I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and consistent if you stuck to applications written using GTK+ 2.
I concur that I’m not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any day.
If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion.
Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).
Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of choices it'll never be comparable.
Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on some sane technical choices without alternatives to provide coherent vision. It would require tremendous resources and it'll cause tremendous resistance from community (just observe how much hate systemd receives and it's still not as convenient as services.msc from Windows 2000). It's unlikely to happen, so that's why I think we won't have good things, because Windows itself lost its vision as well.
Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something special.
Oh yeah, that's right. Though the chronology isn't important.
I think modern macOS is a decent example of how you can increment away from the drab corporate gray of that era without using flashy colors like XP and without going too far into flashy effects like Vista.
I found the bright blue taskbar and window decorators and the bright green start button, among other very bright and contrasting colors, quite the eyesore both at the time and now. Thankfully you could switch to the Windows Classic theme.
The best thing about Luna is that its existence necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of those were very well designed and a joy to use.
Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7 version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles for it too.
I’ll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than what shipped in Windows 1.x.
The fisher price look. For me it was a downgrade in aesthetic and seemed like trying too hard to make it appealing and friendly for the computer illiterate masses.
I called it that too! My backup was, "well, when your UI is designed by Hasbro". It really did have that Duplo Block look to it. When run at very high resolutions, it did get a bit better.
Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI.
Those times are over. We can't have good things.