Looking back over old screenshots and things reminds me how sterile, less fun computing has become.
You used to have little things that would walk around your desktop (like neko), sit on your windows... there used to be themes you could apply to your OS and utilities you could run to really mix up the experience.
These days, as far as stuff like that goes, we have... changing your window colors (and not even that on Windows 10 for a while) and Rainmeter. The latter's pretty flexible, at least.
And this is assuming you're on a Windows system! I haven't seen any kind of theming for OS X since the Leopard days.
Perhaps that's part of why I seem to cling to having some sort of Linux setup: it seems to be the only thing to really embrace customization these days. You don't have to customize your distro's default appearance if you don't want to (much like the Windows of old, especially when you could mod msstyles), but it's wide open if you'd like to.
Granted, I tend to err on the side of minimalism: openbox and tint2 are enough for me, maybe with conky when the mood strikes. But... again, you can do that, and maybe that's why I find mucking about with Linux so fun. There's still so much power to make it yours, while on Windows you can only really do so much.
As far as Windows styles, I've always liked Alduin by lassekongo83. CleanGlass was really nice too, as well as a few oth-- oh my fuck there's a GTK version sign me up
I wonder if I can use that in MATE. And some new wallpapers. I could stand to mix it up a bit, one of my monitors' wallpapers has remained the same since 2014. I did this from 2005-2007 at one point too, but for some reason that felt like a far longer time. Huh. Probably that whole fun thing again.
I miss Windows XP.
While we're on this random tech rant, my XU4 should be getting here today. I'm excited to toy with it. (then, inevitably, it'll just kinda sit there, knowing me.)