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> KDE with the default breeze theme

Well, I don't like Windows classic style very much, but I use KDE with Breeze and it is the widget style I prefer amoung anything I have seen, with macOS just a bit under but I haven't used it very much. It is a big contrast with Oxygen in KDE 4, which is the widespread theme I liked the less.

Breeze is just clean, simple, elegant. It bears its name well.

I also tend to use Breeze in Gnome 3 when I periodically try it (Gnome is so beautiful with Breeze!), though Adwaita got a lot better recently, to the point it went from "I dislike this theme, why is it the default?" to "Pretty cool theme!". I might stick with it next time I try Gnome. Same for Tango, though I still prefer Breeze, maybe out of habit.

> recently used a recent copy of photoshop and premiere and the black UI and the widgets being different from the UI of the whole system really bugged me off

Same thing for Blender and Open Shot. Isn't it to help focus on the content?

I'd strongly agree on the point that a dark theme in a media editor (or similar context) draws focus to the project and away from the controls.

But I also believe that the UI experience should lean towards uniformity. Still, if you're an expert user of specific software perhaps your brain already manages the context switch. At least, though, maybe the WM could become context aware like Android's dark mode.

That's exactly what I think dark mode should be; helping you focus on the content.

Unfortunately too many people misunderstood this and started making apps where everything is dark. A word processor shouldn't have its page white-on-black. A news reader shouldn't display its contents on white-on-black.

> A word processor shouldn't have its page white-on-black. A news reader shouldn't display its contents on white-on-black.

I’m young with (I believe) very good eyesight and I physically can’t handle white-on-black styles, especially with text. And I mean #000 and 240-255. It literally burns and blurs my eyes. A dark gray paired with a light gray or off-white is much more pleasing and readable to me.

I won’t discount those styles for text though, because at night it can help my eyes not melt out of my skull compared to black-on-white pages. And I have at times used Google Drive dark CSS themes while doc writing for extended late night sessions, and enabled some for GitLab and GitHub.

As someone who has spent considerable time in CG DCCs (Digital Content Creation), I can confirm that dark themes are a godsend and help immensely (for me) on focusing on the content. It also has the added benefit of not “tainting” your color perception when working with imagery. Blackmagic Design was under fire for a bit because they revamped themes in Resolve and Fusion from a neutral gray to a subtly hinted blue-gray and it threw off color artists as it influenced their grading.

From my experience most people who have trouble with black-on-white text simply have their monitor set too bright. White shouldn't be eye-searing, it should be roughly as bright as a piece of paper under the lighting on your desk.

> windows XP classic style (not the blue, silver or green one)

So, like, the Windows 95 / Windows 98 / Windows NT / etc type of look, or?

It’s been so many years since I used Windows XP, so I no longer quite remember what it was like exactly. I do have fond memories of using it though :)

Yes, the "Classic" style in XP looks somewhat closer to Windows 98, or the original Windows NT builds. Weirdly, there's a Wikipedia article which covers the available themes, and it has good examples of each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles

Personally I liked most of these visual themes, but that may be biased by how snappy and responsive the UI felt compared to later entries, especially Vista, which introduces the translucent windows thing that Microsoft has kept moving forward. I know my GPU can do those effects in its sleep now, but when it first launched it was painfully slow on normal-people computers lacking the requisite graphics acceleration. That combined with Vista's initially poor Superfetch implementation (constant hard drive activity and weird pauses) and the whole modern themes thing just left a bad taste.

Ignoring Windows specific things, I'm personally fond of a UI that is easy to scan, tells me what I need to know, and gets out of the way. Electron apps that do this well don't bother me, I don't need the whole OS to agree, but I do wish that application designers choosing to ignore the system themes would at least implement a dark theme.

"especially Vista, which introduces the translucent windows thing that Microsoft has kept moving forward."

Alpha Blending was present since Windows 2000. You had to enable it but it was there.

But aero wasn't; I think "the translucent windows thing" is aero.

Translucent Windows were a thing in Windows 2000. You enabled Alpha Blending in GUI. It was also present in Windows ME.

> So, like, the Windows 95 / Windows 98 / Windows NT / etc type of look, or?

Yes, that style.

Poor Windows 2000 always getting left out ;)

Not to me, nt5 is my favorite microsoft product (excel close 2nd)... I ran the beta (offered in a pc magazine) for years without the slightest crash and only upgraded to xp just to avoid slipstreaming drivers in the install image.

The "redmond classic" style would look a bit unnatural today given how common high-DPI displays have become; you'd have to thicken the pixel-perfect visual elements quite a bit to even make it look acceptable in such conditions.

In general, I find that any simple theme with clearly-visible 3D styling is good enough, and Adwaita (though maybe a bit too flashy for my preference) gives us that - with the extra bonus of being touchscreen-ready by default, which is also quite a big deal these days.

Or just ignore the pixel density. Personally I quite like the way apps like GVim looked on high DPI displays before they were “fixed.”

Incidentally the lesser-known Fox Toolkit is hard-coded to use this look. The toolkit sees roughly zero adoption these days, but it's awfully fast on antique machines.

http://fox-toolkit.org/screenshots.html

You know, dark modes probably started in advanced digital imagery packages (most cinema grade movie compositors were like that). I get that Adobe suite came from a mac-like culture, and I would probably feel a bit like you about the change, but I'd understand the "value" for image edition.

Not trying to contradict you, just adding a tiny bit of historical trivia.

I think I dislike the current UI because I am so used to the other style (the unstyled windows one from the pre-CS 5 era, never really used a mac). Dark mode never bothered me in Lightwave or Avid.

What bothers me is the reinventing of common widgets but I suppose there must be some very valid reasons for that.

Dark themes have been around since at least the windows 3.0 days. I worked for a company making a "mobile" client in that time-frame that ran on laptops of the era. We had a button in our application that fliped the global windows theme between a high contract day look, and a dark night theme. IIRC both were default windows themes at the time.

And frankly back then I don't remember any applications not actually following the windows theming. It was only later in the late 1990's that I started to notice a lot of applications failing to follow the UI theme settings. Initially that was one of the big problems with java applications, they didn't look like windows apps, and they didn't follow the color settings.

I don't think you need to worry about being judged too much for that on HN; I (and a lot of people here) tend to live in the terminal with tmux and Vim.

I'm a big fan of keystrokes, and terminals are simple, high-contrast, play nicely with high-dpi screens, and tend to use lower resources; I know that plenty of people here like things like IntelliJ and Visual Studio, and I certainly don't mean to knock those people if that's what makes them most productive, but I think I'll always like the simple "get out of my way" interfaces.

> an 8088 Windows 3.1

Windows 3.1 removed support for real mode CPUs, and to run it you had to have 80286 or better computer

There was supposed to be a comma between the two words.

Wow, nice to hear that you are using KDE, :)

As a kid and a teenager I used to tinker a lot with the default UI (installing themes, icons, etc. Stuff like Litestep on windows, every linux window manager under the sun) but now I need an experience that works out of the box.

So far KDE is the closest to my needs and wants (very fast rendering, very fast dolphin, consistent UI, fast window switching and managing, the whole thing feels very snappy[0]). I just configured some shortcuts to manage windows approximately like I do in awesome-wm (tiling manager).

There are still thing that I don't like in it (configuration manager is overloaded with options and I don't always find my way through it).

I wish someone would do a regolith for KDE :).

[0] Truth be told I like the simplicity of the Gnome WM but it's way too sluggish.

> I wish someone would do a regolith for KDE :).

Can you elaborate?

Regolith is an ubuntu based distro using i3 as a window manager and Gnome for underlying stuff (network, sound, mount daemons, etc.).

https://regolith-linux.org/

- Provides GNOME's system management features with i3's productive workflow.

- Enables new users a fast and fun way to try out a tiling window manager.

I should be able to use awesome (my favourite and only tiling manager) on top of KDE but I haven't yet found the time to do it (and I really need my machine to work, can't afford to spend an evening to know how to add a wifi widget or figure out why closing the lid doesn't put the laptop to sleep (or the opposite)).

It shouldn't take more than an hour, of course you just need to change an entry. But I fear I have heard complaints of i3 not liking the plasma panels but that was under different compositors, should work fine under compton, :D

P.S: You can use i3 as your window manager in Plasma desktop without too much hassle. You just have to tell it to allow i3 to manage windows instead of KWin

I've done this before to use i3 in KDE (although have since moved to just running i3 on its own).

You can set the KDEWM environment variable to replace kwin with something else; described here https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage...

I would guess that it will take some configuration of awesome similar to how they configure i3, to make plasma behave properly under a tiling wm, though. Maybe you could base that off the i3 config they provide in that tutorial.

I don't like the classic style. I think I liked Windows 7 the most. Actually I like Windows 10 style too, except for the Metro (Modern?) widgets. I don't like these, too flat for my taste.

What I don't understand is why dark UIs are so popular. I find most of them to be lacking contrast. The only dark UI app I use is VSCode, because I got used to it being dark, but every time I open it I feel depressed because of how dark it is.

I like dark UIs because they are not hurting my eyes like white or bright ones. Especially when it's dark in the room and the screen just screams at me with all the super bright light.