Yo this is a great deep dive on skinning that unearthed many memories I forgot I had! I remember discovering the Zune theme for Windows XP—really the only alt skin they had, sort of a consolation prize for all the customizability taken away relative to Win 2000—and obsessively switching over all the computers in our school library to use it. It is kind of ironic that will all the “improvement” that has happened in the software development world since then—esp. popularizing the notion that everything should be a modular and separate code from data—our desktop environments have become more monolithic and their designs dictated from on high.
The idea of the browser start page as a modern approximation of that spirit is also very insightful. It made me think about how much time I spent in my browser nowadays and how little time I spend looking at the blank desktop. In the past I obsessively tricked my desktop out with widgets and a cool wallpaper but now I’m like, do I even have any files there lol.