Windows 10's dark theme basically has this problem: it makes everything #000000 black, which is not most people usually want. It's really tiring to the eyes and I switched back to the light theme instantly.
Most applications look very weird on Windows 10 dark mode, especially some older Win32 apps that were not clearly designed around a dark theme. Windows Explorer looks particularly bad IMHO, it's just too dark and the icons clash badly with those almost pitch black folder backgrounds.
I generally avoid dark themes because 1. they are IMHO very ugly, 2. I find that "night mode" apps like redshift are much better for tired eyes, and 3. I noticed that black themes users often end up keeping a higher screen brightness level than me, which counters IMHO any benefit you may ever gain from night mode.
I don't understand how anyone can read white on black without their eyes hurting.
When I first tried it out I was instantly taken aback at how MS had used full black for their darkmode. Not suprising, considering their inability to implement reasonable design, but ridiculous nonetheless. I can't fathom how no one on their design team stepped back and thought 'maybe there's a reason dark mode is usually a dark grey instead of black'.
> When I first tried it out I was instantly taken aback at how MS had used full black for their darkmode. Not suprising, considering their inability to implement reasonable design, but ridiculous nonetheless. I can't fathom how no one on their design team stepped back and thought 'maybe there's a reason dark mode is usually a dark grey instead of black'.
It is most likely due to AMOLED and their big investment in mobile technology (Surface, etc.) I imagine a lot of them have AMOLED screens, so a pure-black dark mode pays off here. Nevertheless, I can't imagine it would be hard to just let people choose the colour of the dark variant, like GTK / Qt theming systems do on Linux.
Not designing for a variety of displays and viewing conditions is frowned upon in general, but should be inconceivable for a company the size of any MS org.
On that note, this is one of the reasons I still use a 1x display as my main. Currently it’s a comically large 43” 4k@1x, so it’s only representative of “normal” usage when I remember to shrink windows, but still.
White text on black is terrible with LCDs, but with OLED it is wonderful. Imagine dimming your screen just right, the only thing you can see is the text you want to read. It is much more easy on the eyes than even paper or e ink devices IMO, as long as the display isn't turned up too bright.
