When did I give up playing with “beautifying” the Linux desktop and become a believer in “the default already looks good”? …When I discovered my own taste was truly awful.
Is Desktop Beautification Really Necessary?#
In 2003, DrMaster Culture published a book by Mao Ching-chen called KDE Desktop Beautification Campaign. Looking at the cover, it was probably still the KDE 3.0 era. These predecessors were truly impressive! They were among the few willing to publish desktop-oriented rather than server-oriented Linux books on the market. From today’s perspective, KDE 3 back then was truly ugly as hell, just like GNOME 2, continuing all the way to KDE 4. The Oxygen theme was still ugly enough (compared with Windows 7 of the same era). Only after KDE 5 introduced the Breeze theme did it gradually develop taste and look like a modern operating system interface. Interestingly, KDE 4 is said to have had so many bugs that the Linux community regards it as a dark history, but KDE 3 was forked by someone and has been maintained until now, namely Trinity Desktop.
This is somewhat similar to the Mate desktop recreating GNOME 2, letting people witness what a living fossil is. When searching for Linux desktops, I often see the word beautification. Honestly, I am quite sick of it. How I want to use my Linux system is none of your business! Yes, yes, but I no longer have much energy to play with beautification. When did I give up playing with “beautifying” the Linux desktop and become a believer in “the default already looks good”? …When I discovered my own taste was truly awful and that I could never create what other people share on r/unixporn. Copying exactly, so what? Once I start blindly modifying things myself, it turns into a stitched-together monster.
Some people are born without aesthetic sense and need artistic training before they know what beauty is. Otherwise, they install piles of miscellaneous things and mess around, producing something like WordArt + elder memes, or else mindlessly copying Mac, purely wasting time. It is not that I oppose customization, but doing too much customized design seems to be nothing more than self-pleasure.
Maybe I Can Hand-Carve a Desktop#
Compared with ordinary desktop environments, tiling window managers easily stir up people’s geek spirit, because everything can be customized.
Please google before asking questions. Bodhi originally has no tree; where can brown dust arise? (This Korean big-boob fanservice game’s undressing mechanics are quite elaborate, even more exaggerated than Epic Seven.)
The longer you use Linux, the more you gain the realization that all methods return to one. In the end, you know there is fundamentally no difference among distributions. Everyone uses the Linux kernel; it is just that the upper-level appearances differ.
Eh, but this does not mean everyone can accept the resolve to debug things themselves. Even though the differences among distributions are theoretically not as large as the differences with other operating systems, unreproducible bugs still often occur = = So I do not recommend beginners use too niche a distribution just to be unconventional. Start with something more people use first. Enter the world before transcending it.
Unless you consider yourself a programming genius who can realize the essence of operating systems without practical experience and then say, I want to handwrite a new system that shocks the world. If you leave GNOME and KDE and use other tiling window managers, such as Hyprland, you need to set GTK and QT environment variables. Understanding the standards behind XDG lets you experience this even more. Then when you actually implement it, you discover it is very troublesome, because in today’s Wayland era, a desktop is no longer as simple as starting it with one startx command.
Using a tiling window manager makes you discover that those operations you took for granted in mainstream desktop environments are actually the accumulated effort of many developers behind the scenes. They also require community consensus and standards to form today’s free software world, and more often require compromise, finding consensus that everyone can barely accept.
Although Linux seems fragmented at first glance, with inconsistent standards among distributions, there are actually still rules. This is why you must RTFM!!! A good system must have good documentation. RedHat has beautiful documentation, Debian has dedicated manuals, Arch Linux has a detailed Wiki, and on top of that many people ask questions on stackoverflow. If you do not read any of these and come act like a spoon-fed help vampire, what are you if not asking to be scolded?
According to the widely misrepresented Dunning-Kruger effect chart online:
達克效應（DK Effect）的美麗錯誤 — — 對無知的無法認知：愚昧之巔、絕望之谷 by Coach Chiao
Maybe I am still at the peak of ignorance right now, thinking I am impressive because I know a few Linux commands. But there is still much to learn behind the scenes, and after falling into the valley of despair /dev/null, I still have to keep moving forward through willpower.
Conclusion#
Although the DIY process is interesting and teaches many low-level principles, in the end I still need the computer to work, not to “play with the computer” all day. This is why I have gradually become less interested in tiling managers such as i3wm and Hyprland. They are not ready to use out of the box like DEs and require spending time configuring piles of things. I will talk about it when I have time.
By comparison, GNOME’s Adwaita theme and KDE Plasma’s Breeze theme have matured after years of development. Their default aesthetics are already great and no longer look like things programmers who do not understand UI/UX randomly assembled. There is simply no need for excessive beautification! As for XFCE, this living fossil, its interface looks like CDE from 20 years ago. If forced to use this desktop, perhaps one still needs some eye-candy GTK themes to make it look easier on the eyes.
Let us still focus on productivity. The experience of macOS and Windows tells us that once we have a not-bad GUI, even people who are not programming experts can use computers well and complete work efficiently.
