Every once in a long while (very long now) you'll stumble across a dialog box that looks like it's from Windows 3.1. ODBC is one of them that's still that old.

It is, but there's still a standard system style that the majority of the apps are expected to use. Which is exactly what WPF uses - it's fairly easy to see if you take a WPF app and observe the differences on Win7/8/10.

In any case, surely, adding yet another different style only makes the problem worse.

Right now if i open a Sysinternals app I’ll have the text in the UI rendered in one way and the title bar rendered in another. It’s jarring.

Not to mention they behave differently with respect to HiDPI.

Remember how much criticism Linux and other unixes got by people complaining about apps created with KDE on Gnome desktops and vice versa?

I'll never forget ;-)

And that’s a disaster too.

Really the only one that’s done it correctly is Apple.

Apple also did this whole "our apps are special" thing more than once.

I don't know why, but there's this weird temptation for every app to try to present itself as some kind of unique work of art, when it comes to UX. But I don't want art, and I don't want branding. I just want ergonomic tools - and part of ergonomics is not to have to re-learn everything every time you pick up a new thing.

Nobody mention the gui toolkits for Java or desktop window managers for Linux…