Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI.
Those times are over. We can't have good things.
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.
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).
A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page:
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.
Ahh. In that case, yes, I think you're probably right :)
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.
