Walk down memory lane...
I am probably lucky to have lived through the Cambrian era before the Microsoft extinction event. It was pretty cool. Mac System 6 and System 7 were cute. Amiga Workbench 2.1 was my go-to after using Geos on a C128 for a while. Then I got a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris with the joys of Irix 5 and that was simply glorious at the time. The 4D Window manager was nothing like anything I had used before - and a lot of programs were made using Motif - which felt exotic at the time. Compared to these, Windows 3.11 and later 95/NT4 were pretty average but had some useful features. I get where you are going in the article, but for me it's more nostalgia than anything else. Once you start using Ubuntu or Mint the window manager fades into inconsequential background. What is more annoying are weird UI difference between programs you use all the time because of the competing toolkits, or same toolkit but one is a snap container and the other is native. The problem nowadays is that the incredible modularity of Linux and BSD allows for choice with a penalty of less consistency. If you go to Apple it is the opposite. If you go to Windows, it's a little less extreme, but still there. Exotic operating systems like Aros have similar problems to Linux, just less choice due to a smaller community. Lamenting the lack of UI diversity on desktops is interesting, there are other choices, but this is a form of cognitive evolution of our species - there will be fewer outliers and a growing consistency of UI paradigm as more users adopt Linux.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
