[em3rgent0rdr]

It would be have been great if the different OS's had similar surface look & feel, to facilitate people being able to use both. I fear intellectual property concerns at the time may have discouraged MS from making this public.

[Arainach]

Being close but not identical causes confusion and frustration. A radically different UI sets expectations that things don't work the same. A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric.

It's similar to Linux window managers - things that try to copy Windows exactly inevitably cause frustration when certain behaviors (hovering over taskbar icons, dragging to edges) or keyboard shortcuts don't work like how you expect, while something significantly different like Gnome or i3 makes it obvious that you have to learn something differnet.

[wodenokoto]

> A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric.

I would have said that windows is window centric and macOS is application-centric.

On windows you alt-tab between windows and on MacOS you alt-tab between applications and alt-~ between windows inside the currently selected application.

[jeroenhd]

Is that where GNOME got their idiotic alt+tab behaviour from? I absolutely hate having to use two shortcuts in sequence to switch to a specific window. Thankfully it's easy to correct the shortcuts but I still don't get what person would want this behaviour.

[nsgi]

They could have just allowed users to create their own themes (without having to patch system files)