Transparent Ambition

Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was limited to the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash, never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs.

Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS.

Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it, whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.

You've got to be a bit more specific when comparing 'Windows' to 'Linux'! Both operating systems are used with a dozen different graphics libraries, each with multiple possible configurations, and sometimes more than one for a single application.

The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped. They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility is concerned.