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by benterix 375 days ago
I know people hate this but it shows a huge problem: innovation in operating system design. It's really a tough one. You really want the basic functionality to be very stable and unchanging to save yourself and others incompatibility pain over the next decades. OTOH, you need to release a new OS every now and again to show the markets that you are doing something. So they did a cosmetic upgrade like changing the graphic theme. Which, depending on your PoV, might be a very good thing.
3 comments

UI is fashion-driven like clothing or furniture or car design. That's not new, it's just hard to admit for us techies that such a thing exists in our world. And just like with fashion, some changes are not for 'better' but for 'cooler' or 'more interesting'. The question is how far on the 'worse' scale you're willing to go to get up on the 'cool' scale. Otherwise, we'd all still be running Windows Server 2000...
Windows Server 2000 was great though! Or maybe that’s what you’re saying. I’m fine with all kinds of UX flash as long as it can be disabled; especially animation.
Or perhaps, it's for "designers keeping themselves employed"
IMHO the next actual OS design innovation isnt stylistic, its AI integration and everyone knows it.

Siri was a fun toy, but "Siri except not an idiot" is a revolutionary step, and how to tastefully integrate her is an interesting, challenging, and active problem with tremendous upside. I know enterprise moves slow but do they need Open AI and others to build a fully functioning alternative OS before they wake up?

> IMHO the next actual OS design innovation isnt stylistic, its AI integration and everyone knows it.

I'd be careful with "everyone" in this context. So far, almost every review I read/watched sees Apple Intelligence as underwhelming at the very least (I ignore the backlash at the ad campaign as I believe Apple understood by now these ads were really stupid).

It's why Linux with a sane WM has become the most pleasant client OS almost by default.