I want Linux-like anarchy^H^H^Hthemability on Windows and macOS. I'm not keen on tweaking the appearance of every little button, but I want to go 'theme-shopping' from time to time and change the appearance of my desktop. Just to make it look a bit different now and then.
It's interesting that the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash, but the remaining 1% are a lot more aesthetically pleasing than both the current Win10 and macOS themes).
The themeability ran on anarchy but on the community-organized kind. Users expected apps to use the Desktop's toolkit and having their custom widgets respond well to theme engines.
But that's only for KDE nowadays, there was a period where GNOME was breaking theming with new releases and its maintainers argued for why they just supported the standard Adwaita theme and not anything else. KDE comes with a historic sloppiness at the individual application level, you'll quickly notice that padding, margins, lines, orientation are all over the place and it's just how KDE application developers roll.
> the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash
I read that as 99% of the Linux desktops being trash.
There are a number of desktop environments, but calling any of these "trash" is pretty harsh and subjective, even for something as barebones as weston.
For theme, icon, color packs, etc, for any desktop environment, I agree. That's always been the case for most user-generated content anyway.
But you do see a lot of subjectively great styles on reddit.com/r/unixporn, even for environments such as windowmaker or fluxbox!
It's interesting that the most slick and stylish desktops are now on Linux (of course there's 99% trash, but the remaining 1% are a lot more aesthetically pleasing than both the current Win10 and macOS themes).