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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
by shireboy 5y ago
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_.
- sethhochberg 5y agoI have very fond memories of Rainmeter (and WindowBlinds, etc) - but much like you, these days I can't be bothered. It was a fun era 15ish years ago.
- derefr 5y agoKids today are still doing it. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/. We’re just old.
- naikrovek 5y agoit 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.
- bserge 5y agoPlus, who even sees their desktop these days? :D
- raverbashing 5y agoExactly I either have a terminal window full screen or a browser I think "Desktop Customization" were for the times we had to kill before the internet got so commonplace.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoAnd before we had sprint goals and a big pile of PRs to review
- bloopernova 5y agoThis is why I think some folks spend so much time on customizing their mechanical keyboards. The need to decorate one's own space.
- naikrovek 5y agois 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.
- 7thaccount 5y agoSame. I had Bonzi buddy as a kid, but try to avoid pretty much all apps now.
- poisonborz 5y agoWhat 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)
- Kuraj 5y agoSame, 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_.
- bashinator 5y agoOne word: xroach
- mangamadaiyan 5y agoxeyes too
- bashinator 5y agoHah, dating to when the OS being aware of the mouse pointer location was novel.
- salmo 5y agoAbout 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.
- smackeyacky 5y agoSadly xroach appears to be missing from debian. A quick search indicates the source is encumbered somehow. Xeyes is still there though
- bashinator 5y agoIt’s not in the distribution, but some kind soul updated the source code for modern compilers. https://github.com/interkosmos/xroach https://github.com/interkosmos/xroach
- wolpoli 5y agoOne great program that I recommend for Windows users looking for a plain vanilla set up is Open-Shell-Menu. https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/ https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/ It replaces the always animating Windows 10 start menu with something more simple.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y agoI 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?
- naikrovek 5y agoare you aware that software installations and customizations take you further away from "vanilla", rather than closer to it?
- goinfar 5y agoHave you tried the classic shell? It is a first for me with any new windows install.
- bigmadwolf 5y agoOpen-Shell-Menu is a fork of Classic shell which is no longer updated since December 2017.
- naikrovek 5y agothe windows 10 shell is fine. 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.
- wincy 5y agoExcept 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.
- mrfusion 5y agoI miss that sense of wonder from the early computing days.
- itomato 5y agoMe too. “I wonder if these three pages of BASIC I typed in will run?”
- na85 5y agoI lost at least a week when I figured out you could change the WinXP start menu text with a hex editor and went down the rabbit hole from there. Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.
- exporectomy 5y agoHaha. I wondered what "na85" meant so I looked up Urban Dictionary and it turns out you're the authority on "1337".
- bemmu 5y agoI recall there was a little window cleaner guy that would go around your screen with a ladder. Maybe it was on the Amiga?