buried deep in the archives of my Pictures folder are a few desktop screenshots from 10+ years ago, when I was big into custom themes for Windows Vista/7, and later Ubuntu. most of them were pretty garish without the nostalgia glasses, but to teenage Ash, it was pretty dazzling that you could do this at all. on Windows, you invariably had to swap out some shell resource DLLs to install custom themes, which is almost certainly a security hazard in retrospect.

you could find all kinds of system themes on DeviantArt - they had their own dedicated subcategory! in a way, it elevated this form of personalization to something you were, like, supposed to do. I don't know if modern-day DeviantArt made categories way harder to find or if they've just been completely supplanted by tags, but the discoverability factor seems to be a lot lower now. not only that, but Windows 10 ripped out a bunch of the Vista/7 era code that made really unique themes possible, particularly the ones that made use of the frosted glass effect. the Win10 shell modifications I've found so far seem like fairly simple color & icon swap jobs, and anything that tries to go further looks as janky & misaligned as ever.

I've been trying to figure out what the state-of-the-art is for desktop customization on Linux (insofar as I can without installing it - I currently have too many load-bearing dependencies on Windows to go back) and it's left me with the sense that even the die-hard computer nerds stopped caring. all the themes & discussions about them are from 5 years ago at the latest, usually more like a full decade. compiz seems to be unmaintained (though probably still functional?) and none of the themes for actively-maintained window managers seem particularly inspiring to me.

I know this feeling is partly garden-variety nostalgia. it's not that you can't do any of this stuff anymore, it's that our expectations for computers have changed. your desktop is no longer your sanctuary when you spend so much of your time on a mobile device instead. the tech companies who make our daily-driver GUIs know this, and they prioritize accordingly. Microsoft probably excised Aero from Windows because it was too power-hungry for lower-end systems (not to mention aesthetically dated). fewer and fewer of the building blocks of dwm.exe are images you can just swap out, probably because a "pixel" is a meaningless unit when designing an interface for every damn device you can run Windows on. this whole aftermarket of edited DLLs was built on a floodplain anyway; it was never going to last.

default Windows 10 looks fine; it's inoffensive. I just wish they gave us more knobs to turn than a background, an accent color, and light / dark mode.