Sometimes it's all about the eye candy -- and the freedom to do with it as you damn well please.
(As if I didn't already have enough to do this afternoon.)
I had the opportunity this morning to do some work on a Macbook Pro®. One of the things I immediately noticed was the polish on it. Whereas there are many things about the Mac® I do not particularly care for, and so much more so can be said for Windows Vista/7®, I will give them this. They do understand the need for, and have made the effort to, put the needed details and finishing touches on their default themes.
Neither one of these well thought out environments considered monochromatic, over-simplistic, hyper-stylized goose-stepping conformity to be a good thing. (Until the advent of Windows 8® -- but that's a different story. <....> )
In fact, it is de facto evident that having a rudimentary understanding of the concept, "A good appearance commands respect", guided them to good advantage. The bottom line being, they didn't look like they had been cobbled together in someone's garage. That's a good thing. The heartlessly plain is -- by definition -- heartless. If it has no appeal to the eye, it presents a constant source of irritation to use. And that's the sort of user-experience that has little to recommend it. All else being equal, and given the chance to effectively mitigate that itch, people will naturally migrate toward the beautiful, and away from the irritating and/or ugly.
Enter GDM, and default Gnome 3/Gnome Shell ... <....>
Which, over time leads to ... <....>
Which, soon leads toOr, in my case, (being pretty much a "fringe" sort of a guy).Code:yum install cinnamon/KDE/XFCE/E17 etc.. (Yeah ... I do like to fiddle and twiddle.) <....>Code:yum install e16
Which brings me all the way back to the eye candy thing.
I'll freely admit it. I like "shadows" under my windows, colors in my drag bars, easy to find scroll bars I can actually see, and some individuality in the presentation of all the above. And, that's every kind of possible in e16. But ... there really isn't much of a GUI to adjust the size, scope, color, opacity, blur and direction of them. You gotta do some of it yourself.
So I went digging in the config files.
Figure 1: Shadows
Ya just gotta love that e16! <....>