To some degree I think the desire to have “any design you want” is anti-user: I really don’t want to use apps that have the design their developer picked for me, I want to use apps that respect the conventions of my system and the preferences I have set (e.g. on Mac, I want the accent color to be the one _I_ picked in System Preferences. On Linux, I want the apps to fit in with my choice of gtk or qt theme.)

These days Qt is fairly close to this ideal, even on Mac: apps like calibre look a bit weird but their menus are in the right place and their coloring roughly matches my os settings. Electron apps are all over the place: vscode, slack, etc. all pick their own design styles and ruin the visual consistency of my desktop.

> To some degree I think the desire to have “any design you want” is anti-user

To some degree? It is incredibly anti-user, especially if the user happens to have a disability. I know I've said this before but it is absolutely ridiculous that having a "dark mode" is considered some kind of notable feature in 2018, when in 1995 you could just set all your colors and fonts however you preferred them.

But that's the world we live in now. Personal computing is dead, you just rent your computing from some corporation and they'll tell you when to update and how everything should look and what you can and cannot install (for your own good comrade!).

As far as personal computing is concerned we're living in the darkest timeline. Makes me ashamed to have anything to do with the tech industry.

Something that actually blew my mind is that by default most Qt apps actually can accept a theme sheet by command line argument. This means that you can pretty much retheme any Qt app by adding a file and editing how shortcuts/registry/however else you can launch applications. I know that there is a programmatic way to do all that on linux but not sure of how for win and mac.

That's still a huge step down from the single configuration dialog we used in Windows 95. And it's slower.

On Linux, at least, there is such a central dialog. It’s just that Qt exposes the configuration via command line overrides

Well, I think what we call "design" has two parts: one is "theming" concerns and is made up of things like colors, icons and cursor shapes (to give an incomplete list); the other is more functional and has to do with the logical structure of the various inputs and outputs in a UI. Generally speaking, I think the former concern should be totally under the user's control while the latter concern is what UX people and front-end devs should be doing.

Comparing Calibre favorably to VSCode and Slack highlights how different perhaps audiences are: while I love what Calibre does, I really dislike its interface and vastly prefer VSCode and Slack.

I actually agree with that overall. The point was more that Qt has come a long way towards integrating with OS X.

For an apples-to-apples comparison, I’d rather use Slack through something like Adium that puts me in control of the ui. And VSCode would be nicer if it looked more like textmate.

UI is art, art doesn't fit in such limited terms as native UI. Your personal preferences of liking the same UI style should not hold back the potential useability improvements that electron apps do infact have. Their presentation of content and organization of information is on point in ways existing applications didn't have, that's why they're popular.

I'm pretty sure UI tends to be science, with art kept for flight of fancy systems interactive like Emacs, vim, the Leo editor or Bret Victor's ideas--none of which would pass muster in committee UI decisions in for-profit companies. Shells are some black art.

Art is about presentation of content, styling. Every cartoon has it's own way of doing 2D presentation in a way that content matches up to be pleasing to the eye. If UI is not designed to a consistent eye pleasing assortment of styled information, it doesn't work well. That's the whole point of native styling.