This is more akin to Disney saying, “We hate mice! Disney is now a chain of casinos and we’re rebranding to 🅱️!”

Could almost be similar to the situation that forced Musk to buy Twitter in the first place, because he of course tweeted that Twitter would never be Twitter again and they were ‘getting rid of the bird’”.

There are more details in the article and older articles linked as well.

I’ve been trying to find a source but from what I remember the transition was in maybe Munich and it was going fine.

Microsoft opened a new sales or operation center there and got cozy with the government there as quickly as possible to turn them back into a customer.

EDIT: Here is the LiMux endeavor.

Microsoft had announced in 2013 its willingness to move its German headquarters to Munich in 2016, which according to Reiter though, is unrelated to the criticism they’ve presented against the LiMux project.

I tested it in my iPad and it’s an eyesore and genuinely less readable.

In a simple mechanical sense the glass effects are well done but they create ugly imperfections when covering different backgrounds. In my opinion Windows Aero was more tasteful.

There is also a degradation when it comes to buttons and control frameworks. In previous versions of iOS it was easier to determine what was a control layer and what was a content layer in the UI. Now the content layers are minimized or even hidden for a non appreciable “aesthetic gain” I think in a quest to further make the UI look less technical, in an user interface that already has been made less readable by previous aesthetic considerations (the removal of obvious buttons, which, from an IT standpoint, I run into issues with every day where a user cannot determine what is a control element vs what is a design element)

sixcolors posted a great breakdown on icon regression as well. A lot of icons look downright sloppy or almost like placeholders while penalizing previously well designed icons by third party devs that don’t conform by putting them in the community-coined “bubble jail”.

In short, there is a distinct lack of taste and a poor execution of ideas that is also hostile to third parties who produce software that looks better than this new paradigm.