[east2west]

I understand your strong opinion and since I am no sysadmin I have no technical problem with arguments. But I am not sure I totally agree with your characterization of slow pace of change by Apple or the wonderful state of Unix/Linux. Aqua was quite a break from the previous GUI and Apple changed the whole stack at one point from computer architecture to OS to graphic library. I don't know a more radical change than that for a software company. As for Linux graphic environment, I can only say that replacing X-win with Wayland is not evolutionary and it cannot come soon enough. Anyway, hopefully things will quiet down for a while and we can compare and contrast alternatives in the real world.

[dredmorbius]

Also, to be clear, I'm not accusing Apple of failing to innovate elsewhere in its product chain. It clearly has. Since 1999: the iBook, MacBook Pro, Air, and a few iterations of the iMac, just in form factors. There's been a lot of under-the-hood stuff going on as well.

But where the user interacts with the system, things have been remarkably stable. Even the relatively minor changes which have been presented have been covered with the usual Apple levels of obsession -- skewmorphic vs. flat designs, etc., ad nauseum.

Again the point being: screw with how things are visually and how users interact with the system, you're going to create huge usability costs with little to show for.

[dredmorbius]

I'm not saying that the System 9 (I think -- I'm not fully up on my MacOS nomenclature) to Aqua break wasn't big. It was.

BUT IT WAS THE FIRST SUCH BREAK IN 15 YEARS OF THE GUI, AND IT'S BEEN THE ONLY MAJOR BREAK IN THE PAST 15 YEARS.

I'm also not saying that Aqua hasn't changed at all. It has, with the most notable addition that I'm aware of being virtual desktops (something NextSTEP had in the 1980s). But other than some minor cosmetic changes, and largely invisible-to-the-user under-the-hood updates, the visible UI has NOT changed appreciably.

Contrast that with the disruption that's prevailed in the Microsoft Windows and Linux spaces from 1999 to present. We've gone from the Win98 UI to the candy-cane XP styling, and Metro in Windows, and at least three generations each of KDE and GNOME on Linux, plus a few other desktops which have waxed and waned in popularity.

I've continued to use WindowMaker, and after 17 years, it is, hands down, the one GUI metaphor I've had the longest experience with of any. It's been exceptionally stable, with very few changes. Even minor ones are quite jarring to me, which is somewhat odd to reflect on.

X11 and/or replacements is a whole 'nother discussion, but I'll simply note that the network transparency of X has been hugely underappreciated by many who've sought to upend it (I don't know what the status of Wayland is in this regard).