbage, the first thing I disable on a fresh KDE profile.
t. GNOME user

>>110089189
VGH, SOVL

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Trinity Desktop remains a light in the darkness.

>>110089453
Jesús Christ almighty! That is a hideous wine anon. I dont even know the fuck to say to you.

>>110089834
What a beauty. Is there anyway to use this ?

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>>110089226
DEsk
https://github.com/fyzugx/DEsk

>>110081790
6
KDE is at it's best right now.

>>110100842
>just dumped X11 for an incomplete display server, while introducing a bunch of new bugs as usual for feature releases
>it's best right now
Sorry, try again.

>>110100368
>claudeslop

>>110081790
I like the compact title bar in KDE2. It might be inspired by BeOS. Why did they get rid of it?
VitruvianOS brought it back.

>>110081790
KDE 3.5, which looks different from your KDE 3 image

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What KDE was aiming for: CDE

>>110081790
Current one

>>110081790
KDE3.

>>110100942
Name one thing (You) can do in Wayland right now that isn't the consequence of outdated programs relying on hacks and misused behavior of X11 to work.

>>110087642
Nah nah go the fuck back give me the flatshit what the fuck is this garbage?

>>110100237
You can get close enough with Trinity but since it's KDE3 the taskbar looks different

>>110082412
>>110085405
came here to post plasma 6
I use GNOME btw

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>>110104232
>What KDE was aiming for: CDE
Xfce too at the beginning

>>110100942
Kwin is now the best compositor and window manager of them all. Not just Linux, but all. Apple can't do proper font rendering and Windows is garbage with HDR and fractional scaling (same with Gnome and every other Linix DE).
If you have a good HiDPI screen, KDE is the best ecperience you can get.
>b but it has bugs
The only bugs i experience are pipewire getting wrecked when waking from Standby in about 10% of cases... which isn't KDE related... and gamescope needing more resources than it should... again not KDE related.

It's crazy how good KDE is now.
Like when i have a resolution of 2560x1440 with no scaling and change KDE to 3840x2160 with 150% scaling, everything that is on my screen is still the exact same size, but more crisp and higher quality.
Find me anyone else who can do this simple trick. Microsoft, Apple, GNOME, etc. can't.
If your DE can't do that, i consider it broken. Which makes KDE the only DE that isn't broken.

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>>110109021
>font rendering
Why do my fonts render fine under Xorg but under kwin_wayland some of them look like ass?

And how the fuck do I fix THIS
<-----

>>110081790
design wise, 1 and 5 because they have the least rounded corners.
functionality wise, 5 and 6 seemed equally buggy to me. LXQt is less buggy

>>110109021
I switched from kwin_x11 session to kwin_wayland session on 6.7.5 in preparation for the 6.8 "upgrade" and the first thing I got was blasted in the face with monitor brightness followed by Dolphin forgetting its open folders from the previous session. And now when I log out and back in Dolphin restores the windows but not the tabs, so if I open X folders in Y windows and relog I get Y home folders open in Dolphin instead of my tabs - except SOMETIMES I get ONE window with all of its tabs, but none from the lost windows. :^) I've seen some variation of this problem since around 6.1 or 6.2 and it's still here, but now only on wayland for some fucking reason. Saving and restoring a list of directories is apparently a difficult task for KDE devs.

>>110109700
How in the world do you manage to get your font rendering this bad? Give up and start with a fresh profile. Who knows what fontconfig stuff is going on there. No way any distribution (except Debian) would ship this per default.

Apropos Debian, and all their related downstream distros... it is fucking garbage!
Debian (including its Canonical employees like the convicted child rapist) can't stop fucking shit up, and that's not specific to any DE, but affects KDE much more, because Debian trannies kicked out the main maintainer of the KDE packages, for being not openly leftist.
https://www.preining.info/blog/2022/01/future-of-my-packages-in-debian/

In 90% of cases, when i see someone with an issue that i never experienced or heard of before, he is using Debian garbage.
And it keeps getting shilled! "Hurr, it's so stable", while their repo is filled with orphaned packages (without being marked as such) that got compiled from a randomly chosen commit five years ago.

>>110109744
LXQt is a great option when your distro has garbage packages.

>>110109826
>How in the world do you manage to get your font rendering this bad?
Don't know. It's Arch with a few extra fonts installed. I have some user fonts from Windows 10, but moving them out and doing fc-cache -f and restarting apps changes nothing, so that's probably not the issue.
Most things are fine, but sometimes I see ligatures where there shouldn't be, and particularly on PDFs like that screenshot of Okular things do look like ass, and it's somehow worse on wayland.

>Give up and start with a fresh profile.
Same results on a clean new user, I've tried it. I don't know what to do, fontconfig is a nightmare.

On an unrelated(?) note I also just discovered that System Settings doesn't properly synchronize with GTK when setting the default font under wayland. If you select a "Regular" or "Text" font style for the General font, System Settings removes the word and GTK ends up like this:

$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name
'IBM Plex Sans Condensed  10'

There are *two spaces* between the font name and size so you can see there's a missing word. For many fonts this probably isn't an issue, but for some like IBM Plex Sans Condensed it causes GTK to pick the wrong variant, I'm assuming because it sees the "Condensed" as the variant instead of part of the font name so it looks for a "Condensed" variant of "IBM Plex Sans", which doesn't exist, so it uses the default variant of that, which isn't "condensed" at all. Manually setting org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name to "IBM Plex Sans Cond 10" works... until KDE fucks it up again.

And again, this doesn't happen under Xorg. :^)

>>110110236
I assume you already tried changing hinting in the font settings of the system settings... or fontconfig?

>>110110695
It's set to slight, it makes no real difference whatever I pick. Annoying to test too, it doesn't take effect immediately in System Settings without restarting it.

>>110108059
Why did they abandon this??

>>110111585
Because it looks like ass?

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>>110113090
Drivel.

>>110113386
Jesus christ I'm gonna puke.

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>>110113518
Have some more.

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OK Plasma... what the fuck did you do with my desktop? Where are my shortcuts?

>>110081790
6 then 2

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>>110104232
only a contrarian would pretend not to having puked after looking at this shit

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3.5 was peak, plasma fucked up everything

>>110113950
>fuck huge fonts
>1920x1440
Indefensible.

>>110089174
It's still KDE, so it still doesn't look too good... but hey, this is still nice to see, we need more of it.

I put KDE NEON on a macbook air 2013 13 inch. It's using plasma 6, and it looks so good because of the glossy glass of macbook.

Matte and Glossy glass are night and day in comparison. It makes KDE 10x better and make the OS pops out and looks sharper, and crystal clear.

>>110118643
It makes KDE "look" 10x better

>>110113950
God I miss those days. It's so sad watching everything turn to shit. Fuck KDE for not preserving this.

i started linux with kde 3.2 and kde 4.0 pushed me off DEs entirely

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>>110089251
if you can't make it 100%, just do something similar but not exact. if you try to make a clone but it's imperfect, every little flaw stands out, while something just similar won't look so uncanny

like i find serenityos's look to be excellent, for this reason. it has what i like about the classic windows look without trying to be identical, so it avoids looking off

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>>110118649

Haven't tried TDE but a quick search on google, reveals there's a fork version of kde 3.5

Anyone have experience with TDE? https://www.trinitydesktop.org

>>110118680
i've tried it briefly. i don't really use a DE at all nowadays but it's an option, it's still maintained last i checked. limited distro availability however. also it's still based on qt3 (their own fork called tqt3)

Did any mainstream GUI ever succeed in implementing pie menus in a good way?

>>110089163
Doesn't look as good as air on kde4, into the trash it goes

>>110113915
You sound brown

>>110104232
CDE is so fucking shitty but all zoomies are drooling over it because they never fucking used it.

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>>110122494
KDE 6's themes have better contrast in windows with glass effects and in the system tray.

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>>110081790
Obviously it's 6.8 any other answer is pure contrarianism.

>>110081925
KDE 4 was a buggy mess, though I did like the visual style.

>>110122640
i think what's bothering me the most is the system tray icons, they look to flat

>>110122525
I used it on a HPUX machine back in the day. it was great but then again it was also state of teh art in its era. Today, there are significant shortcomings under the hood, but the looks remain great.
CDE is still available but I don't think they have yet plugged the security hole that has been tere since dawn of time.

>>110118680
There's no point if it doesn't have first class support in a major distro.

>>110124216
There's no point because it's essentially abandonware.
It's cool that they've kept it alive all this time but poor support for modern display hardware and no Wayland roadmap nor any roadmap to update the toolkit from their Qt3 fork means it's not very practical.

Maybe throw it on an old laptop or computer but for most people it's useless.