Why is it so hard for anyone outside of Apple to make a visually appealing GUI? It just requires a little bit of taste and sense of aesthetics. I am baffled that this hasn't happened yet. The closest thing so far is probably ElementaryOS.
I'm hoping this UI matures and allows for customization so that I can get it where I want it.
Apple spends billions on design, even inventing many of the core paradigms that have since become foundational. Apple still frustrates me with a lot of their choices, but let's not pretend just anyone can match their design prowess.
That and unless a software engineer has specifically practiced implementing pixel perfect designs from a great designer, then they don’t spot the errors. The design will feel wrong but they don’t know why.
They're also shitty for accessibility. If you're significantly visually impaired but still inclined to rely on your remaining vision, you'll find that (a) macOS doesn't let you jack the fonts up big enough and (b) when you actually do get large enough text just by jacking up the scale of the whole Ui, all kinds of text fields are truncated and some windows some even fit properly on your screen.
Aligning UIs by pixel makes them worse.
> Pixel perfect is a design approach that aims to achieve a precise and consistent look for a design, down to the pixel level.
You can't have, for instance, consistent alignments down to the pixel level, on systems with arbitrary DPI emulation, e.g., when you set DPI manually to something other than 96 in Xorg. This is where the usual caveats for 'fractional scaling' come in (because you have to render at a higher resolution and then scale it down), why such scaling often results in blurry text, why HiDPI displays are required for the normal scaling on macOS, etc. Such changes come in part in pursuit of enabling 'pixel perfect design' on the desktop, and they suck.
Commenters on this site will frequently point out things that are apparently misaligned by a single pixel. What is their complaint, if not that the UI element in question fails to be pixel perfect?
Whether the System Preferences pane must have a fixed size in order to achieve 'pixel perfection' is perhaps debatable. That such inflexibility makes pixel alignment easier is obvious. You think Apple have some other, better reason for System Settings being completely unresizable? What is it?
I say this as someone who used to not see the details, and then worked at a company where it was expected that we implement designs exactly. Ever since then I can’t _not_ see UI design details.
It’s like shopping for a car, once you’re biased towards a specific model you see it everywhere.
I think it requires a combination of things: a good taste, a sense of visual design and programming. The first two is more of art form.
Most of the developers on these projects are really good at programming but its rare to get a good combination mentioned above AND willing to work on open source over multiple years consistently.
Update: Also someone in the decision making hierarchy needs to have a keen sense of design. Example: Steve Jobs learnt calligraphy and even though he did not actually designed it he would certainly veto and pass feedback to the developers.
Some people think this is because it's hard to contribute as designers, but I think it's just that designers are brought up in a proprietary school of thought. It's just like some cultures have recipe-sharing and others have the notion of 'secret recipe'.
To my people there is no 'secret recipe': if you ask, you shall receive. But others hold this notion dear. This cultural divide pervades occupations and makes some incapable of sharing.
Big margins and tons of whitespace is fashionable. Good design doesn't need to be fashionable, but it does need internal consistency. A Mac-style dock with big rounded corners needs some space to breathe. If you don't want to sacrifice that screen space then maybe it's better to go for a more angular design.
1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.)
2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.
I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.
As long as I can use the OS I like and how I like, I don't care about metrics like market share.
But using KDE, Gnome, XFCE or Mate and then popping into the modern Windows' hellscape shows that actually Linux on the Desktop is already here and pretty damned good.