I have no idea why flat / material is considered superior to Skeuomorphic. I acknowledge that position was useful for the people that wanted to force Scott Forstall out of Apple. But as far as taste, what we are now left with design-wise is nothing more than inhuman garbage.
It isn't considered superior. It is a deliberate design choice jointly by BigTech, including Google, Apple and Microsoft to slowly blur the line between the desktop and web applications for the user. All are colluding together to become service companies and rent their products for subscriptions. But they know that if the transition is sudden, many of their users will abandon them.
I think skeuomorphism went a bit too far and became almost comical at times, but I agree that there has been a massive over correction. I think the real driving factor has been scaling. It is the same reason why ever logo looks the same. It needs to look good on a 4 inch screen and a 400 inch screen and that is hard to do unless you simplify the design down to the most basic elements.
This reminds me of the good old days of Mac OS X theming with Shapeshifter. There were a ton of crazy themes out there, most of which now seem to be lost to the ages (or at least difficult to Google). Some screenshots can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110219030424/http://mac.appstor...
What a trip back in time. I also individualised my desktop! Thinking about my current desktop...I never use my desktop anymore. Junk accumulated there, I don't need to put files there. I think it makes it strictly worse because of the clutter. The only reason why I would use it is to interact with finder but I think that could be solved differently (dragging/dropping from one window to the other). Everything else is always fullscreen, be it vs code, safari or my terminal.
I’ve always wished I could have the desktop behave as a terminal window (un-closable and always ready) rather than a file/folder interface. Does anyone know of a way to achieve this?
