The article is misguided at best. The amount of desktop customization on MacOS vastly exceeds anything that was possible on Windows 3.1 by an order of magnitud

The article is misguided at best. The amount of desktop customization on MacOS vastly exceeds anything that was possible on Windows 3.1 by an order of magnitude. Yes, tweaking the individual colors of desktop elements is more limited. However, look at the accessibility features, and you’ll find many ways of customizing the desktop that make read differences in people’s lives. This whole idea that disabling tweaking colors on the desktop theme is part of a slippery slope towards a computer ‘you don’t own’ makes no sense. Windows 3.1 was not open source. Mac OS is vastly more extensible and programmable than any desktop environment from that era. That said... I do agree that we live in a world where people who create OS’s have vast power over the experiences of those who use them, and this is not where we should be. The real step down this path came when both Apple and Microsoft copied the desktop metaphor superficially from Xerox but left behind the end user programmability of the Smalltalk and Mesa environments. Their goal was to create an environment for the delivery of shrink wrapped software. That is what Windows and the Mac were about.