Agreed. Years and years of objectively bad UX and UI with the likes of GNOME, KDE, etc. I cannot understand why the organisations creating Linux distros have never at any point thought to hire a designer or two so their desktop apps don’t look like someone just slapped them onto a window with either far too much padding (even more than HN loves to complain about the web) or not enough so usability is harder.
GNOME is infamous for blindly copying things that appeal to them without underlying the originator's rationale and, in the process, making a mess of things... they just usually lean more toward copying Apple.
(eg. Changing their save icon to an "arrow pointing at hard drive" one that's harder to visually distinguish from their download icon because they don't understand that you shouldn't privilege affordances (which only give benefit while learning a new system of symbols) over consistency with existing established iconography like the "save icon" (diskette) used by every other system.)
...or GNOME 3 ruining the "Cancel/OK in the bottom-right corner of the dialog, in that order for LTR languages" they borrowed from Apple with their "action buttons in dialog header bars" idea. (TL;DR: Dialog boxes are laid out to read like paper forms, following the writing order of prose text in the user's native language. Action buttons go in the reading-order-terminal corner for a similar reason to why the signature field on a paper form is at the bottom and why business letters are supposed to end with what you want the reader to do.)
Likewise, for dialogs where they stretch OK and cancel to full width. Now you've required the user to move the cursor much further during normal operation.
