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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

Apart from the main desktop overhaul, does this bring a consistent UI across all Windows elements?

Windows already suffers from 3 (?) different UI styles; does this fix that or add to the problem?

You cannot change that UI toolkit an existing application uses. Only change the theming if that toolkit supports theming, and change the desktop shell.

This is true for Linux as well as Windows.

I think they’re referring to the fact that, within the system apps that Microsoft controls, there are multiple generations of UI design. Like, last I checked I think Device Manager still has a Windows 98-ish look (there are many others).

These also correspond to different UI frameworks. You can change between themed and unthemed Win32 apps (although doing so can break layout, since themed widgets may have different sizes). But you can't easily change from Win32 to "modern", which is where the main disconnect is.

(Device Manager is a themed Win32 app. I actually can't think of any piece of Win10+ that isn't themed.)

Isn’t unthemed Win32 the same as ”Classic style”? So it hasn’t been supported post-Windows 7.

It hasn't been supported in a sense that there's no checkbox in OS settings to enable it for all apps. But any Win32 app that doesn't declare itself as compatible with theming (either via the manifest or via an API call) will still get the old slate grey 3D widgets, and even the old UI font.

(It has to work that way for backwards compatibility reasons, since some very old apps make assumptions about how exactly the widgets are rendered in their static UI layouts.)

Similar but not identical. The different Windows UI toolkits have slight nuances that are sometimes only noticeable if you’re looking but sometimes stand out.

I got that. But the reason it looks different is because it’s literally different APIs drawing the widgets. You cannot “fix” those programs to use the same APIs without access to the source code. And clearly 3rd party desktop shells are not going to have access to the source of Microsoft Windows.

On Linux, KDE is able to theme GTK apps to match it's own theme. It has limitations of course but it does a very good job.

That’s not a KDE thing, it’s a Qt and GTK thing. Those toolkits support themes and all you’re doing in KDE is specifying a two different themes (albeit named the same) that is visually similar. However if you look closer at the widgets you’ll notice how theming on Qt and GTK differ, so even the “same” theme across those two toolkits will look and behave subtly different.

It can do that because Gtk allows for custom themes, so it's possible to make one that looks like Qt. The opposite - making Qt look like a Gtk theme - is also possible.

But Windows deprecated support for user-configurable themes ages ago, and none of the new frameworks have it.

If it continues to work on new versions of Windows as they are released, it would be liberating to keep the same desktop interface even after an upgrade of Windows, instead of being subjected to whatever whim of the day they cook up (half-made) in Redmond.

That's not even possible in theory. If my app uses half system controls and half custom-drawn controls that I have painstakingly made to look like (I expected) the system controls to look, then if you swap out the system controls now you made the app inconsistent internally, which is just worse.

Windows has some consistency flaws, e.g. how they can't make their own settings have a consistent UI, but releasing more toolkits with different looks can't change how past ones look, it's just not possible. Having apps being consistent internally is the best you can hope for, and that obviously is the same for Linux/MacOS as well.

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