Every so often there appear some new pics from developer builds of Windows or even leaks such as the recent Windows 11 preview screenshots. More or le

No, Windows is not copying KDE Plasma

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2021-06-16 16:30:12

Every so often there appear some new pics from developer builds of Windows or even leaks such as the recent Windows 11 preview screenshots. More or less every time this happens there are comments from the Linux side that Windows is copying KDE Plasma – a desktop environment that is, granted, among the most similar ones to Windows. The similarity is, however, only very superficial. To convince you of this, in this post I’ll dissect several design elements and show how the two competitors differ in approaching them.

The most obvious difference. Plasma does use some transparency in the desktop theme, but unlike Windows it doesn’t and won’t use it in applications by default.

New Windows design has more padding than Plasma. While some places in Plasma (such as everything that uses form layouts e.g. applet config windows) are very roomy, there are also other places where there is not much padding. On the whole though there is more padding in Windows as Plasma often tries to be ultra efficient with space. Compare the difference in empty space in the start menus:

Even though Windows 8 (and to an extent 10) was the epitome of boxy and Plasma was in fact the rounder one, the screenshots from Windows 11 demonstrate more roundness than current Plasma design. You can notice this by comparing the corners of the start menus shown above.

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