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Device Customization
Device customization is an activity that people enjoy, to make the interfaces of their devices look personalized.
Open source operating systems are in principle more customizable than proprietary operating systems, however due to popularity and associated or otherwise monetary advantages, proprietary operating systems can also be pretty customizable, although they will ultimately be limited to the extend to which the developers allow for customization.
In essence, customization is about altering the default working and appearance of the system, and at the deepest level, customization is only possible to the extent to which a system or a layer above it is open source.
Modularity is another important factor, because that is the design feature which allows a different interface to work with the other components.
Appearance and Workflow
The general components to modify are:
- Icon Packs
- Font Packs
- Cursor Packs
- Sound Themes
- Global Themes (Dynamic or Static)
- Wallpapers
- App-specific Themes
- Window Compositing and Animations
- Docks
- Functional and Aesthetic Widgets (Window Gadgets)
- Window Management and Workspaces
In Microsoft Windows [Proprietary]
Widgets
- Windows Vista/7 Gadgets (deprecated) [Proprietary]
- Rainmeter Widgets
Desktop Environments
- xoblite Window Manager
Custom Applications
- xplorer File Manager
- Kando Pie Menu
In UNIX-like desktop operating systems
- EWW
- AGS Widgets
- GNOME Extensions
- Plasma Addons
- Kando Pie Menu
- Window Managers
Workflow Customization
In Microsoft Windows [Proprietary]
- Sound Enhancement
- FxSound [Proprietary]
In UNIX-like desktop operating systems
- Sound Enhancement
- Easy Effects
- JamesDSP
- Network Management
- NetworkManager, iwd, wpa_supplicant
- Firewall Management
- systemd-firewalld, ufw
- Audio Management
- PulseAudio, JACK, PipeWire
- Kernel Flags
- System C Library
- Package Management
- System Package Manager, Flatpak, AppImage, Snapcraft, Plain Binaries