alt Hacker NewsThe UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing.
If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.
Replies
The UI was so attractive it was back then even "ported" into KDE, not mention the countless OSX-themed visual styles for XP and Dock-like applications (later Launchpads arrived as well). There were even theming packages which were patching everything from icons to bitmaps in Windows somewhere before Vista arrival.
Aqua "era" ended with 10.10 when Apple decided to join flatness craze.
I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.
Modern UI trends seem to optimize for neutrality and content-first minimalism, which is nice in theory but often ends up feeling generic
>The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
Because "good looking UI" is a completely subjective metric.
> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?
From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.
https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...
Please no, that Lucida font is unreadable and ugly. Let’s not talk about the childish “aqua” design.
Because your opinion is in the minority
There used to be a really nice Aqua theme for Gtk back in the day, but like everything else it's gone out of fashion and succumbed to bitrot.
I don't even know where you'd find a copy of it any more, even if it could be ported to modern toolkit libraries.
I wish freshmeat.net was still on the go, that was full of things like that.
Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.
In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.