Depends on your definition of winning. Lots of foss projects that look ugly and are not designed with ui in mind because it’s made by devs who are used to doing lower level stuff. Plus the fragmentation of qt and gtk. Winning would be easily building applications that could be native across DEs and actually look nice.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Lots of foss projects that look ugly and are not designed with ui in mind because it’s made by devs who are used to doing lower level stuff.
Maybe I am one of these developers because my domain is signal processing.
I don't care. I write mostly CLI apps.
Plus the fragmentation of qt and gtk.
I don't care whether something is qt or gtk. I use what fits me. I might write a GUI in Swing or,JavaFX because it fits nicely with Clojure or Common Lisp on the JVM, or I might write a Rust app with a Racket GUI because it is actually native and cross-platform. It is so liberating not having to deal with corporate bullshit.
It is not that I am an enemy of aesthetics. Actually, I like to do art! But I do that in wood and metal and other materials - not on the computer.
Winning would be easily building applications that could be native across DEs and actually look nice.
And about winning and having apps that suit your taste: Go ahead and write them. Scratch your own itch - that's how great FOSS software is created. But don't expect from others to spend THEIR free time on things YOU want. In return, you can do anything you like.
Yes go and write them is the usual response to these and I understand the sentiment. But also one can’t rewrite many many complex apps by themselves. I understand people wanting to do whatever they want sure. My point is it wouldn’t be an issue as much if there wasn’t as much fragmentation. If it was easy to write for both qt and gtk at once then people wouldn’t have to complain about one or the other all the time. In order to have an actual change it has to happen as a community not as an individual. It’s great that people can write stuff in whatever they want, I like being able to try out different frameworks. But sometimes unification across the desktop is something some people want. I don’t think you can just invalidate what I’m saying with the just go write it then. It’s not like I’m going to devs GitHub’s and raising issues saying “write this in gtk right now!!!” And for the record I have the same problems with proprietary software too. I don’t use windows really except for work but it looks like dogshit and a cobbled together mess.
Fortunately, there are plenty of foss projects with nice and intuitive UIs! (Okular, the PDF reader, Lutris, Firefox and its derivatives, Thunderbird, all the various Material You Android apps like Breezy Weather and AntennaPod, all the various SwiftUI Apple apps that are open-source like mLem and NetNewsWire, the bazillion apps that use libadwaita, all the Qt-based apps that fit really well with KDE Plasma, but work well in other DEs, Prism Launcher is nice to use, super easy to install Fabric mods, i could go on...)
I think that one reason why the proportion of open source code grows is software quality:
Companies would love to own all their code. So, when they employ people who work on proprietary code, the amount of proprietary code should grow, shouldn't it?
Except that companies have mostly very short-term goals. And this affects quality: A lot of proprietary code has quite shit quality and is not really maintainable. Which has the effect that either the project dies, or becomes very slow to develop further, because of tons of technical debt.
So, the company eventually will resort to rewrite that project. But that is like walking on a threadmill; it always takes a long time until a rewrite of an old project matches the predecessor projects features and stability. And the current GenAI craze will only make that threadmill rotate faster...
FOSS projects do not have this obsessive constraint on short-term returns, so they often have better quality. Which makes it more likely that these projects live and prosper a bit longer. The short-term difference might not be even large - but the process goes year for year, round for round, and it becomes an evolutionary advantage.
In the end, everyone uses that Finnish students former hobby kernel project, and nobody uses Windows 95 - or wants to use its shitty successors.
(And this is why I also think that Guix will win in the long term: The capability to re-produce all components of a program or system from freely available source is, in the long run, an overwhelming evolutionary advantage.)
Guix mention!