Having a start menu that read "na85" in lieu of "Start" made teenage me feel like the leetest of haxors.
I think we all had some kind of a username and password with which we were supposed to log in. Except that, of course, in Win 9x it's really only a login to the network (for whatever it was used for -- access to file shares or something?), and to access just about whatever in the OS you can just hit "cancel" and be in.
It replaces the always animating Windows 10 start menu with something more simple.
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.
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.
there's a lot I don't understand about people, though, so this isn't some profound comment or anything.
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.