[Ayesh]

XP was the peak of desktop customizations. There were "theme packs", one of the most popular being a Vista Theme Pack.

The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter, desktop CPU-o-meter dials to a whole modern look.

[flohofwoe]

I'd argue that Linux desktop was always the peak of customization via themes, and today remains the last platform to even allow such customization. Most Linux desktop themes don't look all that great (simply because of the '90% of everything is crap' rule), but there are a few really great ones that are aesthetically much more pleasing than both Win10 and macOS (of course this is very personal and subjective, which makes it all the more important to allow theming).

[kzrdude]

Old Mac OS - System 7.5 days and thereabouts had a really great theming situation, with Kaleidoscope schemes making it possible to change everything. I remember I made my own.

Something like this shows the diversity in themes:

https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25

Wayback machine link

https://web.archive.org/web/20040404162223fw_/http://www.kal...

[dannyw]

What are your favourites?

[flohofwoe]

I currently use Adapta Nokto on Ubuntu.

[boomboomsubban]

It's the peak of customization yet the community is full of people saying "I didn't like GNOME's palette so I use Plasma now." I never know how to respond to those people. If they're happy, whatever, but it feels like most people are unaware themes exist.

[BearOso]

To be fair, themes are only grudgingly supported by gnome. KDE has more available configurability for color schemes, but the number of Qt themes that handle everything correctly and look good is small.

I think resolution-independence has made creating themes much more difficult, and not a lot of people are up to the task.

[im3w1l]

Windows can still be customized a lot.

[nip180]

Are you aware of the very large number of desktop environments and window managers available on *nix systems?

“Skins” were popular in the windows ecosystem around XP, but it was far from the peak of customization.

[xyzzy_plugh]

It was definitely the peak. I was heavily involved in several communities, and also ran plenty of other desktops environments, but XP had the largest following by far. The sheer number of websites devoted to skinning XP was astounding. Popular websites had thousands and thousands of themes. Winamp 3 was thriving too.

It was most definitely peak customization.

[anthk]

Ha.

Fluxbox itself. Fvwm. Enlightenment. Sawfish.

With fluxbox you had over 1000 themes. And winamp skins worked on xmms.

Also, fvwm was so distinct that you could have tablet like setups before even tablets existed, even with those infamous thumbnail minimizations, but in 2004.

[Shared404]

Maybe peak community, I don't know about that.

But r/unixporn disagrees about peak amount of customization.

[m463]

the odds were good, but the goods were odd :)

[sudosysgen]

Even with that scale, the capabilities and ahievements are nowehere near what can be done with a proper *nix DE.

[slipheen]

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the extent to which people altered things, such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

[solarkraft]

Speaking off shell replacements: Are there any worthwhile ones today? I know Cairo, but it's "meh". The windows default shell is just buggy and glitchy as hell (even though I generally mostly like it - a version with fewer glitches would be enough for me, really).

[cpach]

AFAIK: No. These days the default Windows WM seem to dominate. I don’t know of any viable alternatives to it.

[sudosysgen]

I did run LiteStep actually, it's still not nearly as much customization as what is possible nowadays with modern DEs.

LiteStep is amazingly customizable and versatile, but it doesn't come close to being able to, for example, define pixel shaders in a theme, or being able to easily change any UI element anywhere using simple HTML/CSS, or completely switching paradigms by just changing around a few dotfiles.

[anthk]

Not even DE. Fluxbox had literally thousands of styles. And fvwm powned ANY DE and Windows OS.

[count]

Enlightenment got me into linux, and when I discovered you couldn't run it on Windows, I discovered Litestep. And then spent so, so many hours of my life tweaking themes. Ahh, memories.

[based2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(software)

[factorialboy]

Most Linux desktop environments disagree. :)

[zokula]

> XP was the peak of desktop customizations.

XP theme customizations wasn't even close to what you could do on Unix at the time.

[anthk]

Compared to fvwm or KDE3 xp was a damn joke.

[ekianjo]

> XP was the peak of desktop customizations.

Only if you consider computing is limited to Windows/Mac.