Mondrian – KDE Plasma desktop inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings | Hacker News Reader

Mondrian – KDE Plasma desktop inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings

store.kde.org

143 pointsleonry46 comments

Nitpicking, but why is font rendering still broken on modern Linux? In the screenshot, there are clearly issues with letter-spacing in the words "Salir" and "Equipo" in the lower left corner.

I see it too. I daily drive KDE with the Inter font set globally and everything looks great for me. It will depend on certain UI widgets and the fonts you choose. Some of the open source stuff is not perfect because it was created by someone merely scratching an itch for fun and not a professional designer.

Thanks I'll try that font set. KDE has been overly converting stuff to ligatures in the last update 5.27.8 I think.

So "fi" now becomes a character with the two letters together and it's really annoying.

Its amazing how so many of us have converged on KDE. It feels like a real google-like moment where all the tech people I knew started using google for a year or two before everyone else caught on.

If I could buy stock in KDE Id have 1/2 my net worth in it, KDE to the moon :)

I don't have that impression. But maybe I'm just in my Sway-bubble :)

For me Cinnamon just works. Used KDE for some time but I the resource usage was too high.

To be fair, those screenshots are three years old so there may have been rendering improvements since then. Quality can often depend on the selected font as well. A comment in another post from yesterday stated that Noto Sans is currently used by default in KDE and while it might have some issues, the breadth of the font solves other problems.

The most obvious answer is that it isn't broken on developers systems or indeed on most systems.

I kind of expected it to include tiled window management :)

Hehe, same here :)

I mean we can have perfectly rendered floating cubes with wobbly windows that get a Viking funeral when you close them. Surely, a Mondrian TWM is a possibility!

Use while as kwin replacement, it is so good and written in python, works well with plasma

Do you have a link?

Qtile, it was auto corrected to while, Qtile.org

kwin does support tiled window management. I’ve never tried it personally so cannot vouch for how good it is but if you’re a tiling WM fan, it’s probably safe to assume that you’d favour something that doesn’t include a full blown desktop environment.

Turn on Krohnkite under Kwin scripts and you have exactly that.

How, on Earth, can this still have icons with more readable meaning than Google app icons that were refactored a few years ago...

Because linux is made by engineers, google products are made by product managers.

All these years and different flavours, and there's still something 'not right' with all Linux UIs.

Font rendering is one issue, but there's something else that I can't quite put my finger on.

It's entirely subjective. For me, most Linux UIs have a charm that I'm not seeing in Apple or Microsoft UIs. Those are often "too clean" or "too polished" for me. I'm not saying that font issues shouldn't be fixed, but it doesn't bother me that much. For what's it worth, I also really liked the aesthetic of macOS pre-X.

There are lots of things. One that comes immediately to mind is the fact that if you apply any Linux desktop “themes” you are actually pretty likely to end up in situations where certain software is hard to use because they have components or cursors or some weird stuff that was never tested with a variety of desktop themes, so parts of them end up with black text on a #020202 background or buttons drawn with a hardcoded background color or whatever. Since there is no actual cohesive theming environment, the splintered miasma of theming environments means there is effectively none that’s useful. This is, unfortunately, the nature of guerilla software development, and the reason why, as awesome as it is, it’s never taking over the desktop.

Did you ever try windows? There are loads of weird ui things going on there. Mac also has it's quircks but fonts usually do look decent.

>Did you ever try windows? There are loads of weird ui things going on there

I mean, "Windows does it badly too" isn't exactly a very pro-Linux point.

Linux is perfectly capable of good font rendering. A lot of people dont care/cant tell and show off screenshots in which they are intending to show off their theme/backgrounds/colors and are only unintentionally show off the fact that their choice of fonts and settings they tweaked for no reason is subjectively or objectively worse than default.

Padding and spacing is 90% of the issue for me. KDE is worse than Gnome in this regard.

I kind of agree.

For me, in Ubuntu LTS, Gnome looks nice and has good font rendering. File drag and drop doesn't work, I can't use their default file manager like I use Windows Explorer.

So, not always the same thing, but always something.

Now do cubism.[0]

I'd ask for something in the vein of Escher's Relativity[1] but I'm not entirely sure how useful the result would be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism

[1] https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.54256.html

KDE is now my daily desktop driver. It's great now that it also has basic window tiling support built in.

I do miss the ability to customise the hell out of KDE (I'm on Windows 11 + Linux headless for work), but at the same time, I would often spend times making the UI look how I wanted only for some app to simply ignore the GTK+/Plasma/QT theme and look well out of place.

Just not worth the time anymore.

Does it include a Piet interpreter so that you can actually _run your desktop_?

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

Does this work well with the latest Plasma desktop? It was last updated three years ago and there is a comment from two years ago asking "With all the visual changes in the Plasma iterations will you update the theme a bit to incorporate those changes?"

At the very least, I'm thinking that general improvements in Plasma and KDE in general would improve some of the font rendering, consistency, and other nitpicks some other comments here are bringing up.

I think Mondrian is cliche at this point. Building developers think it’s culture and it’s easy to pull off since everything is squares so I see them theming apartment building and schools like this. It’s like the Cool S of architecture to me. I understand why someone made this theme, because it’s easy and seems cultured, and if you’re genuinely into Mondrian’s art, then go for it, but I always cringe a little when I see it now.

It's a cool minimalist aesthetic, regardless of how "cultured" it is or isn't. To say that it's cliche is really just to say that it's popular and recognisable, which seems to me like a good reason to incorporate it into a desktop theme.

I appreciate the Mondrian aesthetic.

Has anyone noticed that the High Contrast theme for Google Chrome uses the same colors?

GMK Mondrian is my most-used keycaps set for my custom keyboards: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86616.0

There is also a Mondriaan tools for partitioning and reordering sparse matrices.

I wonder if he knew his style would be so soothing to technologists.

The theme should sneak a couple flowers in, though.

Could we add (2020) to the title?

> Last changelog: 1.0, 3 years ago

Oh please let there be something similar for macos!

Hmm not a fan. But great that KDE is so themeable.

I'm more of a fan of eliverlara's colourful desktops, though mine is more vanilla.

That’s really fun. I’m not sure if form and function meet, though. It’s almost like desktop dazzle camo.

The painter is named "Mondriaan", with two a's.

No. It's one A. He changed it.

I never heard that story before, but you are indeed correct. I stand corrected.

Flashbacks to the .NET 1.x/2.x default winform icons

would a dark theme ruin this look?

It comes with a dark theme. https://www.pling.com/p/1404056/

huh, thats... actually not terrible.

A dark theme ruins any look.

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