Linux

I like how that material design stuff looks on my Android. Bite me.

To the people complaining they can't figure out what is or isn't a button: How often really does that happen to you? Even the computer illiterate somehow manage on their Androids and websites.

Windows 9x, which gets brought up in these discussions as an example of some sort of perfection, had plenty of "buttons" that had no 3D effect, including menus, icons in icon bars, systray icons and desktop icons. WordPad originally had all the icons up in the icon bar with a 3D effect. It looked like shit and Microsoft stopped doing that in 97 at the latest.

There are considerations other than clarity of intent, like not distracting people from the content with all that ornamentation.

My suggestion would be to put a picture of a baroque church as your background to even out the minimalism if it bothers you so much.

I'd like to throw my hand in with this sentiment. I always liked Adwaita because it was modern but independent, not chasing trends for the sake of it. Now all of a sudden they're not only chasing the flat trend, but chasing the much more extreme older version of it that reminds me more of the initial Material apps than anything going on in 2022. It's hard to read, much uglier, and gives up much of the identity GNOME has held onto compared to other modern desktops.

A lot has been said about libadwaita and the wrench it throws into the world of themes, but the pill would be a lot easier to swallow if it didn't come at the same time as the worst theme the project has ever deployed. It honestly really surprises me, as Adwaita and Clearlooks before it were both top-notch visual styles and I never thought such a regression would come from the GNOME team.