It is one of those things, yes. Not just an "everyone's tastes are different", which of course they are... but sometimes I see GUIs and think "yikes, how can you bear to look at that all day?"
For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant.
GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good.
As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10
But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.
For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant.
GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good.
As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10
When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204
But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.