How can we make FOSS GUIs follow true unix way and be more aesthetically pleasant?

In the world of Linux (FOSS?) almost everything I have ever seen and used looks ugly. As a Linuxoid I’m an irregular user of 10 years, I do want to switch to Linux entirely on my personal MacBook Air. Saying that I mean I’m not a total newbie, but I’m not a power user yet.

And aesthetics I’m talking about is not something fancy, like super-customized drop-shadow effects, complicated textures and/or vivid colours, etc. But the basics: some simplicity maybe. I know we are all different, for me all that means just simplicity of the interface and its typography. That would be enough, and that simplicity is not that easy, actually. Just as a reference of the style, of what I mean, check the , but does it exist?

Metaphorically speaking I mean that we are like a grown-up kid of a stupid/abusive parent, who still mindlessly repeats what the parent demanded us to, in our childhood. Why do we repeat those silly Windows interfaces (who just copied mac interfaces of that time)? Why don’t we use Macs a bit longer before design Mac-like DEs? To bring the important stuff, and not the fancy whistles which would become obsolete earlier we’ll end up developing them. I don’t mind all that abundance exist, don’t get me wrong, it’s great and it’s nice to have people switched, because ‘same same but different, you know,’ but I wonder why are there lack of innovative interfaces, which could move industry forward? We have a unique opportunity of not minding a customer or investors: most of our community is eager to learn already (to some degree), most of them understand what they use is free, some of them contribute back to the community. Bugs, wild experiments, all that is tolerated. But I see none of the experiments of that kind.

I see not just a CD/DVD-disk pictogram in the Ubuntu distribution (the most popular one?) installer, but also an ugly diskette metaphor in KeePassXC. No, really, who the fuck still uses optical CD disks? We have 1TB microSD cards these days! Okay, if someone does, who the fuck thinks they are the target audience of newcomers, whom those things should be targeted to, as pictograms? The last time I saw that diskette pictogram was in a Windows Phone, which I sold the second day of using it. And Windows Phone looks exactly as stupid as Steve Ballmer’s phrases, who infamously claimed his opinion on iPhone as a product, for example. And you may know the fate of Windows Phones these days, since we have just two major mobile OSes (eh, we always had just two).

Don’t developers (their managers, their designers, or someone else?) understand that icons are for newcomers, and old users need minimum of the interface. Well, maybe everyone needs minimum of the interface. I believe that usually Linux managed by those who know what they do, but used by great many others. Why for example interfaces won’t be both very simple (for the latter), but keep being highly configured with editing files? Or am I missing something significant already?

I am a part of a small team of geeks (locally; and of course a part of a huge team of geeks whom I’m writing this to), who would like to participate in changing this. We have our projects, we have our clients, and we cannot devote ourselves into a 24/7 volunteer work. But we would like to improve the Linux experience for ourselves and possibly for others. FOSS community deserves this!

We would like to try to change the things somehow, to higher the plank of what is considered to be at least okayish in GUI, and what is not. What do you think would make the strongest impact? Should we start redrawing the most popular interfaces? Should we apply to work with Canonical to help Ubuntu become visually cleaner, so everyone else will take that as an example? (Why hadn’t they used that opportunity themselves? Why they’re still a popular, but not take-us-as-an-example distro?) Should we write articles explaining some basics that we know to the community? (Aren’t there plenty of them already?) Should we join some popular projects? Which ones and what should we do there then? Should we start a consulting foundation and invite developers to send us their interfaces providing them some basic advices with simple steps to vastly improve their apps visually? Or somehow invent an AI online tool/service to analyze the picture of the interface and generate the feedback? Start our own distro or just DE and fork software and make it wildly popular? Anything else?

We are small now, but we are able to contribute on a long-run, and we want to have a kind of a strategy, so the impact would be not just us learning the Linux things and giving up on that later. I myself know it’s possible to achieve great visual aesthetics in Linux, thanks to posted they’re converted a class to Linux Mint recently. Great news, but those default Mint wallpapers on the photo! Does anyone think they’re at least okayish? They’re ugly as fuck! You can have beautiful wallpapers as a default, having no professional photographs of big cats, mountains and deserts. You can integrate