Readit Newsfrom 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful
it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`
I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29
(in some alternate universe, motif was under the x11 license and you would have motif v13 instead of GTK.)
(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…