Same idea: And you can tell where the window borders are, unlike a modern dark gray rectangle on top of another dark gray rectangle.

Honestly in CDE/Motif/classic Tk styles I actually have a little bit of trouble telling stuff apart, because everything has the same background color. We just retired an app that often had like a dozen or so dropdowns and edit fields on top of each other and it was kinda hard to tell where a box was, because all those lines are kinda just noise in a dense interface. The same interface even in Gtk, where widgets have a simpler outline, but utilize colors, is much easier to use. You also can't easily tell read-only widgets apart, because everything is the same color and look (might be a Tk defect though).

I suspect CDE was designed to still work on monochrome displays, but color is imho very important for effective interfaces and CDE doesn't use it at all.

> I suspect CDE was designed to still work on monochrome displays, but color is imho very important for effective interfaces and CDE doesn't use it at all.

To say something like this is a bit funny in the world where "light" and "dark" are theme choices. If anything has tried to use colorful desktop, it is VUE, CDE, today NsCDE etc.

You shall try Teams on windows over another window. The cream of GUI design. Good luck telling which window is active and which GUI element belongs to which window.

Teams certainly set a new benchmark for dumpster fires.

And a slight barely-noticeable drop shadow and some transparency with blur effect just light enough not to notice it but still put a big load on your GPU :)

You can change the thickness of the shadow. Try to do that in other GUI.

Windows had that well into W 7, individually for inner and outer bevel IIRC. The only thing that went away from the Control Panel was the adjustment of the actual Border Width, between the bevels, below 1. Previously you could set it down to zero, butting the bevels directly against each other (a look I preferred). For a while afterwards, you could hack it via the Registry Editor, but a little later they broke that, too.

Or did you mean the actual drop shadow, outside the window proper?

A modern composited UI with GPU rendering including such effects is far more efficient than a traditional CPU rendered desktop, especially with HiDPI.

True but it does need the GPU. I had some issues with my dual-GPU (intel integrated + nVidia) MacBook Pro. Whenever I would start up the desktop it would fire up the external GPU.

But my point is that the effects are often so subtle they can't even be noticed. I'm not against them per se. I have most of them on now in KDE in fact but boosted up a bit which I think looks nicer.

But you're right, it's not a 'big load' like I said, a modern GPU can handle this with 2 fingers up its nose.