I still keep thinking about the time right before the pandemic when I was at the grocery store and the cashier guy said “I don’t know about this whole Corvid 14 thing”
I think summer starts in June, but still very cute and I’m happy for kitty to have nice warm tiles. Bonus points for being able to surveil everyone from on-high.
Plasma “get new stuff” does need an overhaul though, after a poorly-coded theme could wipe a guy’s drives. So careful what you install and always have backups, kids!
THAT BEING SAID:
I remember Win98 letting you customize wallpapers for individual folders.
I remember being a Win-ME kiddie that was thrilled with all the fun wallpaper/icon/sound/screensaver themes it came with. . .even though Windows ME lol.
Then XP was so bright and vibrant and fun I didn’t care too bad that it let you choose from THREE dazzling color schemes. I also loved that StarDock cursor freeware that gave me a bunch of obnoxious animated cursors.
Vista’s desktop applets seemed so neat except for the “massive security hole” part.
And here we are with 10 or 11: [Pulsing blue light] “We’Re sEtTiNg Up YoU’Re bLaNd DeSkToP…get hypnotized by spinny circles and forget you once had choices.”
It’s going so backwards, and they think they’re so ahead of the curve by letting you tint your theme based on wallpaper color. Pffft.
Since I switched to Plasma I’ve had SO MUCH FUN setting up my desktop however I want it. I have a laptop install that feels like “Vaporwave XP”, but my main rig is all efficient and sleek and pretty, and I get the urge to flip it all around every few months. It makes personal computing feel personal again!
Mimicking old themes is especially fun because you’re still on a security-patched system that works the way you expect, but with improved nostalgic feelings!
I really want to learn to make my own splash screens and icons and cursors some time. The fact that I easily can do this and the community could enjoy them is SO COOL.
I miss when it was commonplace for people to customize and personalize their computers. It would say a lot about them. Now most normie folk don’t even know how to change the wallpaper…
Why is everybody so obsessed with tweaking and customizing an OS?! My systems are pretty much vanilla and apart from the file browser I hardly use any active OS features.
I remember in XP, Vista and 7 using the UXtheme dll mod to get third party themes. First the loss of the sidebar then the drop-off of themers. I skipped 8 and by 10 I'd had enough. Didn't really come back to theming until I made the jump to full-time Linux in 2022. Theming support being there by default in KDE is amazing. I miss the 2007-2018 themes but Oxygen keeps me happy for now.
The uxtheme thing was great because it was pretty powerful, and since it was just the standard theming system built-in to Windows, it was more reliable than theming systems that required third-party apps (WindowBlinds being the most common one).
Apparently uxtheme patching still works on Windows 11, but I haven’t tried it.
They weren’t though… I used to love the stardock stuff especially. But they were objectively inferior. I also couldn’t run hyprland or sway with nearly every part replaced by an unconventional replacement like the friggin notifications daemon for example. Even on Plasma, i could literally replace the entire shell. And even on GNOME, I could add an “extension” that essentially replaces the GNOME workflow.
As much as I enjoyed those days of windows customisation, it was far too shallow compared to what i can do on a Linux setup. Will i do all that though? Probably not, i like my Plasma setup as it is right now.
i’m talking about being vastly superior to the built in theme options in windows since it implied third party tools were “bloat” instead of being genuinely useful.
slrpnk.net
Hot