linuxmemes

Plenty of Linux projects have had a focus on UX.

Back in the day, Ubuntu made huge strides in UX and usability, and they're still riding the coattails of that success even now that they've shifted to the corporate sector.

ElementaryOS came out and was super polished, simple, and beautiful. That's still kinda true, but their small team has meant that they're now falling behind the likes of Gnome, who've set out to do a similar thing.

The Cinnamon desktop is ugly out of the box, but other aspects of UX have been pretty great - everything is simple, they were pioneers in making everything a GUI option, rather than the last 5% of things having to be done in a config file or via terminal.

And finally, Gnome. Extremely polished, consistent, beautiful, and heavily UX-focused. That applies not only to their own system, but also to their third party app ecosystem. Just look at the apps on Gnome Circle - a Gnome project for showcasing apps that nail the Gnome design guidelines. Tell me they don't look like they have a focus on UX.

Honestly, even MacOS struggles to feel as UX-focused as Gnome, and that's saying something. UX is like, Apple's entire schtick. Everything from trackpad gestures to UI elements, subtle animations, etc in Gnome is about UX.

Tbh, Gnome is sometimes so focused on UX that it arguably becomes a detriment to their development cycle. They'll spend months deliberating on things like accent colours, chatting about all the potential ramifications, legibility, how it can inadvertently lead to destructive user actions, and the best way to implement it as a feature, rather than just doing it and moving on to the next feature.

Even KDE Plasma, which is often mocked for being hilariously inconsistent and filled with bizarre clunky UX, has made major strides in the past couple of years, and Plasma 6, releasing very soon, will fix a bunch of fundamental things that currently hold Plasma back from being consistent, and a significant portion of bugs have been fixed - it looks like it won't be the buggy mess that Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 was. We're about to see a major improvement.