Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.
I thought that would be immediately clear to the HN crowd but I might have overestimated your aesthetic senses.
I know that not everybody spent 10 years fiddling with CSS so I can understand why a project might have a skill gap with regards to aesthetics. I'm not trying to judge their overall competence, just wanted to say that there are so many quick wins in the design it hurts me a bit to see it. And due to nature of open source projects I was talking about "empowering" a designer to improve it because oftentimes you submit a PR for aesthetic improvements and then notice that the project leaders don't care about these things, which is sad.
Too much information density is also disorienting, if not stressing. The biggest problem is finding that balance between multiple kinds of users and even individuals.
In my opinion, I believe the Tiny Core Linux GUI could use some more refinement. It seems inspired by 90s interfaces, but when compared to the interfaces of the classic Mac OS, Windows 95, OS/2 Warp, and BeOS, there’s more work to be done regarding the fit-and-finish of the UI, judging by the screenshots.
To be fair, I assume this is a hobbyist open source project where the contributors spend time as they see fit. I don’t want to be too harsh. Fit-and-finish is challenging; not even Steve Jobs-era Apple with all of its resources got Aqua right the first time when it unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. Massive changes were made between the beta and Mac OS X 10.0, and Aqua kept getting refined with each successive version, with the most refined version, in my opinion, being Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, nearly five years after the public beta.