Geeze, that's a blast from the past. You know it's funny- I used to periodically go looking for things to customize my desktop experience. This, those little dogs and cats, Rainmeter, Amiga workbench hacks, etc. etc. Nowadays- I supposed finally burned by enough malware and having become curmudgeonly- I want the most minimal "plain vanilla" setup I can get and pride myself in hardly ever installing _anything_.
That made me think back to running litestep as an alternative shell on my Windows98 computer and occasionally having to pull the drive and mount it in another system to recover it when I blew it up with a bad configuration.
I have a vague memory of being able to change the windows 98 startup screen image ( where it says windows 98 ). I changed a bunch of HS computers to say nindows 88 by "photoshoping" it in ms paint.
Ah, the security of Windows 98 on common-use school computers.
I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.
I kind of - and I am not being sarcastic - miss running every antivirus on earth as well. Finding and using software was such a thrill back then. The antivirus programs were important incantations against the evils that permeated the internet. It’s since lost that magic for me.
I love how an application which modifies the UI of windows does not have a single screenshot showing the application on their website. What is going on with this trend?
press and release windows key, type the name of the application you want, press enter.
same as windows 7.
why would I need a different shell? last time I tried one, almost 20 years ago, it crashed continually and was therefore completely useless. same with all of the stardock software I bought. garbage, all of it.
Except that if it doesn’t find thr application it will search Bing if you aren’t using Windows 10 Enterprise. This can’t be turned off unless you edit the registry. I was furious when I figured this out.
Years ago I found a great Chrome/FF extension called "Bing2Google" where any search from the start menu that gets sent to either browser is automatically re-directed to Google instead. I was more furious when they changed that to always open Edge instead of your preferred browser.
it has little to do with age, to me, though it is far more common in older people: you value your time, and spending ages customizing everything does not help you reach your goals, so you just don't do it.
is there a need for that? I get having a mechanical keyboard hobby, that makes sense, and I don't get that there is a need to customize your stuff for customization's sake only.
there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.
What does Rainmeter has to do with any of the other examples? It is still a very popular framework, and the only good solution on displaying external data on windows desktop (which, I think still a better place for home user dashboarding than some browser tab)
Same, and I follow this so dogmatically that it actually pisses me off when software I use changes the defaults drastically, _even though the options to customize the behavior are stil there_.
About 10 years ago, I took a background with 2 cats and pinned window-decoration-less xeyes to them. It was hilarious when I paired with people and they would realize the cats were watching us.
Even at the time, most folks had forgotten or never knew about xeyes.
I did use to customize everything in the late 90s/early 2000s. I loved Sawmill/Sawfish for its lispy extensibility. I was constantly flipping between heavy desktop environments and seeing how stripped down I could run.
Nowadays I don't even change the wallpaper on my mac. I don't use any fancy shell prompt (just host$).
I do still have a ~200 line shell rc just to make all my oses consistent (macos, freebsd, redhat, debian/ubuntu) and deal with junk like my ssh-agent. I change a line or two every year or so. And my neovim config is in flux. But most everything else I use is just OOB.
I should say I did fall in love with chezmoi for managing config like this a couple years back and still use it religiously.
