I got a hard drive caddy for my laptop yesterday that allowed me to install a secondary onto it, so I did that and put Linux on, too. I'm sure you guys recall that I've been designing my UI to be a satire of Linux users who attempt to mimic other operating systems and this continues this trend, blending elements of classic Mac OS, OS X and Windows 95. This is still a work-in-progress, but right now I'm particularly happy with the dock at the bottom, which is actually an auto-hiding Xfce4-panel.

There's no telling where this will go next, but I see maybe changing the font to Tahoma and adding "Start" to the Tux icon and changing the Tux to a classic Windows icon? Maybe I'll change the icon to the OpenBSD Blowfish. Who knows.

Update:


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I think I’m slowly coming to accept the fact that I’m in fact one of those people who will be perpetually dissatisfied by my user interface customization and I’ll be fussy over things like icons, icon sizes and the shade of orange they’re colored with. In order to prevent senseless customization, I develop a series of design ideas, which are fine but even they can be changed.

Anyway, I realized that my last post actually showed me using Linux after I set up this dual-boot set-up involving a third party hard drive caddy. What happened is I tried to reposition the caddy one day and it simply broke and I ended up putting the hard drive in Lillian's computer instead. So now she has a Linux computer and I just went back to living my #Windows8.1Life.

I went back to default-size window borders after realizing I tend to full-screen everything anyway and set up a slideshow of nearly a hundred landscape images as a background. The system is set up to select a window border color automatically so I can stop fussing over it. The taskbar I set back to large icons after a brief stint where I only used small icons on the bottom, which I had reasoned would be acceptable because the aspect ratio of the non-taskbar area would be closest to the golden ratio until I realized I just like the larger icons better.

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Someone turned me onto the idea of wallpaper slideshows and now I'm obsessed. First, I had it change every hour. Then every half hour. I went all the way down to every 10 minutes because it just wasn't dynamic enough. I get so bored with my desktop and it's convenient that it's changing for me.

Bar is experimentally small and on top with all taskbar buttons expanding. It's been making my UI closer to that of the one I had in Linux.

It's interesting because it gives this boxed in feel. I like it.

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