Me too, but i solved this very simple: with black background of dashboard and cards. So any corners are not shown unless i want them to.
And same may be said about people who consider it outdated.
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You truly don’t think objectively the theme looks dated?
It isn’t about round corners or theme X vs Y. It’s about the general aesthetic sense of what software looks like in all form factors - mobile, laptops, TVs, etc. And across companies - apple, Google, Microsoft (rest of big tech), Samsung, Sony or random other software like Ubiquiti networking UIs or even my silly GE appliances apps are better looking.
I think ppl take this WTH personally because the HA theme is cute in a nerdy and retro kind of way. I personally thought it was kind of quaint when I first started playing with HA a year and a half ago. It’s kinda nice. And many people here are engineers or tinkerers.
But I don’t think you are being realistic if you I don’t think HA is out of touch with the current visual language of how the average software looks no matter where else you look. It’s not about whether you like sharp corners or rounded corners or material design.
But maybe things are like fashion and if we wait another few years things will come around and this will look fresh and “current” again. It just doesn’t today. 
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Btw @Ildar_Gabdullin I’m super grateful to you because you have amazing guides on styling and theming both the default and the mushroom themes. You are a monster in that space in the best sense of the word! 
I owe you half of my dashboard look 
! So thank you for that.
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Objectively, it looks simple and usable. Anything beyond that is subjective.
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You are right everything is subjective. In fact, even simple and usable are (ppl have various levels of ability and some have accessibility needs.)
But I think there is a baseline of averages you can look at and say - this looks dated. It’s like looking at paintings or fashion or listening to music. There are styles and eras and genres with clearly defined averages and maybe a bell curve of variability within each. HA default theme is firmly in a “dated” cluster in the context of today. But apparently I’m in the minority here so I’ll stop spamming 
. I just never bothered to post a WTH but this one resonated and I think it’s relatively easy to fix unlike most WTHs which requires serious work. Here they can just make mushroom the default.
People have different tastes.
Giving them a new DEFAULT look may cause similar heat as we faced before many times (like borders instead of shadows, new colors BEFORE this was added, bages-2024.8).
Wait is mushroom now the default theme??
I have never considered HA UI to be nerdy or retro. In fact, those descriptors seem simply ridiculous to be. It’s not retro and it’s not nerdy, at all. Nerdy would be something that looks like command line. Retro would be something like the Winamp I shared earlier in this thread. There is nothing nerdy or retro in HA look.
But I admit I don’t think about design like you, that newer = better. Good design is timeless. For example, furniture from 70s can look very modern even now. Trends change all the time, I don’t see the value in following them.
I do agree the UI in HA is just not great. But it’s not a matter of following the newest trend from Apple or Google.
It’s just a matter of getting a better design, more polished.
And this is slowly happening. The tiles, sections and the new badges look better already
Still plenty of older cards look quite terrible. And it’s not just a matter of their style, it’s inconsistency and how everything looks together.
Again, rather questionable.
Cards should be FUNCTIONAL. No 100 clicks to get info, no useless “tap on a switch to get one large switch”, no Apple-like “we better know what you need” etc.
Agreed - I shouldn’t have used a qualifiers like “retro” as it can make things more confusing.
I would say that a lot of the cards look unpolished, yes. “quite terrible” (quoting you here) - I wouldn’t be that harsh.
And I’ll just say that style is a lot about consistency so perhaps our definition of “style” is also misaligned so we actually mean the same thing even though you wouldn’t consider that to be style.
That’s why I also tried to heavily emphasize that I don’t mean we should focus on one specific look and match it perfectly since there are many to choose from and they evolve. Nor, should we call “success” matching a specific look as you can never get even 2 people to agree on what is ideal. I just meant have one HA internally consistent look that doesn’t look so dated. Even if it’s very functional today.
I agree, a good design preserves ease-of-use and functionality. They are not mutually exclusive.
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I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I’m not saying functionality should be removed. But of course whether something looks good or not is in the eyes of beholder.
What is jarring to me is the lack of consistency between the older cards and the newer cards, especially tiles cards.
For example, entity card, statistics card, they use different font sizes and take more space than the tile cards. They have icon in top right, that cannot be removed, which is again placed completely misaligned compared to tile card. The statistics graph card is probably one of the worst to me though. It just looks bad, with the random black lines in the background (that are not functional, btw, as they are not drawn at any logical place, like start of month, they are static). And they do not match sensor card style (or the sensor footer/header in the cards that support that feature) neither with the line thickness, color and fill.
So, while beauty is not objective, consistency is, and it is jarring to me.
But I do think this is work in progress. Some time ago there was a call to arms blog post, asking developers and designers for help with updating the cards, so I’m hoping we’ll get nice results with that.
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Here’s the post I was referring to:
As the new sections view matures in its featureset, we want to begin our focus on a bigger task: to revamp all the dashboard cards and bring them up to modern standards. To achieve this, we need you - the power of our contributor community!
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I agree, there is a separate WTH for this.
But “renovating” old cards may cause a heat as was said earlier, so this is complex thing.
Adding a new default theme doesn’t mean switching it for all existing users after the update - the existing theme can be kept (and should be) but renamed to Classic and existing users should remain on it if they are currently using it.
But for new users, something like the Material Rounded theme or whatever HA team comes up with should be the new default. And maybe add a notification after installing the update that a new theme got added and encourage people to try it out.
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Indeed, here are examples of what competitors currently have. It is just a guess but I do really think an average person will find these more visually appealing than Home Assistant’s spin on Material 1.
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In my opinion, this could be solved by adding copies of the existing cards (Modern Design) and renaming the existing cards to Classic and reverting the changes they made. They could even make the Classic ones additional cards and keep the existing hybrid ones so the changes don’t break current dashboard layouts.
so, you propose to thousands of users to edit their dashboards ))
Am I the only one who wishes the default frontend was more outdated?
It should run on any browser from IE11 to the latest build of Chrome.
I see nothing in the interface that could not be handled by IE11. Which by the way is supported on Server 2012 until 2026 (as a random fact).
Why?
Old hardware with embedded touch screens make excellent and extremely cheap wall and desk consoles.
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