While I'll agree those are important for usability, I'm not sure they're necessary for adoption. Windows 10 uses a mix of UIs ranging from win32 windows 95 legacy to MAUI and most popular programs implement their own UI frameworks and it's doing ok.
It's an old joke that one of the best ways to make someone perpetually unhappy is to teach them proper font kerning.
YMMV. I myself am very happy with Gnome and would say it's about as nice to use as a Mac. You can, of course, install ugly applications with horrendous UIs, that use Athena or Motif widgets, limited only to X bitmapped fonts or an ncurses UI that would work on a VT-52, and so on - but that's kind of a feature of Linux - it's Unix and it runs a lot of things originally built in ages long past. It can be consistent if you want, and it can embrace the past in ways no other OS can dream of.
Except, maybe, IBM's z/OS, but that's a completely different beast.
Not really jarring anymore with ok functionality between apps. I wish gnome-shell was more stable and shipped with a dock…
It does. It's just that it's hidden now by default.
What I really would like is a simple e-mail/messaging program to consolidate my mail, Slack and Teams inflows on a single threaded timeline.
>Another evidence of the impact it had.
Well for me it wasn't Compiz that brought me into Linux, it was this idea of something different from WIndows but it may have had this impact for others. Compiz was a gimmick to me and after trying it once I put it aside to try and just make my regular Linux installs remain stable.
At the time it was easy to hear people complaining about how ugly linux was. Compiz helped a lot in that front. We were used to people saying "you can't do that on linux" and then things quickly changed to us saying "you can't do that on your OS".
Let's not fake it: linux is still far from being a diamond of UI design or consistency, but well, competition has its own problems too. The point is: things improved a lot and that event at that time in history made things improve a bit faster. To the point that almost two decades later something like this gets to the front page of hacker news and is filled by comments of people with fond memories of the time.
> This whole journey began during the Compiz era.
Another evidence of the impact it had.