Honestly, I don’t know - I haven’t fiddled with the themes much on my Linux installations. All I can say is that currently, for the 3.x series, out of the box VLC looks very similar between Windows, Debian (KDE Plasma) and Linux Mint (Cinnamon) - all three of which are arguably different DEs.
A couple of other comments have flagged that this is the new 4.x UI, which certainly explains the difference.
Why does it look like what? What about its appearance are you wondering about? It looks normal to me.
Is this a distro-specific UI? It certainly doesn’t look like that on Windows, Debian or Linux Mint.
Doesn’t it use whatever theme you have your DE set to by default?
Honestly, I don’t know - I haven’t fiddled with the themes much on my Linux installations. All I can say is that currently, for the 3.x series, out of the box VLC looks very similar between Windows, Debian (KDE Plasma) and Linux Mint (Cinnamon) - all three of which are arguably different DEs.
A couple of other comments have flagged that this is the new 4.x UI, which certainly explains the difference.
Is this a Mandela effect or something? Have I been using a completely different VLC from everyone else all these years?
Oh, you mean it looks different than it used to? Maybe the defaults changed? I notice that with the beta version sometimes.