Desktop Customization |OT| Cooking up a New Desktop

At the behest of some people who asked that I made a OT detailing how I customized my Windows 10 Setup, I decided to make this OT so that people can share their desktops and any questions they might have about setting something similar up.

But Zexion why should I spend my time tweaking my windows?

If you are like me & you spend most of your day working at a computer, all the small grievances about windows starts to pile up. There is a bevy of customization options that you can do ranging from small tweaks / additions to Large system editing changes.

Ok so what can I do?

Glad you asked! With some time & effort, you can make your windows look like this!
You can even tweak your Windows Themes to not burn your eyes out every time you open a app!

Alright i'm interested, How can I do it?

Let's start off simple with some of the small time stuff you can do first:

- TranslucentTB (Github Link)
TranslucentTB is a lightweight program, that as the name implies, makes your windows taskbar transparent! It also adds a blur & is customizable on a Colour / application setting.



For example, I have my setup set to have it be Transparent while I'm using windowed apps, but Blur when an App is on Fullscreen.


- OldNewExplorer (Download Link) Edit: Site is down but you can download it Here
OldNewExplorer is a small shell extension that allows you to remove the ribbon bar that windows added to the File explorer in Windows 10 & make it more like windows 7 (Or just plain remove it).

I use these settings:


- Wallpaper Engine (Steam Store Page)
Wallpaper Engine is a program that allows you to set Videos / Web Apps as your wallpaper! It's super powerful & with steam workshop intergration there is a ton of Wallpapers available (With Filtering In the app)

Ok but what about the Custom Windows Themes?
So Custom windows themes does come with some forewarnings.

I am not Liable for any problems caused by your Windows Themes.

- It's not cataclysmic like causing your computer to BSOD, but it's small stuff like your Windows not loading up after an Update (Which is easily fixed by going to Safe Mode & Reinstalling the Patcher)

- You also have to be careful with the version of the theme you download, as they aren't forward capable (Except for any themes from the Fall Creators Update [or FCU / 1709 as it's also known by] Those work with the newest build [1803])
You can check your Windows Version by doing Win + R & Typing 'Winver'


Ok yeah whatever, just tell me how to do it.

So First you are going to want to install UltraUXThemePatcher (I recommend keeping the Installer saved on your PC for if Windows Updates the Files).
After It's installed, you can just go on any site (I recommend Deviantart) and look for some themes! Here are some of my Recommendations.

- CakeOS (Deviantart)


- Janguru (Deviantart)


- Elegre (Deviantart)


Is that It?
There are a ton of other stuff that I don't use often such as Rainmeter, bbzero, & much more! I'll be detailing app Customization (Steam, Discord, Spotify, etc) in a later post.

But What If I think Windows is trash?

Well I think it's pretty garbo too but I have to use it for gaming / work so I'm with you on that. But fret not! because you can also customize MacOS / Linux with tweaks too! r/unixporn (Don't mind the name) is an absolutely great resource for finding inspiration for your Setups & the people there are very friendly when it comes to explaining.

Ellis said:

Nice thread OP.

Is Wallpaper Engine heavy on resources for what it does?

I just want to set a gif as a wallpaper.

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Thanks!

Depending on the Video, most 1080p Posts are fine, with some 4k Videos can eat up some resources. But a GIF should be fine as long as it's not humongous.

texhnolyze said:

How do you move the icons on the taskbar to the middle? Is it a special dock?

I think that's all I'll need.

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It's a pretty old video, but That's pretty much how you do it.

Midramble said:

What are the limits of what can be done with rainmeter?

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The only real hard limit is Performance. Rainmeter's grown considerably since before & now you can even replace the taskbar with a pretty great alternative like Polybar

Been meaning to do a write-up on this.

There's now a program that auto-centers your icons on W10 so if you add more icons It stays centered, The performance impact is meh depending on what you have running (I've seen some weird performance issues with some DX11 Titles running in Borderless with it running)

On my Ryzen 1600X I'm seeing about 6% CPU Usage (I'm running an older version of the program though)


Here is the reddit post, There is a newer version on his site, But I linked the reddit post due to some pre-requisites that are needed.

(Wallpaper Link)

texhnolyze said:

It's completely a nitpick, but the new Steam update made the Steam taskbar icon duplicates when I open it. Battle.Net does the same thing too.

It's supposed to work like Chrome and Discord. Is there anyway to fix this?

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If you Unpin the original one It should work fine, the new Friends list is technically a different EXE so It uses seperate Taskbar Icons

S_Dev said:

Zexion, what are you using for that 3D graph on the top right? Is that a rainmeter skin?

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Yup, it's a rainmeter Skin called TouchTerminal.

It's one of the nicer rainmeter skins I've found that works with a multitude of wallpapers


The one on the Left is a modified version of Smooth Sailing, using a W10 Plugin that allows me to use the Acrylic Glass added in the newer versions of W10.

sca said:

I was expecting to see a lot of Linux ricing in this thread, color me surprised.

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I was planning on expanding the Linux section on the OP, but r/unixporn's community is great with giving explanations & setup info, so I passed on it for now.

BLEEN said:

I used to do this all the time. Had some beautiful setups for a long time. Windows 10 updates will shit on the modifications every time, however. I'd go back but it's such a bitch to redo all the damn time and waiting for the devs to update their software(s). I'm also on the Insider Team so it's really never gonna work out for me unless things have changed recently. Tho, I doubt it considering the .dll changes and resets. Anyone?

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Yeah I was always on insider (been there since beta!) But between the constant reinstallation of the modded DLLs & the fact that sometimes they just won't work after a random update really puts a hamper on it.

Ryne said:

Thanks for this thread, was browing era while bored so I got the urge to mess with rainmeter a bit. Tried a clean setup for myself:

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That's a pretty nice setup

I'm currently looking into editing the frosted glass plugin into the meters I have on the right, But I otherwise finalized my setup for now

It's been a hot minute since my Last Post, But due to some more Interest I'm going to be delving into some more application focused changes

But First let's go through my new Setup:

So First things first I removed some older stuff out & rotated in some new stuff. Most importantly is the inclusion of my Bongocat Visualizers which you can get HERE.

List of Rainmeter Skins used above:

• Bongocat Visualizer (Linked above)
• TouchTerminal (Link is found at Post #20)
• Nogadt (Link)
• Ettaglans (Link)
• Yadov (Link)

Next thing I did Is I moved from Elegre to CakeOS, which is now In the OP. I also switched out my Font and moved to San Francisco Pro Display (Font Apple uses for MacOS / iOS) and I'm now using Mac's Font rendering for more nicely rendered font (As shown Below).



You can checkout the new Theme in the OP, And I'll be talking about changing your Font Here!

so for the MacOS Rendering, I'm using MacType which is a free download. For MacType I'm using the Registry Tweak mode (Due to higher compatibility & Use) and I'm using the Preset "Windows 7 Opt".

Now for the font tweaks. There are some caveats, mostly some stuff windows does specifically with Segoe UI (Microsoft's Font) that causes some stuff to be lost (Notably the Clock bugs out & etc). So I don't recommend the font tweak unless you really want to, MacType is a good enough change that even base font looks nice.


- The Back / Play / Forward Buttons were a Segoe UI Addition
For San Fran Pro I downloaded it from This Github (Note you could just use it as a regular font too, it's not system exclusive!).

Next you have to do some registry tweaks (Notice how this is a recurring theme for windows.) which you can easily download HERE.

If you want to revert it (or use a different font) feel free to follow this guide.



Application Tweaks

-Spotify

So with the magic of Rainmeter (I have no clue how someone did this in rainmeter) you can make your Spotify look something like This.


It's as simple as Downloading Spicetify and setting up some minor settings.



You can change the settings as you'd like, But make sure you do Backup / Apply. There are also some cool extensions by default you could add. now for the theme you have to go to The Spicetify Folder (Normally Located in C:\Users\[Your Name]\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\Spicetify\Themes) and replace SpicetifyDefault with the one Located Here and then applying.

Erebus said:

Does anyone here use Wallpaper Engine?

I recently bought the app but I find it pretty tedious having to scroll through countless pages of anime wallpapers just to find some decent ones I like.

So if you guys could share some links for the wallpapers you're using, I'd be grateful.

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I'm running on a rotation, but here are some nice ones that are usually good all around.

LiS Main Menu
Los Angeles Skyline
Alps Mountain

On the app you can filter by genre, and get rid of all the anime stuff too

Aizō said:

Oh, cool. I didn't know this thread existed. I was about to make one. I still use rocketdock, and I've used it for over a decade. Is there a more modern alternative, since it's not really supported much anymore? I really like having a dock. I used to use rainmeter and rainlendar many years ago, and I kinda miss it. Here's my current setup, but I'm kinda bored with it.

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There's Nexus Dock, but the implementation is hit or miss in my opinion (especially if you want to use it to replace the task bar)

Aizō said:

Zexion What's your desktop look like nowadays?

Edit: Cleaned mine up just a bit and got rainmeter back.

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I'm currently out of state for the rest of the week so I'll upload a screenshot when I return, but I'll explain all the things I've changed.

I've stopped using rainmeter & TranslucentTB because the new windows task bar acrylic looks nice (the white task bar also looks great)

I'm using the Janguru theme by niivu for Windows currently, and I've styled everything around it (the main background colour is #171717 and the main accent colour is #E69D29)

I'm still using wallpaper engine, though now I'm using dual 1080p wallpapers because I recently got a new monitor.

Falcon 10 was superseded with a new task bar centerer I found that has a much better performance cost aptly called CenterTaskbar.

Aizō said:

I'm fascinated by the custom themes, but also concerned about potential maintenance that comes with them.

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What I do is that I keep the installer .exe for UltraUX in a folder and if a windows update breaks it I just boot into safe mode and reinstall it. If you're proactive and remove the theme before you install any patch you won't even have to boot into safe mode.

The only updates you have to worry about are the big feature updates (1903 for example) and the delay from theme devs to update their themes for it (Janguru took ~2 weeks to update for 1903).

I personally think it's way worth the hassle and it's the biggest part of any setup IMO.

LazyLain said:

It's not the most original customization and the wallpaper's one of the stock ones, but I spent the past couple hours tweaking a fresh Linux Mint Xfce install to my liking... I'm pretty satisfied with the results:

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Sometimes the simpler setups are the best ones for you!

Cotton McKnight said:

Thank you so much for sharing this info, I don't know how I've been missing this thread since 2018. This is so much better than object dock (far less resources used). I've utilized much of what you have in the OP, and I'm working on going through what you shared in further posts.

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Thanks for the kind words! Yeah this thread has fallen off to the wayside since it's something super specific that's usually better suited on Reddit (though r/desktops has been extremely slow recently)

I do want to go through the OP and eventually update everything there, as there is a lot of old information there that's changed dramatically from before (which was Windows 1806!!)