Josh Sherman
If I still used MacOS as my daily driver, I’d be absolutely over the moon about dark mode being announced for Apple’s next macOS release, Mojave.
It’s great that this feature is finally being added, but it’s very much “too little too late” if you ask me.
For those unaware, dark mode is just a dark theme for your desktop environment. Nothing totally crazy or unique, just flipping the bit on the colors.
It’s my preferred way to GUI and I don’t just save it for night time use.
The concept of a dark mode is something that’s been around for quite some time on other operating systems and graphical desktop environments.
Like, a long fucking time.
And I’m not just doing that typical Josh thing where I’m up on my high horse about Linux (GNOME, KDE, et cetera). Dark mode has been around in the Windows for a while as well.
What’s the most upsetting about this, is that I assume there are people out there that are ignorant to this truth and are talking about how revolutionary Apple is by introducing a dark mode.
Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think Apple has had some bouts of being revolutionary. Hell, I’m typing this post on an 11” MacBook Air which as outdated as it is, I still consider one of the best mobile rigs of all-time.
But, in my opinion, the rigidness of their assumptions, especially around the overall look and feel of Mac OS X / macOS, without any way to do the work yourself, is far from revolutionary.
I totally get it though, the non-power user is happy with what they are spoon fed. They are in the majority and Apple caters to that. If nothing else, it makes support a ton easier for them.
If macOS were open source, it would have had things like dark mode and theming back in the early aughts. Software like f.lux would have been patched right into the system instead of existing until Apple decided it was good enough of a feature to add themselves.
This sort of flexibility may not be something that everybody wants or needs but having the option to do so is always a good thing.
More so, having access to improve the systems you use [every day] instead of waiting for a multi-billion dollar corporation to decide what’s in your best interest, is a great thing.
The problem with dark mode is that I couldn’t have just added it myself.
p.s. I did do some digging to see what theming options were out there, and most of the links were outdated and redirected to parked landers. There also seemed to be way more viable options out there back when OS X was codenamed after cats.
