I honestly keep forgetting that the underscores are for some reason equivalent to asterisks, I always think they’re instead underline tbh. (Which they make perfect sense for).
The issue I see with % is especially in ranges. 50%-60%, “between 30% and 40%”, etc. (same goes for $ potentially.)
In any event, I find it really interesting that someone would be suggesting Markdown should be using different symbols.
Sometimes I wounder how all the bad designs in the world do even exist with all the UI-/UX-designers that studied this stuff and get hired by multi-billion companies. Because they understand what is modern and good design, but decide to create the opposite? I don’t think so.
If I look about game design, there are a lot of professional designers, but why was gaming more fun in the 90s and early 00s when there where no (much) professional ones? Games back these days where not perfect for sure, but they where designed with a goal in mind other than just being shiny. Just one example: today a game is not allowed to be super hard on super hard difficulty setting, because the average user cannot win this and so they would complain about → ignoring that “hard.core” (the word is not allowed to type??) players complain about too easy games these days.
And the whole discussion here reminds me similar. Everything should have no edge that nobody could complain about - which would make many people complain about. KDE is trying to accept the fight that people come here to argue against all kind of edges, because these enable the ability to make it the perfect system for a wider range of people. Otherwise KDE would not be the highly preferred design for many people these days.
I know there are some points that can or even should be improved, but not the overall modernity of design (which you still haven’t explained in the nearly 300 written posts of that thread).
Valid argument, but procentages are used in very specific use cases. It is only written behind an alphanumeric. That can be used to make exceptions as alphanumeric/space+%+space/comma/math-sign/... is just not used for Markdown, if there is no Markdown start point which requires another sign behind the %, which is no space/comma/math-sign/.... And even in things like %it took me 5% more time%, which conflicts, it could have another Markdown with alphanumeric+space+%+space/comma/math-sign/... makes Markdown removing the space in between and printing %, while not using it for formation. Backslash is still an option for the super uncommon edge-cases or as alternative, if people prefer it.
These things do not work with sign that are not so specialized as *, but work pretty well for those who are as @ or § and so on (while § is not part of US-keyboard, if I see it correctly).
It’s not hard at all hard to dispute the claim that GNOME has “better design”… because ‘better design’ depends entirely on what you value in a desktop environment - so it’s simply your opinion that GNOME has better design.
They have very different design goals, and having used a couple of desktops I found that KDE was designed more to fit me like a glove (not just talking about defaults, but also about the interior design)… Whilst GNOME is designed to be Minimalist and simple (so much so that nobody uses it without also installing Tweaks; so much missing).
KDE focusses on flexibility; and I can flex it into minimalism where I choose.
Your comment about floating panels is key here. Floating panels do not exist because they are part of a grand singular design, they’re simply there because they serve a niche use case for people who like that - and because KDE is flexible and can accomodate. Mine doesn’t float, it sits bottom left because I like my menu to pop up at the left edge (top or bottom) because that’s the part of the page I start my reading and writing.
It’s nothing to do with Windows, but Microsoft have some convergent ideas because they make sense.
And a friendly good morning to you too 
I haven’t studied design but I’d be interested in understanding more about it as a scientific discipline. Particularly, what is the methodology for evaluating what is “good” design, and ensuring that it actually makes people’s lives better?
We can’t just assume that “modern” = “good” by definition. An example that makes this obvious is clothing design. We can look at the clothes of today, those of 10 years ago, those of 20 years ago and so on, but we wouldn’t want to say that progression in time equals progression in quality, i.e. that 2025 clothes are objectively better than 2015 clothes, which are objectively better than 2005 clothes. Because popularity over time is obviously primarily driven by other factors - economics, the sociology of fashion and so on.
I fear that exactly zero people have had their minds changed by this thread - and having more objective evaluation criteria is the thing that might be able to generate more consensus around design changes.
I like it.
As opposed to abuse and overuse of empty space that is so painfully abundant in “modern UIs” these days?
LOL, nope. I disagree with your personal opinion. If you like that better then use it, but it’s not “better” in any way. My personal opinion is that GNOME is awful with its misguided minimalism, overuse of empty space and pointless hiding of common UI elements. Factually GNOME violates almost all UI design rules known to the humanity. I feel comfy in Plasma, it fits me as it is, it’s flexible, gives me tons of options, more than Windows while GNOME causes me great discomfort, I can’t stand that interface.
Use what suits you. GNOME and KDE serve different crowds, stick to what you like.
Exactly. “Modern” simply implies different and trendy and that is rarely “good”.
This is literally a copy/paste of the first post in the thread? Is this an LLM bot posting?
Or maybe the whole thing is a piece of performance art showing how Linux forum discussions go in circles, in which case it has been pretty good
Where is it chaotic???
Examples please. I can understand, that people don’t like the optics. But Chaotic means there are major design flaws, like the menu is sometimes on the left sometimes on the right. Handles are not always located at the same place. Sometimes there is a frame sometimes not.
I can’t see any major design flaw on Plasma. All in all it fits together quite well.
it’s microsofts ai, here to instigate a from scratch rewrite…in typescript…
Yeah, I think it’s clear there’s no value to be harvested as long as we’re talking about generalities; we’ll be going in circles forever. Time to let this thread end peacefully.
Anyone wanting to discuss design should feel free to do so in a new thread that focuses on actionable specifics.