Being able to tell things apart at a glance equals a "shotgun blast of color"? We're not talking about the Hotdog Stand theme, you know.
The more methods you use to differentiate things from one another the easier it is to navigate an interface. Abandoning depth so completely was already stupid, mostly-white-on-blue-uniform-squares? You have color, use it! That shit was awesome when I was 19 and wanted to make my XFCE monochrome because I thought it looked cool. It's not awesome when major OS companies copy my awful teenage taste in desktop aesthetic just because it makes for slick-looking screenshots. Please, someone, have better sense than that.
Is not something to aspire to. If you think that's easy on the eyes I can only assume you never used interfaces back when you could tell one thing from another without having to play Where's Waldo—which, admittedly, was pretty long ago at this point. Look at the buttons on that dialog! Who OK'd that?! Look at those crappy icons that look like the 404-not-found of the icon world! Don't look at where Mail is on the far left. Look at the center of the screen. Tell me which one's mail. Can you even guess? Just tried it on my MacBook, and I could tell what every icon was out of my peripheral vision, thanks to the "shotgun blast of color".
Overuse of color was done because designers could do things like photographic icons, gloss, gradients etc rather than because it makes things more distinguishable for the user.
OS X in particular had multiple levels of shininess which made it hard to distinguish the actual shape of the objects - they learnt their mistake and are attempting to roll it back years after Microsoft popularised digital first design. The Linux DE's haven't even learnt that yet.
Windows mail uses an envelope symbol. It's far more obviously mail than a picture of an eagle flying in the sky with a white scalloped, stamp-like border. Do people even use stamps anymore?
Compare with the OS X-style "Cars: fast as lightning" which I guess is a car but is so detailed I can't really tell.
I won't defend the stamp thing's discoverability (though it's not that bad—and besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp is, and if you don't then it's because you're somehow encountering envelopes exclusively in non-mail contexts so how is that going to be associated with mail for you? Anyway...) but I don't think it matters how appropriate an icon they use if half of them are same-proportioned, white, and sitting in identical blue squares that are mostly wasted ("negative") space, compared with MacOS icons that are larger in proportion to the space they're granted and use color so you can tell what they are without having to look directly at them.
Looking back at Leopard screenshots (I assume that's part of the era with the supposed excessive-shininess?) those icons were slightly worse because smaller (probably configurable though? I don't remember) but their shape seems to be a bit more apparent and distinctive (most of mine on Sierra are squares or circles) so I'd call it a wash, usability-wise. Maybe slightly favoring the new ones because color is easier to distinguish in peripheral vision than shape. I'm not seeing a practical problem with the use of depth, aside from "depth is bad now, because reasons".
Microsoft's Win10 design is like the kind of thing developers come up with when they manage to banish designers from a project—not saying that's what happened, and I doubt it is, but it really looks like it (I can't get over that drop-down box, god, it's like I tried to style it). It's incredibly bad. It reminds me of really old "how to make your web forms pretty" tutorials from the pre-CSS days. I seriously thought I was in some kind of safe-mode when I started it up the first time.
[EDIT] actually, rather than pre-CSS, let's specifically go with "when people used the term DHTML". STRONGLY reminiscent of that time period—but not of finished websites, of web design tutorials from that time period.
> besides, if you know what an envelope is you probably know what a stamp
An envelope is an arbitrary thing that means email. Much like a floppy disk is an arbitrary thing that means save. The postal system and floppy drives are about as relevant as each other.
I prefer the taskbar icon look - ie, raw shape - than the colored background look too. But the raw shapes certainly are far more better than the distracting, detailed pictures which serve only their designers.
The Win10 design is what happens when designers consider users over themselves. I think you're favouring OS X simply because you're familiar with it. But it's clear that Android since 4, OS X since 10.10 are all following the same direction that Microsoft popularised way back in the Zune era.
If you got 1000 people who'd never used a computer before, and asked them to find 'mail' between the 'envelope' and the 'picture of the eagle with the scalloped background' were mail it's predictable what the outcome would be.
You... really think icons are more user-friendly if you take away color differentiation? I find that entirely confusing. It's the result of a "make this interface look like something out of a Mission Impossible movie, we want those screenshots to look slick!" directive, not a user-friendliness effort.
[EDIT] As for familiarity, I started on DOS, was a Windows user from 3.1 through 10 (finally ditched 10 a couple weeks ago because it pissed me off one too many times) including NT3.5 and 4, plus 2K, and mixed in a ton of Linux plus a fair amount of BeOS and a touch of QNX starting around the Win98 era. I've used KDE since IIRC late version 1 or early 2, Gnome since before it was bad, and spent lots of time in both Windowmaker and XFCE for good measure. I've used CDE on Solaris in anger. I only jumped on Apple devices ~5-6 years ago for work. With all that context, I feel confident asserting that the Win10 interface looks like the punchline to a joke that I just don't get—it's got nothing to do with exclusive familiarity with Apple.
I've used all those systems you have, and the worst are ones where someone had tried to use the entire palette or colors and greatest graphic detail in shapes.
Right, now give me 6 apps with the same mail icon and help me find the one I like. The one that supports my mail provider and has my contacts in it. Not the other ones.
The bird is distinct. I know it's thunderbird because that's the icon thunderbird uses. I can upgrade windows and still find it. If you are making things easier for new users but ALSO worse for existing users, you're not doing anyone any good.
The more methods you use to differentiate things from one another the easier it is to navigate an interface. Abandoning depth so completely was already stupid, mostly-white-on-blue-uniform-squares? You have color, use it! That shit was awesome when I was 19 and wanted to make my XFCE monochrome because I thought it looked cool. It's not awesome when major OS companies copy my awful teenage taste in desktop aesthetic just because it makes for slick-looking screenshots. Please, someone, have better sense than that.
Look, this: https://dri1.img.digitalrivercontent.net/Storefront/Company/...
Is not something to aspire to. If you think that's easy on the eyes I can only assume you never used interfaces back when you could tell one thing from another without having to play Where's Waldo—which, admittedly, was pretty long ago at this point. Look at the buttons on that dialog! Who OK'd that?! Look at those crappy icons that look like the 404-not-found of the icon world! Don't look at where Mail is on the far left. Look at the center of the screen. Tell me which one's mail. Can you even guess? Just tried it on my MacBook, and I could tell what every icon was out of my peripheral vision, thanks to the "shotgun blast of color".