Does anyone else find that modern UIs with lots of pretty grahpics are actually getting harder to use? I'm not sure if it's just me or not!

I just wonder if I'm alone in finding modern UI's cluttered with unnecessary visual features which distract the user from the task they're doing, presumably waste CPU and memory resources, and don't actually serve to make the OS/application any easier to use?

OK, you lot get my whinge for today :-) Does anyone else find that modern UIs with lots of pretty grahpics are actually getting harder to use? I'm not sure if it's just me or not! Having not used a recent Mac I can't comment there, but Windows and the more popular of the Linux desktop environments seem to be suffering the same fate in the last few years (and apps for both OS's): Clear and simple icons and buttons have been replaced with complex images (and the icons and buttons seem to have grown larger, taking up more screen space) Simple window borders have given way to windows with rounded corners, or complex colour fades and other things in the title bars. Backgrounds to UI components often seem to be images these days rather than plain colour. Colours seem to be chosen without any thought these days (as a contrived example, blue buttons with a slightly darker shade blue background panel) I just wonder if I'm alone in finding modern UI's cluttered with unnecessary visual features which distract the user from the task they're doing, presumably waste CPU and memory resources, and don't actually serve to make the OS/application any easier to use? Thoughts welcome - personally just because CPU power and memory is cheap I don't think it justifies making a user interface harder to use! In the case of interfaces where look is configurable, at least app vendors could choose the one that makes the product easier to use rather than the one filled with the most graphics... Anyway, rant over. Thankyou for tuning in :-) cheers, Jules