As a user who dual-boots Windows 11 Pro 25H2 with Garuda Mokka GNU Linux, I enjoy trying new things in both OSes, and today, in the Chris from Windows ReadMe newsletter I subscribe to, Chris discussed Windhawk, an open source Windows tweaking tool. The item sparked my interest, so I decided to do a little experimenting with the appearance of the Windows task bar. The end result is that I now have a completely transparent task bar! I tried several themes, including a dock-like one, but in the end I like the Simply Transparent theme the best.
After succeeding with that, while the learning curve was notable, it wasn’t overly steep (Google’s AI overview’s my friend here!), I decided to look around in the panel’s configuration on my Garuda Mokka system, and I wasn’t disappointed! Garuda Mokka includes the panel colorizer widget, pre-installed, right out of the box, so making the panel completely transparent was a very simple process of scrolling through all the available and alphabetically organized presets, down to the Transparent (Built-in) one, and applying it!
I probably spent at least ten times as long customizing the Windows taskbar as my KDE Plasma panel! And the panel looks better!
In spite of the fact that this was a really simple experiment, because I performed similar efforts in both OSes, it was very revealing too! For me, the main takeaway is that Microsoft has a very long way to go if they truly want to pay better attention to the wishes of their users! My number one suggestion is that, when they receive lots of requests for any single feature or the ability to customize something (the task bar comes to mind), they add a setting (even if it has to be placed on an advanced page in Settings) that defaults to their preferred configuration, and offers one or more alternative options the user can choose from. KDE Plasma seems to already do that!
Ernie