I agree wholeheartedly with this (2019) post. I’m still very much a fan of customizations, forever mourning the end of easy tweaking of icons and themes on non-Linux. I used to “refresh” my desktop every two or three years, but nowadays tweaking Windows or MacOS is unsustainable: every couple of months an update will likely break all your carefully-laid-out hacks, and the knowledge is getting harder and harder to acquire. So I limit myself to wallpapers, browsers, and IDEs (IntelliJ is quite skinnable).
I understand the rationale for the market evolving as it did: the world of computers is now much seedier than it was in the ‘90s... every customisation option will be jumped on by malware writers of all sorts. Tweakers are now effectively banished from commercial vendors, but at least we’ll always have Linux.
I understand the rationale for the market evolving as it did: the world of computers is now much seedier than it was in the ‘90s... every customisation option will be jumped on by malware writers of all sorts. Tweakers are now effectively banished from commercial vendors, but at least we’ll always have Linux.