Yes. Simplicity and function over form. 90s buttons looked like buttons, for instance. And theming was a simple matter of changing your fonts and colors. Windows 95 didn't need a special 'dark mode' supported by the OS, because you just changed your colors in the GUI tool for changing colors and fonts and you were done.
Modern GUIs are ridiculous and stupid and overcomplicated. Much like most of modern computing.
> Windows 95 didn't need a special 'dark mode' supported by the OS, because you just changed your colors in the GUI tool for changing colors and fonts and you were done.
You're over-romanticizing the past. There were plenty of apps even in the Windows 95 era that drew their own widgets and only half-respected the colors you set in the control panel, and that consequently looked like pureed ass if you changed the colors from the default.
Yes, and just like today that was stupid. It was just a lot less common than today's Electron bullshit. Hell, there were games that used native widgets.
One of the big complaints about Java used to be that it didn't use native widgets and consequently looked out of place, but nowadays that is basically every application.
>90s
>aesthetics
wat?