caseyweederman

There are some very convincing Windows themes. Gnome, too. There are a couple to make it look exactly like the IRIX theme, or CDE.
Personally, I think the default layout is plenty simple. You press the applications icon, you press on the thing you want, that thing opens.
If you can take twenty seconds to set it up for them, run everything they’ll ever want to run, right-click on it in the task bar, click Pin to Task Manager.
Then all they’ll ever need to do is poke the one they want to run and it runs.
KDE also has a Mobile DE called Plasma Mobile. Looks like it can be installed on desktops and laptops too.

I’d say KDE Plasma 6 with one of the one-button global theme modifications can do everything you’re promising, while resulting in a simpler and more familiar layout.
More options help everyone, whether they use them or not.

The Steam version of Steamworld Dig had a hidden area with an old bombed-out games store with posters for Half Life 3.

Huh, is there one that does Stardew Valley?

I was going to reply with this:

Gnome

Ahh.

Happened to me in the 90s. Private Christian school in a big city.

Oh nice, I think I’ve used that theme.
I was imagining something a little different.
I had in mind something like xfce’s XML files where settings can be locked at the system level, so when they’re generated at the user level, those individual settings refuse to be masked.
I think for Plasma I’d need a script that runs after the theme has been changed that flips the “group-by” setting back to “never”.

Or how the Wii is two GameCubes duct-taped together

I just need to run a pacman -Ql on the package. I’m guessing it takes the normal sequence of ~ dotfiles if present, else etc, else var lib.
I looked it up, there’s some promising stuff in qmls in /usr/share/plasma, desktop configuration in plasmoids, but that includes a panel configuration qml higher up.
Even if I do tinker with that, an update would wipe it out. I wasn’t able to find any equivalent in etc, maybe as with most things on Arch it’s “some assembly required”.

Oh shoot, while we’re at it, is there a way to change default settings for things? I’m not even sure where to start looking, documentation-wise.
I want my taskbar to never group by names, but I regularly need to set that again each time I theme-hop.
It’s got to regenerate that from somewhere, right? Feels /var/lib-esque, I’ll look there

Wait, is Gnome really still default?

Oh. Well I appreciate the replies anyway because I also missed the joke.

Yep, there’s a full electron browser in there

Most big open-source projects have a GitHub mirror with a link to the real project.

What about Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040?

There’s probably thirty Global Theme packs that do exactly that with a single click

Some friends at work started up a patient-gamer-style Pokémon book club. It’s been four months and we’re almost done Pokémon Black/White (which may sound impressive except that we started with Pokémon Black/White)
My point is: there’s basically an unlimited number of good games that run on old hardware. Not that retro Nintendo hardware is cheap these days, but if you’ve got some lying around…

I can’t argue with that.
With the systemd example, they’ve put the bus in /run, but with different sessions and slices and environments (which could all be concurrent), they’ll spawn a new bus, so there’s no general way to tell it which bus you want.
If you have a cron job (sorry, a systemd-timer job) set up to project your mailbox to your bathroom mirror on the hour, you’d want that isolated from your regular user bus.

I love where Plasma is these days (check out the Tiles editor with Meta+T), but I do wish it was easier to pick only the desktop elements I want. It feels like it’s all-or-nothing.

Whatever i3 is using underneath, somebody put a line somewhere to tell everything where to find the bus.
If you’re not using a full desktop environment then you’re choosing to cover the features you’ve opted out of.
I respect that choice, and I’m glad our ecosystem allows it. But also I understand that you’re not going to get the full benefits of a desktop environment without the desktop environment.

Yes, so it knows where the bus is. That seems… normal?