I don't really know when this flame war started but what I got out of Jeff's article was that sometimes users don't realize something changed inless there was a visual improvement and modification. Makes sense to me, why do you think dreamweaver and photoshop look slightly different each version. The visual adjustments indicate adjustments under the hood.
Also - there is something to be said for consistency... If you had an Operating System where every app had a different L&F, and a different UI metaphor - that would be a pain to use.
OS X is pretty good on this count (even for non OS apps). (To grossly generalise,) Linux does well in some areas, very poorly in others. W7 bringing it's UI into line seems like a good win.
Linux does extremely poorly. Every distro has its own UI guidelines (if they have one at all) that very few projects follow. How can you blame them? They're cross-distro apps that run just as well on Ubuntu as Suse - there's absolutely no distro-specific UI.
So what you get is a mess of apps that each do what they think is the best UI... except consistency is one of the keys to usability.
That's odd. I find Gnome apps mostly consistent and the occasional differences are there mainly when it makes good sense to be different. Not to say there is no occasional weird app that is less than usable, but, for the most of my time, they all get high marks.
Yes, BUT, _that's within Gnome_. Gnome is a unified desktop environment of sorts. If you go outside of that (or KDE, XFCE, etc.), things are more ad-hoc. Some things use GTK, some use Qt, some old stuff uses Athena widgets, etc.
While using Vista, one experiences programs that expose Vista controls. Some others show XP-ish controls, while some others still look a lot like Windows 95/98/2K and, still, there are others that break away completely (Office 2007, Nero) and present a completely different user interface with weird shaped windows and menus that look like nothing else in the OS.
OSX is somewhat better organized, but, still, programs, even Apple ones (Safari? iTunes) have a variety of looks that get presented without much coherence. Apple is too guilty of this.
I agree, the reason I qualified it is because I thought Linux is way too broad - e.g. the metaphor when in a terminal is usually pretty good and quite consistent... or, Gnome, KDE do well in certain contexts.
