> Do I change the settings app JUST to look different than OS X, and lose out on the well-established excellence of Apple's design?

I want to single that statement out and go on from there. I'm a bit hesitant to write this comment because, well, I'm about to criticize you and Apple, and at least the latter tends to invite downvotes and a not so nice discussion. But I think it is important to try to get that message across.

When I see an OS X clone or designers trying to copy OS X, like Ubuntu did with Unity (placing the windows title buttons to the left just because, global menu and so on) I don't think it is bad because it is copying something. I feel when something like this happens like an opportunity is missed to do something better, and that someone must have made the decision who sees himself as designer and uses OS X and now copies OS X. Which is bad mainly because: The "well established excellence of Apple's design" is questionable. It is just not there, from my perspective.

Apple made good stuff. The iPhone was groundbreaking, like maybe other of their stuff before - I won't argue with that. But that doesn't mean all of it is great. And especially on the software side. When judging the software I tend to think that it is not always that great - one finds clear usability errors, weird graphical designs, whole concepts that only seem to work for people being strongly accustomed to them. To copy them blindly leads to disaster, not only when copying the errors Apple made, also when copying sound concepts.

Take the global menu Ubuntu copied. It sacrifices visibility and therefore discoverability of the menu items for visual appeal. And yes, that leads to issues - just yesterday I looked a guy over the shoulder on a crypto party who came from windows, had unity freshly installed and didn't find the option he should have because it simply wasn't visible. I had to show him that the item was hidden, that he had to hover the global menu bar. Clearly, from an usability perspective, Unity became worse because it tried to copy OS X (guess which system its designer at the time was using. You won't need three tries.).

What I'm trying to say is: You say you tried to come up with your own design. I applaud that. And now you copied something which was there, which is alright (though to copy the Mac OS Icons is a ripoff in bad style, completely unnecessary, even if that wasn't you fault). But I want to invite you to free yourself from the thinking that a design is excellent because it is made by Apple. Don't fall into this trap. Don't regard good design as process which is a restyling of old Linux programs with their own design history or windows influenced stuff to stuff that looks and feel like OS X and therefore is good. Stuff is good because it works and is beautiful or whatever you want to achieve, and it is not necessary to copy Apple when trying to build something useable and beautiful. And it is especially not necessary that when already copying Apple, then even to copy the visual characteristics like the icons or the colours or the font. Elementary is a name in some circles by now already - please use that to try to find your own style (Linux would profit!).

Maybe you personally don't even do this. Maybe you are not a designer who uses OS X and defines himself by that and therefore only copies OS X. But the presentation of the elementary OS sure gives the feeling that this is exactly what happened - OS X guys building what they already have, just in "free", just running under Linux. That would be a pity, because the Linux desktop can use people trying to design it into a better form - what it doesn't need is to become OS X.

PS: It would've been really easy to find better categories. That the whole thing is just x sections with one or more rows of Icons in it, that is alright - one could easily come up with that solution when designing it from scratch, it is sound. But why the section names? Just by glancing on it one has to realize there are other possible and sound options.