[coldtea]

>By designing everything on the screen to be as photorealistic as possible, the software essentially negated needing to define its style or stance — it merely reflected the world outside of it.

Not even close to reality. Aqua, iOS "skeuomorphism" had a very defined and unique style.

It obviously wasn't some photograph of an actual desktop with some folders on top and a garbage can, as this makes it sound (not to mention that even if it was, there are 10000s of ways to have a unique style and stance in a photograph too).

Hell, old "photorealistic" GUIs were even MORE distinct from one another than today, with everybody having their same-looking flat UIs.

[nsonha]

didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop? It baffes me that linux DEs these days have moved from some single bar that mimics the efficient Windows taskbar, to the "menubar and dock" anti-functional design copied from MacOS

[coldtea]

>didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop?

No, that would be NeXT OS. Through the NeXT dock had different look, and slightly different behavior.