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The Windows ecosystem has never had a coherent design. I fondly remember the Windows 7 days where we had Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and Zune Media Player each with a completely different design style despite coming from the same company. Similarly, Outlook vs Windows Live Mail vs etc or Word Perfect vs Word. And these are just comparing similar Microsoft products.

Ok I guess I've had a bit of a different perception back then, since thinking back I think you're rights.

I guess the thing I was thinking of being cohesive were stuff like context menus, or integrating better with the window manager (or whatever it's called on Windows) than they do on Linux (since you had to integrate with the only existing one, not choose one). My earlier complaint about Krita/Inkscape is that most "labels" rendered in a colour and labels that was almost indistinguishable from the background, so I was largely working with shortcuts, or from memory and sometimes squinting to see what I'm clicking lol. It was an issue with all non-gnome apps, but I mostly used those two.

Back in the days even on windows you had java apps with different toolkit / experience. Now you have electron apps, there isn't even much cohesion.

I quitr remember that on Mac it is barely better.

Now take some specialized areas such as DAW, video editing software and 3D editors and you can just throw that idea of cohesion out of the window regardless of the OS.

Yep, I think cohesion is only going to die going forward, and I think web technologies are going to be what kills it. Electron is already popular, and nowadays every platform has a system web browser that can run in a "webview" mode so you don't have to bundle a full browser with each app. And building apps with HTML/CSS/JS is wayyyyyy easier than using native toolkits or cross-platform toolkits, especially if you want to target multiple platforms.

Hmm. I think that devs developing for macs tend to at least try and reuse established design language forms. I've only recently started using a mac for work and a lot of stuff I use seems to try and feel "maccy" (with varying degrees of success). But then again, I don't use many mac apps either, so I could have a poor sample rate and was recommended good looking apps by colleagues

On Linux, if you used Gnome but ran a KDE app (or were on Gnome but ran a GTK app) you'd by default get something that looked horrendous broken visually but worked, and sometimes the visuals actually managed to break the app (ie thing being out of proportion, or invisible etc). It would look great and cohesive if you ran a GTK app on Gnome, or a KDE app on KDE, etc.

I think it's gotten much better at some point when these environments decided to support each others themes, though.

I wish they all sat down and came up with a unified theming framework for apps (maybe based on CSS, since they kinda use CSS flavours already), but have the rest be implementation details. Dunno how realistic that is, though.

Windows I think I missed the mark actually. A lot of people pointed out stuff I didn't think about or forgot about (every Office Suite release looked different, Java apps etc, branded stuff like Adobe or specialist software, etc).

I think it might be because I never really used those apps that my much, since Windows was basically only my gaming OS

> But then again, their design language has recently started to be less cohesive too (or more precisely, mix of older and newer design systems are apparent).

It's the age of Electron, baby! For better (more frequent cross-platform support, rapid app development, empowering the masses of web devs to create desktop apps without retooling) and for worse (non-native look-and-feel, high resource consumption). Nobody really has a cohesive collection of apps on their desktops anymore, not even Mac people.

> I think people mostly complain about a lack of cohesion that Windows/macOS have.

Like we've both noted to some extent here, I think this is pretty much a thing of the past. It can be pretty good on Linux, at the same time. If you stick to KDE or Gnome (which I think are both reasonable propositions), your desktop on Linux will be way, way more cohesive than Windows has ever been in my lifetime (maybe ever).

In a strange turn of events I think you might have a better shot at a cohesive experience on a carefully curated Linux desktop these days than macOS. Even Apple's first party apps are now a mix mash of different UI styles. Once you start installing third party apps you get something that looks more like a Linux desktop from 15 years ago than the glory days of OSX.