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> Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside.

If that's the case, then OS developers should spend less time making it fit some designer's aesthetic of beauty and instead make it super mailable, so users can make it look pleasing to them instead.

Not surprisingly, 90s OS did that better too.

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I'm reminded that Windows 3.1 had dark mode in the early 1990s, and not simply inverting colors. Theming was so easy compared to today that it's embarrassing.

Heck, the main reason I originally figured out how to root my high school's 3.1 setup was so I could enable the "black leather jacket" theme.

But the designers really, really want that aesthetic: https://stopthemingmy.app/

IMO: Perfect example of designers thinking they are something they are not:

As a designer and as a software engineer we should strive to deliver a good out of the box experience.

But, we should also try to make it simple to reuse our works: stick to standards, provide APIs, make sure theming and extension is as simple as possible.

Yes, this leads to complexity, but if people could do it in 1995 surely we can do it in 2021 as well?

I felt a bit queasy reading that.

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