Back then about just anything was better looking than Windows 95. OS/2 was slick. Mac computers had a very enjoyable UI. SGI machines had a very good looking UI.
But people mostly only knew Windows 95, so that's what they remember.
I would say that Win95 aesthetics was about someone with an actual good taste taking Motif and making it not suck. Remember how selecting menu items by hovering was BIG? Coming from Windows 3.1/3.11, the usability improvement of this alone was massive. Same with mouse wheel becoming ubiquitous, courtesy of Microsoft (they weren't the first, but it's thanks to them that everyone and their dog could actually make use of it).
Another thing about Win95 aesthetics (which peaked at the time of Windows 2000) was the extreme consistency which had been simply absent before that in the DOS/Win3/PC world. Maybe Apple could brag about it too, can't say about SGI (was it all like Motif in all applications, with colors/hotkeys set platform-wide, or was it the ugly Motif/Xaw/Athena mix seen elsewhere and each application having a mind of its own?). Man, you can't find it these days, especially since Electron.
I'm purposely omitting Qt/GTK, as they have always felt like also-ran toolkits, mimicking the conventions of the platforms they inhabited, and I can't for the life of me remember when it was that they actually set any trends instead of mimicking some hotness of the day introduced by the dominant platforms.
Thing about GTK and QT though, is they are extremely relevant in 2023. I use QT at work and as a nerd that reads spaces like this I hear those acronyms basically every day - conversely, other than these, we have all been saying names of things that essentially don't exist anymore.
Not here to fight, but I dunno, slow and steady wins the race I guess?
I thought they were all similarly ugly. Thought so then and still do now. Drab grays and muted colors for miles. (Ignoring utility here.) Uglier stuff could be found off the beaten path, though.
