How on god's green earth is a 30 year old operating system more customizable and user-friendly than any of the modern interfaces (that includes both windows 10 and gnome)
Now we have full HD screens with 32 bit colors and HDR, powerful GPUs to draw edges as smooth AF and what did we decide to do with all of that? Use 4 colors, fill it up with whitespace and cram everything into squares.
I think the Windows 10 UI was created by a group of depressed people and it really shows.
You’ll likely get some pushback along the lines of ”We already tried that with Windows 8 and everyone hated it”, but keep pushing - quote something about Henry Ford and horses if neccessary
IIRC, they now have guidelines to not assume spacing, icon sizes, etc optimized for touch unless touch is the only interface available.
For me the worst of those is the prevalence of whitespace, and the loss of the grey background.
Grey was the greatest color for UI background, it wasn't overly bright, it won't burn your eyes like modern UIs that shine like a thousand suns, no need for separate "dark theme" because a grey theme is comfortable in all light conditions, it allowed the content color to go in two different directions (if your background is white then your content can only get darker, but if your background is grey your content can be darker or brighter than the background), and it has a clear visual separation between the grey app UI (menus, toolbars, ...) and the white content (E.G. document being edited).
Exactly this happens every time in my company. Designers and PMs wants to « educate » the user and force a strict workflow for them. They never take into account that power users exists.
Sure, most of our users are happy this way because our product replaces shitty and complex excel sheets. But I always wonder about the 1% who took the time to learn and master excel and were fast with their tool. For those people, our product must be a PITA, because their is no other (faster) way to work than the path PMs and designers decided.
But in theory: It's as customisable as you want. You "just" need to write it. The linked 3.11 project is not just a customisation - it's a whole shell just like Cairo.