The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) first appeared near the end of the first decade of the millennium. It was a time when the Linux desktops had caught up with their proprietary counterparts but had paid little attention to the user experience. In 2008, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Mark Shuttleworth challenged developers to “shoot beyond the Mac,” and “to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean.” In response, over the next few years, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE experimented with rethinking the desktop, with varying degrees of success and mixed user response. Since then, distributions such as elementary OS, Deepin, Zorin, and Pop!_OS have conducted their own experiments, but KDE’s HIG have been little changed. However, in 2024, KDE developer Nate Graham has started a much-needed update.

The revised KDE HIG are still a work in progress, but the draft is a glimpse into an aspect of software development that users rarely consider (Figure 1). Many of the HIG are practical, such as suggestions about where and how to use icons, how to space navigation aids, and when to use different input tools such as sliders and text fields. More generally, under “What Makes a KDE App a KDE App?,” the revised HIG highlight the characteristics of guidance for novices, customizability for a variety of uses and needs, and constant evolution – a description that seems a good answer to the question of why users might want to try KDE.

Recently, Graham talked to Linux Magazine about some of the larger issues surrounding the KDE HIG:

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