The GUI inconsistencies in Linux are because of no universal GUI API. You have Qt, GTK, KDE, wxWidgets, just to name a few, or you could just go old school and use X directly. Windows OTOH has (had) a single GUI API, you could always override it's behavior or write your own, but from a cost point of view it never made sense to reinvent the wheel and risk compatibility as well as inconsistent GUI behavior between versions. Applications like the GIMP which have a windows port suffer with windows GUI integration because it uses a windows port of GTK.
But I guess that is the nature of open source... If something doesn't work as it "should" open source developers don't weigh in the financial cost in time to write their own version that works how they would like it to work, simply because they are writing it for their own personal satisfaction, on their own time.
Imo, this is the main weaknes of Linux in penetrating the desktop market.
Average Joe and grandma don't care which one is uber superior GUI either with killer features or the slim&mean one, they need consistency across any computers they use.
I'm a Linux noob, just few months ago, while trying latest downloaded Fedora, I accidentally broke the GUI and ended up can not boot into GUI anymore, only the command prompt after booting and left me no clue how to proceed. Though I managed to bring it out again with the instruction from Googling "AT THE 2ND COMPUTER". User with one PC (and no other internet access like from smartphone/tablet) is definitely screwed.
And no, I didn't tweak or changed any system configurations, nor SU and did some silly changes. Just all thru standard Fedora supplied GUI apps.
Until today, I'm quite surprised that it is still very easy to break the GUI rendered the PC only can boot up with command prompt. If I remembered it right, I only did an online auto update as the recommendation, and its a new X370 AMD mobo, that was it, after the upgrade, it failed to boot up the GUI which was not a problem when it was installed 1st.
It feels like the old days when using earlier Linux that was standard came with X, that was so easy to break it, and left the user ended up with text mode command prompt.
Exactly like the nostalgic Windows 3.1 era that we had to boot into DOS prompt 1st and then type Win to launch the GUI, the problem is avg. Joe even doesn't have any idea to type the "WIN" at the prompt to launch the WIN.COM executable. Of course advanced user can tweak the AUTOEXEC.BAT if its broken that makes it to launch windows automatically at booting, but the problem is avg Joe doesn't know heck wtf is that, let alone asking them to launch a text mode editor to edit that batch file. Edlin ? Copy con autoexec.bat ?
End of Linux noob rant.