History of my Desktop
Wanna see the desktops of the computers I've owned over the years? No? Tough luck.
2014
This is as far back as I have screenshots of. This was on my first computer, a dinky little Inspiron laptop I got for Christmas one year. Ironically, I remember wanting a Wii U and being dissapointed by the laptop instead. With the gift of hindsight and knowing what my passion is now, I'm glad I got the laptop.
The laptop came with Windows 8.1, which I only have one measly photo of. This is the super old Minecraft launcher. This was part of a tutorial I posted a random old Minecraft server forum about how to downgrade your Minecraft version to fix an issue with skins or something.
When the free upgrade to Windows 10 was offered, I took it and remembered liking it at first. However, it began to slow down my aging laptop, and around 2016 I got into computers and Linux. I was only curious about it at first, however after accidentally causing my system to not boot after changing something in Windows, I got fed up with it and wiped the entire drive and replaced it with Linux Mint. I didn't even bother to save anything, which I deeply regret. Speaking of Linux Mint...
2017
Thankfully, I do have screenshots from this era. Not a ton, but a couple that I took to show off my desktop at least. Linux Mint actually saves your screenshots you take to the hard drive by default, while Windows only copies them to the clipboard. I actually mained Linux Mint for about a year without ever touching Windows from what I remember, as the games I wanted to play (mainly Minecraft and Team Fortress 2) worked well enough on it. I also learned to get into older FPS games like Doom and Quake to make the most of my weaker hardware, and source ports of them ran great. This screenshot is of the Cinnamon desktop that Linux Mint came with circa March 2017. I think I customized the window bar at the top but that's about it. I actually miss this design of Firefox a lot.
Later in the year, I got into various Linux customization related communities and wanted to try something new. So, I installed the LXDE desktop, a desktop that is meant to be more lightweight on system resources than what I'd been using before. It probably actually didn't impact my daily usage that much, but I enjoyed tweaking my desktop and it made me feel cool, so that's what mattered. I also learned a little bit of the terminal, so here's my neofetch circa August 2017, with an appropriately angsty color scheme.
Some time in late 2017, I think I did something to my Linux install that caused it to not be able to boot. I also wanted to play games on Windows that didn't run well under Wine for me, like Cuphead. So I abandoned my little neckbeard for a while and actually installed Windows 7 onto the laptop, which ran great and I was happy with it. I don't have any screenshots from that, but I did use the Classic theme, so I guess even back then I was a hipster.
Thankfully, my parents let me get components to build my own PC with a shiny new GTX 1060 for Christmas, so I wouldn't have to be stuck with that laptop anymore. This leads into the next section...
2019
On my new PC, I installed Windows 10 since I didn't want to have to replace Windows 7 later down the line. I was happy to finally play more graphically demanding games like PUBG and DOOM 2016. For my desktop, I wanted some widgets that didn't look too flashy or out of place, so I found some for Rainmeter that fit that criteria. They also didn't work half the time but I still liked them. This desktop is from January 2019, but it didn't change much at all from 2018 all the way to 2022.
Does that mean I stopped wanting to play around with Linux desktops? Of course not. Over the next few years I had various dual boot setups that I created, wiped, and created again. I forget how many times I did this, but it was a lot. A lot of stuff is lost from these because I never bothered to keep any files I had on the Linux installs I set up. This one is of an Ubuntu desktop changed to look vaugely like Mac OS, circa June 2019. This one actually looks pretty good. I like how the icons on the dock look.
2021
Skipping a year again, since I have nothing from 2020 saved. As you can see, as of January 2021, the Windows side of things barely changed for me at all. Just some widgets moved around, with a new weather one added that only partially worked.
On the Linux side of things, here's a random Ubuntu install I set up around February 2021. I think I was trying to make it feel more like Windows, but evidently I didn't get very far.
Later, in April, I tried out an Arch-based distro for the first time, EndeavourOS. Basically it's Arch Linux but with a graphical installer. I tried my hand at using a tiling window manager, i3. As you can see, I didn't manage to configure anything too impressive. I'm pretty sure I just copied someone else's config for the bar at the top. I learned that I didn't really like tiling window managers all that much, since my dumb monkey brain defaults to using the mouse.
After this, I would move to my current desktop of choice, KDE Plasma. Here is a screenshot of my multi-monitor setup. I was using a custom theme called Commonality that makes KDE look more like CDE, a Unix desktop from the 90's. I was actually trying to modify it to give it a nice purple and pink color scheme, but it only ever got half-finished. The second screen is actually an old CRT monitor that was just sitting on a neighbor's porch waiting to be thrown out, so I snagged it for myself. You may notice a familiar wallpaper on the second screen. As for what I'm editing on GIMP, your guess is as good as mine.
I actually tried to change my desktop up every season, so there would be a color scheme for fall, winter, etc. but I don't have any of them saved sadly.
2022
This year, I wanted to try something a little different. First, I decided to actually install full Arch instead of just EndeavourOS. And of course, by that I meant install EndeavourOS and run a script that replaced the branding with Arch branding. I wanted to get more experienced with manually configuring a window manager without having to force myself to learn to use tiling. That's why in March, I decided to give Openbox a shot, which is a floating window manager, not a tiling one. That means it actually lets you drag windows around with your mouse instead of controlling everything with the keyboard. By this time, I was starting to become interested in old desktops from the 2000s, so I wanted to give the window manager a feel of being from that time. This first one is meant to look like something you'd see on GNOME 2.
I wasn't too happy with it, however. It was a light theme, so that means it'd be eye-searing at night. Just a few days later, I went back and changed it to look more like Windows Vista mixed with KDE 4. I don't consider this to be "angsty" like the 2017 desktop, since I was going for a more endearing "2010 super customized linux desktop with neon colors and gradients" look. I even added basic tiling functionality with scripts, so I guess I had the best of both worlds. This is probably one of my favorite desktops I've had over the years.
After a while, however, I got tired of having to do things like manually mounting drives whenever they randomly changed IDs, and I wanted the creature comforts of a full desktop environment again. So crawling back to KDE I went.
Late this year, I managed to get a new PC to replace my aging one from 2017. I gave the old one to my younger brothers, since it still runs games like Fortnite decent enough. The GPU was delayed by almost 2 months, to the point that I got it after Christmas. This leads into...
2023
First, I decided to install Arch Linux on my new PC the proper way instead of just faking it. This is still dual booted with a smaller Windows drive, however, as there are a couple games and programs I still need Windows for if I want to run. Other than that, 90% of my computing has been under Linux, and I've been happy with it ever since, as the number of games and applications that I can't run under Linux has been dwindling.
Since I have an AMD GPU now, I can take advantage of the new features of Wayland, which is the new windowing system replacing the aging X11. Most of the year I just stuck with KDE, as you can see with this screenshot from September. I suppose this desktop is a little angsty.
Also, there's this one from October. I liked to just switch up the icon theme and color scheme every month, in this case to be more festive for the season. (The color scheme is called "Dracula" after all.)
However, later this month, I decided to give the window manager lifestyle another try. Since the only floating window manager that is similar to Openbox I could find, LabWC, wasn't as far under development as I'd have liked, I decided to give a tiling window manager another shot. I chose Sway, since it is very similar to i3, which I'd already used. This time, I actually tried my best to make it look good and not just copy someone else's configs. I set up a script to select an area to screenshot, just like Windows and KDE. The top bar is still based on someone else's config, but heavily edited to the point of being unrecognisable.
Sadly, I would only end up using this for about a month, as I got tired of forcing myself to use the keyboard for everything, meaning that the monkey brain won again. I switched back to KDE. However, I decided to change things up from my usual standard of using the default theme with a different color. This was around the "Fruitiger Aero" trend started to become popular, and I wanted to experience a desktop that was more reminiscent of that early 2010's glossy look, as I had fond memories of using Windows 7 in school. I became interested in Oxygen, the theme that KDE used during the KDE 4 era, lasting from 2008 until 2014 where it was replaced with the Breeze theme used today.
The current version of KDE still lets you use the Oxygen theme, however. I found an edited version of it on the KDE theme repository called Vulpinity, giving it a red accent. I decided to use it to give my desktop a nostalgic, glossy look for Christmas. This was taken right before upgrading off of the fabled Linux 6.6.6 kernel.
2024
After the holidays, I decided to keep the theme I had going, and I replaced and tweaked some stuff to lean harder into the "edgy early 2010's linux desktop" thing, just like I did with my 2022 Openbox desktop. I wanted to make it look like the desktop of a 2010-ish hardware enthusiast, so I set the wallpaper to this gaudy but endearing Radeon wallpaper. Someone I showed it to said it had "shadow the hedgehog colors." So mission accomplished, I suppose.
In March, the newest version of KDE, KDE Plasma 6, hit the Arch Linux software repositories, so I installed it without hesitation. Unfortunately, it had a bunch of bugs on release that broke the theme I was using and forced me to switch off. So I was stuck on stock KDE for a few weeks, changing to the default colors to reflect this.
Unfortunately, one of the headlining features of KDE 6, the improved scaling, doesn't work well on anything but the default Breeze theme. Since I had gotten a 1440p monitor recently, I was forced to set the scaling to normal and set the font size larger so I could still read it comfortably. Also, there were a bunch of bugs with font rendering when using scaling anyway. So I then switched to normal default Oxygen theme, with a dark theme added and the proper icon set in place, and this is the current setup I use right now. I think it looks pretty nice, and I'm happy with how it's set up right now.
So, what was the whole point of this exercise? I don't know, really. I think looking the the evolution of how I used my computer is interesting, since it's an extension of myself in a way. I'll probably update this if I make any other changes to my desktop as long as I remember that my Neocities exists.
Update: September 2024
Read my yapping
Since writing this, my opinion of KDE has soured a bit. I truly believe that the update to KDE 6 introduced a lot of regressions in regards to themeability and workflow customization. For example, over time, I started to notice problems with the Oxygen theme that started to grate on me. Certain icons in many applications would not appear and be replaced with black icons on a dark background. Some applications would default to using the flat Breeze style rendering, even with Oxygen styling enabled. Eventually, I decided to disable the Oxygen theming and use the default styling and icons, it might not look as pretty but at least all the icons are readable and everything looks cohesive. In doing so, I realized that one of the main selling points of KDE, the visual customization, wasn't really to the standard I would have liked anymore.
Now, I haven't been entirely truthful in this page until this point. This page describes the history of my desktop on my main PC. However, after getting a new, better laptop as a graduation gift in 2020, and being frustrated with the brokenness of Windows 11 on it, I decided to install a different Linux distro, Fedora, on it, which ships with the other main Linux desktop, GNOME. Now, GNOME has a reputation for being opinionated and restrictive. The applications it ships with are simpler than those of KDE, and it tries to funnel into using its intended workflow pretty heavily, which is a lot different than Windows. By contrast, KDE works a lot like Windows by default. GNOME instead has a large emphasis on gestures and moving between different fullscreen workspaces, which makes it fit very well on a laptop, especially with its very smooth trackpad gestures. By default, it also is much more polished than KDE.
After restoring KDE to its default state, I decided that if I wanted to use a desktop with its default look and settings, maybe I should try a desktop that is known for its defaults and try to make that work. Since I was running Arch, it was actually fairly easy to simply install GNOME with a single command, and I simply logged out and switched my desktop to GNOME. Out of the box, it carried over the icons and some theming from KDE, since you aren't really intended to install them together. After fixing that and getting a few extensions installed I know I wanted from using it on my laptop, I tried to get used to the workflow but couldn't really get into it. As far as I knew, you were supposed to open your applications first and then drag them into the workspace you wanted to use, which was tedious and took a long time. You're also supposed to switch between workspaces using a keybind when not using a laptop, which I wasn't used to at first. However, I then learned about one thing that completely changed my experience. Watching a Youtube video about GNOME, I noticed that the person in the video dragged their applications into the workspace they wanted to use. After seeing that and replicating it myself, something clicked.
I finally got the hang of how it's meant to be used, and honestly? Going back to KDE afterwards was like going back to the dark ages. By default, it is just so much clunkier than GNOME. And yes, you can in theory mess with the settings and menus and panel bars to give yourself a similiar workflow. In fact, after switching off GNOME for a while, I actually tried to get as close as possible on KDE, thinking I could give myself the best of both worlds. But in practice, a lot of the features either don't work as well or are buggy and/or janky. What do I mean by this? Let me list the ways...
- On KDE, there is no way to quickly switch from the overview to the grid-style application menu it comes with. This means having to have seperate buttons and keybinds for both, which is not ideal.
- The monitor edge detection for summoning a dock/panel is not as good on KDE.
- The menu has a slight delay when loading sometimes on KDE.
- KDE has a feature similar to GNOME's Hot Corners, where you can simply throw your cursor to the top right of the screen to get to your desktop overview. However, the KDE version works by instead stitching together all your monitors and making you drag your cursor to the top left point of the top left most monitor. On my setup, that would essentially mean dragging my cursor to the top right of my second monitor to access my overview quickly, which is very annoying.
- For the most egregious case, KDE's workspace management does not let you dynamically create or delete workspaces as needed. This means that if you want to be able to have a lot of workspaces, you either need to manually create and delete them as needed or just deal with having 4+ workspaces you will hardly use on your taskbar and overview at all times.
However, all of that is not the reason I switched away from KDE. GNOME is very polished, sure, but after a while I just got used to the normal Windows-esque workflow of KDE again. It wasn't great, but still usable. No, I actually stopped using KDE because of the crashes.
A few weeks ago, while gaming, my system hard locked up and turned to a black screen. Trying to move the mouse or input any keyboard combinations achieved nothing. Only a restart would bring it back to normal. I thought it was just a weird one-off error, and it didn't seem to happen again. Until it did a couple days later. And then it did it again. And again. It would usually happen while playing an intensive game or running some intensive program, but sometimes it would just happen while browsing Firefox. The errors suggested something was going wrong with the GPU drivers. But of course, I googled "arch linux amdgpu crash" and tried everything, with no luck. Eventually, I noticed that it wasn't really the whole Linux system crashing, what was crashing was KDE's compositor. On a hunch, I reinstalled GNOME, and after using it for a few days, not once did I get a single crash.
So, I decided to adapt my application selection and workflow to fit GNOME. That's right, I'm one of those people now. And, is GNOME perfect? No. The way it groups application pages together is really obnoxious and moving applications around in the menu is super tedious. Application folders are super tiny by default and going back to the main application menu requires a keyboard press for some reason. The fact that by default you have to enable the maximize and minimize buttons is kind of insane. But if that's the price to get a system that looks and feels cohesive (and doesn't crash), so be it.
In short, I switched from KDE to the other major Linux desktop, GNOME. For now, I'm happy with it.
