I think it made substantially more sense in the 1990s.

For one, Gtk+ used to be advertised as a multi platform toolkit, with a port of GDK to Win32. Making Gtk+ widgets look like Win32 made sense for that.

Secondly, there were two groups of people using Linux and X11 in that era: one group who were exiles from commercial Unix, and another, faster growing group coming from Windows. For the former group, it was reasonable to want widgets to look more like Motif or Athena. The latter group wanted a more modern look, which could depart from old school Unix workstations.

In fact, the only change from your characterisation is that the toolkit has been renamed from Gtk+ to GTK. Here is an example of a current claim: "GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, and macOS." https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/overview.html

I think what has changed is user expecations; in the the 1990s, there was an expectation that programs should look like the native toolkit; whereas by now, it's even questionable whether there is a native toolkit on Windows (due to the range of choice, each of which a noticeably different in look and feel) and program-specific appearance is the norm on mobile and web applications. Nowadays, you could probably write a slightly customised Adwaita app for Windows and you'd get by more satisfactorily than if you wrote a plain GTK app and tried to theme it to modern Win32.

That's funny. Because I remember one of the changes from gtk-1.2 to gtk-2.0 (or maybe 2 to 3?) was to drop Win32 support. Which I at the time didn't like. We go full circle.

Not sure what you’re referring to.

Gtk 1.2 did not really have great Win32 support, was basically a one man show primarily to get gimp to run on Windows. The Win32 backend took off after gtk2, there was more commercial push from Ximian to make it a cross platform toolkit via Gtk# as well. And it wasn’t dropped in 3 or 4, though it definitely has lost development steam as commercial interest in it and cross platform desktop GUI toolkits in general has flagged and consolidated.

I think I had it one major release off. It was probably the gtk3 era. I read comments on the mailing list that you basically shouldn't rely on Win32 support.

You're right that gdk2 ramped up Win32 support, I remember that now.

Desktop environments are inherently very personal things and so what one person might find great, someone else might consider unusable. Themes are a good way to add room for user preference without forcing the user to change desktop environments entirely.

For example, before libadwaita screwed it all up I used to like to apply a custom theme to GNOME to cut down on the egregious padding everywhere, making the UI a much better fit for non-touch desktop OS use on a small laptop screen. There were several themes that accomplished that very well.

I just like how the cursor looks. I'd never buy a mac but I can admit the icons and design look nice.

Maybe Posy cursor would be a good substitute for you: https://michieldb.nl/other/cursors/

Does it also get bigger when you wiggle it?

there's cursor themes on linux and although you have to apply them in the usual wonky linux way, it's totally possible and it is independent of the window manager.

Of course some applications do their own cursor management so if you do it poorly your cursor hops around themes as you drag it over various windows based on the toolkit they use but then again, that's what we all signed up for.

for years i’ve stuck with Chicago95 and I refuse to use windows 95

I just had to use Windows 11 to do some work for a client, and it made me miss Windows 95. XP even more.

WSL is a welcome addition of course. PS is pretty powerful. The rest is painful. :D

I wouldn't primarily base my OS choice based on the theme. There is so much more about an OS that is more important. But that doesn't mean that I can't like the look of the other OS.