> I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend ages going through the appearance options and customisimg pretty much everything. Even later, I knew of people who had a meticulous desktop ordering or spent substantial amount of time ordering favourite icons in the browser.
> All that was great fun until the first time, the settings were lost. Maybe you had to reinstall the OS (or got a new PC) or maybe the program updated and simply erased the settings. In any case, trying to redo everything you had arranged before looked to be an enormous amount of work and not fun at all. So after the second time, this happened, we gave up and accepted the standard.
I was like this, and felt exactly the same. When I discovered the magic of unix windows managers, it felt like a miracle. Suddenly, I could adjust every frivolous detail to my liking, and _have it reproducable_ in a version control somewhere. When my laptop broke, I just reintroduced my package list, inserted the config and it was just like the old one! I think it's a shame so relatively few people will ever reap the benefits of a customized system over the fear of losing it randomly to a hardware failure.
In windows I was changing fonts, sizes, window colors, sizes of things like title bars...
And was the reason that you didn't do this on the Mac that nobody would ever want to do that, or that you just couldn't?
I hate losing settings and having to fiddle with everything all over again.
I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend ages going through the appearance options and customisimg pretty much everything. Even later, I knew of people who had a meticulous desktop ordering or spent substantial amount of time ordering favourite icons in the browser.
All that was great fun until the first time, the settings were lost. Maybe you had to reinstall the OS (or got a new PC) or maybe the program updated and simply erased the settings. In any case, trying to redo everything you had arranged before looked to be an enormous amount of work and not fun at all. So after the second time, this happened, we gave up and accepted the standard.
But this eas not because we didn't want customisation, it was because the experience was too frustrating.
My impression is that in modern UX, not only do opportunities for customisation become less and less, the results are also increasingly ephemeral. E.g., there is still no option under Windows to save the arrangement of desktop icons - but there is a menu shortcut which will instantly rearrange everything and render your own arrangement moot. I think this shows a pretty clear priority of the designers.
My impression is that customisation opportunities are simply conflicting with a lot of priorites of moders software developers, much more so than their users: Companies want the freedom to frequently change the UI and control overy tiny detail about the "experience" - customisation runs directly counter to that. In some extreme cases, companies even want the freedom to build deliberately unpleasant designs (dark patterns).
Additionally, an inflexible UI also provides more opportunity to present some minor improvements as significant new features ("twitter now has three different colour schemes!", "iOS now can show two apps at the same time!").
Last but not least, an inflexible UI lets you actually sell certain adjustments as a premium feature - e.g. YouTube letting you listen to a video in the background.
All of this are strong incentives for software companies to get rid of settings, but none of it has to do with users not liking settings.