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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I truly miss working in software in the early 2000's. We were all using XP but it was all customized up the wazoo. Almost all of us had custom themes and icons and what not.

I ran a Mac at home, and had that customized as well, I forget the name of the app that would install custom themes/docks, but CandyBar would install custom icon sets.

Now days most people don't even bother to change their wallpaper. Live a little!

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I feel like the cost of housing along with layoff culture has caused an underlying sense of desperation, software isn’t fun when you’re just trying to avoid being homeless/deported

More likely is that was most of your online entertainment, while today people are mostly hooked on cheap sugar that is social media/short content (me included unfortunately)

Fwiw, you'll be happier and more secure at a stable Midwest company than a trendy coastal company. In my twenty years of doing this, I know personally two developers who were laid off, one of whom was hired back after COVID calmed down.

Anyway I think your proposal is flatly absurd. People stopped changing their wallpaper because of housing prices? Shoosh

I used to use Litestep on 2000 and XP, it had such a big community and feature set.

> Now days most people don't even bother to change their wallpaper. Live a little!

There are some nice communities around custom desktops, like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?t=year (despite the odd name)

For other OSes there’s also https://www.reddit.com/r/desktops/top/?t=year

That said, for many the defaults are sufficient and I guess people just use what’s there out of the box to get things done.

Rainmeter[1] is also quite alive on the Windows side.

[1] https://www.rainmeter.net/

Maybe Kaleidoscope? There was also the built in Appearance Manager, but it wasn't supported after Jobs returned around 8.5 and wanted a more consistent interface.

>> We were all using XP but it was all customized up the wazoo.

Agreed.

I worked at a huge corporation for one of my first developer gigs. All the devs were super into desktop mods and customizing everything to the hilt. It was crazy to think we all had these third party apps running on our corporate laptops. I know I had my laptop completely crash twice and needed it replaced because one of the apps I loved, I installed an extension for it and turned out it was malware. Other devs had similar things happen too.

As a developer it was like the Wild West back then, you had complete and utter freedom to do what you wanted with your hardware. The funny thing was the hardware support people didn't even blink at all the stuff you had installed either, they just shrugged and downloaded your ROM to a new laptop and sent you on your way.

Hah, so we were a very small ~40 person company.

We didn't have a dedicated IT department, we had a customer support person who doubled as IT. When he failed, we had a very knowledgeable guy who ran our servers remotely from Alaska.

When something went wrong with our computers, it was almost always down to us to fix them.

I miss those days. Everything is so serious now days. It was a lot more fun back then.

> I forget the name of the app that would install custom themes/docks

Shapeshifter! Those were the days...

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