Also, Linux desktops had very nice themes back in the gtk2 days. Now not so much anymore (they do have themes, but they all look boring somehow).
Like, gnome/kde/etc can't ship some solarpunk slippy slidy tiling config for the same reason that Word can't save-and-exit with :wq
But the customization is alive and strong!
Compiz-style effects live on in gnome, cinnamon, hyprland...
hyprland in general lets you config just about anything.
WaylandCraft is a thing [0]
I personally use sway as I can just run all my windows without the chrome as windows are meant to be.
[0] https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft
oh, and reddit link below the fold, but look at this thing and tell me customization is dead: https://www.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1tw5x6e/final_ric...
So far I'm avoiding wayland (tried omarchy once, didn't really warm up to it), but maybe I'll try again.
Now many (like myself) who tinkered to make their setup just so now just want things to work but perhaps with a few custom options (wallpaper, overall app chrome colours, a few tweaks to the syntax highlighting & folding in our editors), and most “general public” users care even less, so there isn't the demand to warrant maintaining the extra code needed to allow more complete customisation at the window manager or app level. For those that want that, fun tools like this pop up.
There are a couple important carve-outs: 1. The UI is rendered on the GPU now so it’s harder to mess with. 2. A certain amount of customizability is also a security attack surface.
With that out of the way:
MS was already cracking down in the WinXP days. WinXP had a theming engine built in and people made their own themes at first. Within a couple Windows updates they required theme signing, and later the theme engines were removed.
Apple was a little more insidious. Pre-OSX had all sort of interesting opportunities that OSX didn’t bring forward, but even what OSX did have got slowly closed through “api standardization”. System calls getting deprecated one version, disabled or flagged the next. UI paradigms getting thrown out causing applications to be orphaned. Rosetta RIP, etc. On the iOS side customization is functionality impossible as the landscape is openly hostile. Root jailbreak was used for all sorts of fun things as it is the only way to install a modified app or modify the memory of a stock app or add a program that can interact “above” apps and for the people who could do it they went ham even as each window closed and each dev gave up trying to keep up.
I think people would absolutely customize their ... Windows.