 ♻️ Recycled thread, June 22 2022 I had an inkling it might be possible to patch AppKit in Mac OS X 10.0 to re-enable the NEXTSTEP interface style after it was removed during the Developer Previews — and I was right! So here’s the shipping, consumer Mac OS X without Aqua turned on. It’s rather broken and crashy 11 comments
Here’s some more Mac OS X v10.0.0 with Aqua turned off in favor of Platinum, for funsies. As you can see, the UI is in a state of pure chaos. Many apps crash, open/save panels show no UI, window backgrounds are all over the place  @stroughtonsmith why did Finder retain its Aqua appearance? Is it because it was Carbon instead of Cocoa/AppKit? I whipped up a little library to inject into previously-crashing apps, like Mail, awkwardly patching NSDrawer and NSToolbar support back into Platinum 😅 Even getting Project Builder up and running required a bunch of little tweaks. It’s fun to know that it would be entirely plausible to patch Aqua almost completely out of the early versions of Mac OS X. I had no idea any of this survived, in such a complete form, past the Developer Previews/PB Bonus screenshot of OmniGraffle running in the OPENSTEP-style interface, on Mac OS X v10.0  @stroughtonsmith I wasn’t a fan of Aqua. But looking at this, it was definitely the right decision. @craiggrannell It's just a hack - for sure Platinum would be quite nice if they decide to keep it. Although this revolution in form of Aqua was definitely worth it, unique, and brought attention to Mac OS X Very soon Windows XP followed with their own Luna theme (yet much less spectacular & sophisticated)  @stroughtonsmith That looks really cool! Looks similar to the older versions of Gnome!  |
Gregory's Server
I did it by returning NSNextStepInterfaceStyleDefaultValue from __NSGlobalInterfaceStyle, a four-byte patch. Have fun!