This. And it just kills me how so many things "linux" look so unpolished. Why is it so difficult for projects like this to find and get designers interested?

This comes up a lot… The reason is that no OSS projects want a product manager. They want contributors.

Most projects, if you say “I think the gui should look like X” they’ll reply with “show me the pull request then”. No one wants a manager when they’re already volunteering, and not enough people who have the skills to make things look aesthetic exist and contribute.

Source: look at other comments on this article.

I think the problem is deeper than that: To do a good UI, you need multiple skills: design, development, user testing, etc. It's rare that a single person can do all of that, so you need multiple people to collaborate, which is hard, because of the lack of managers.

So you only get contributions from people who can contribute on their own, which is developers.

I disagree, from my experience designers are generally not interested in OSS projects like developers are. There is one designer for 50 developers.

Probably because for developers, OSS is a badge of honour and can help your CV / find paid jobs - while for designers it's just a dribble nobody cares about.

When designers partecipate, they get to contribute and even impose (sometimes questionable, think kde4) choices.

Maybe it's time for developers to launch projects that make designers look good when participating in OSS projects.

If only there were more people trying to complain less and contribute more. Its not closed source

Windows is also pretty unpolished, I think it is impossible to get people to work on polishing unless you have infinity dollars, like Apple. At least Linux has the excuse that it is a community project -- things that the community decides not to work on are sort of definitionally not annoying enough to be worth working on, or they would.

Windows is polished, but their product people are terrible / constrained by someone higher up to do terrible stuff.

Apple is getting there though, probably because of the same managerial culture.

I disagree. On my laptop running Windows 11, the edges of context menus are horribly pixelated because of the round corners they've added. Maybe there's a setting to fix that but I shouldn't need to look for that after I hit the "update to Windows 11" button.

This is something GNOME does better for God's sake and they can't even show thumbnails in a file picker!

I'd say Windows is selectively polished. Some parts are worked out beautifully while others are hacked together. macOS is a lot better in terms of polish (but a lot worse in many other aspects).

The whole "3 different settings UIs, one from each era of Windows, in Windows 10" thing, despite being a bit over-played, seems a bit unpolished. Maybe the plumbing is really polished, I just don't muck around with that in Windows.

It says it has "silky smooth interfaces" and "polished experience" in the very first page under the very first example image where not only the typeface is butt-ugly, also text layout is all kinds of messed up.