Aside: Thank you for your video! It looks great and that's yet another OS I'd like to try and play with -- along with Plan 9, which Serenity made me think of a bit, and TempleOS because of the soul-saving effect of devoting to a hard piece of beautiful software craftmanship.
It’s a recent thing, but in a way it is a callback to making it more obvious what is interactible and not.
For a while, quite recently, it seemed to be catching on. But then it didn’t really catch on like.
But I think SerenityOS with a Neumorphism style would be a really interesting experiment.
https://uxdesign.cc/neumorphism-in-user-interfaces-b47cef3bf...
It's tactile, yes, but low density, low contrast, borders are non existent, colours are used to create intense gradient background palettes, instead of using them to increase readability and usability.
Neumorphism has all the drawbacks of modern flat design, with none of the benefits of old UI design studies. But it looks cool.
Which I like.
With current 90s themes for GTK+, "breadcrumb" segments appear just fine as buttons. It works quite well in practice.
Oh yeah, this is something we've been exploring (carefully) with SerenityOS! There's obviously been a lot of good UI/UX innovations since the late 90s, and it's super interesting to look for ways to integrate them with the classic aesthetics.
As an example, we use breadcrumb bars in our file manager, to display the current directory as a part of separately interactive segments.
And we also have "Assistant" which works similarly to macOS Spotlight, for fast access to a range of data providers.
I'm sure there are many similar concepts we have yet to discover :)