I prefer Ambient Mate - modified with own wallpapers…
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My modified ARC theme. Arc has, to me anyway, a problem with contrast. Way too little, hence my modification.
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I am only semi-serious. Of course people should have fun with their systems if that’s what they are doing.
Personally, and I do mean personally, I value user-interface stability (not crashing, lagging or taking one 1ms longer than necessary) extremely highly - especially relative to the look and feel. As far as look and feel goes I want the ultimate stripped down, zero distraction interface - nothing annoys me more than some eye-switching animation or gaudy colours. And quite honestly, most of the shared examples make lovely screenshots but strike me as bizarre choices for a work/study environment. I want the aesthetic of a library rather than a child’s playroom or summer holiday.
Why my comparison with Windows? Because it is, to my eyes, a catastrophic taste disaster: bright, highly saturated colours, blocky hard-to-read fonts, badly chosen font-sizes - some teeny, some headline fonts, absurd wastes of vertical screen space, cluttered disorganised desktops, visual cues all jumbled up (omg don’t get me started on the fashion for borderless interior panes), principle-free menus (where do you find the application settings, argh! or the check for updates!?), confused help and search features - the list is probably endless.
To put it another way, the problem is the underlying design - it sucks and fussing about the edges simply doesn’t do it for me. Apple, Microsoft and Google continually fuss about with their look and feel. Just look at what Google just did to Chrome’s tabs - was there anything wrong with their previous size? Nope, that was just about the only thing right with them. So Google made the tabs massively oversized and non-configurable. Sure, I appreciate they are trying to unify the look and feel across multiple platforms. But I have this to say: if you don’t know how design relates to the display environment Google, you need me and I am available to hire LOL.
Do I really care what icons look like? No! What I care about is that they scale dynamically in proportion to the font size I am using and that they stay visually distinct at every scale or get the heck out the way.
Do I really care about the positioning of the close/minimise/zoom buttons on a window? No! I want much better window/tab control altogether: I want “window-spaces” - windows that work like workspaces - that support tabs, full-windowspace applications, and persistence. I don’t want to be fussing around with trying to zoom and unzoom, positioning windows and all that palaver.
Do I care about where the system off button is? No! I care about the system shutting down the instant I tell it to. I am not a patient person. My computer run millions of times faster than me. So why am I always waiting for them??!? Looks like meat > metal. If I say shut-down, I am in a hurry, so get out of my way. Do I want to save a document?! Just shut up and restore it perfectly when I start it up. Shutting down is not an opportunity to negotiate.
Don’t ask me to confirm if I want to close a window. Close it. If I get it wrong, I’ll press undo. Don’t ask me if I want to save a file. Save it somewhere private. If I want to reopen it, I’ll press undo. Or find it on the recently edited menu. Rethink the UI to remove the please-confirm-you-aren’t-stupid buttons. Applications that can’t undo are stupid. I confirm I do not want them.
All of this is doable - but we’ve stagnated in the trap of trying to copy the designs of companies who have lost their way. Until there’s a way out of this place, strip everything back to basics, get rid of every bad attempt to interfere in what you are doing (helpfully labelled ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ so you can disable it). And learn to love the command-line, which doesn’t get much attention from the tech titans. Thankfully.
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I like your style! ( ͡ ͜ʖ ͡ ) Meat over metal, but of course!!
Plus one for arc dark.
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Nice desktop 
Given my “virtual desktop” (i.e. using Synergy across 4 machines and 8 monitors [yeah my desk looks like a SCADA setup in a nuclear power plant - picture Homer Simpson 
) - also includes a Mac (Macbook Pro M1) - I have Mac Big Sur themes on everything, and Mac style icons…
I may yet try some other icons (those buuf ones look interesting - I remember seeing similar icon sets for beOS) - but I have to be careful - 'cause the wrong icon set can break things like Inkscape (it uses those icons in its interface).
But also sometimes for the ol skool lulz - I try out a CDE theme (in XFCE) on my RPi4 :
And yes - hiding behind that terminal window on the top left, is the “SteamPlay” icon, and yes, it works
Well…you did make me smile…and I agree with you all the way.
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