There is heaps of counter culture both online and in the real world - even in my small English town. And so much of what was counter culture has been co-opted into general culture now too.

I'd say things, ideas, opportunities and ways of being/thinking are even broader now than they were than when I was a teenager in the 90s.

There is a pretty strong reason for this; deviancy from the norm is punished heavily on social media. No one wants to be the main character when they have 300 followers and they're just posting their opinions.

Mastodon, Gemini and the 2007-reborn Gopher.

But yes, you are right. Back in late 90's/early 00's Linux and Unix desktop were trully different and unique. Fluxbox had zillions of different themes. 3D, black, retro, flat-ish, metal-ish, Java styled, Gnome styled, KDE-alike, Gaudi, childish, Bohemian, alien looking... every style was fine for anyone.

Ditto witht the icons. One day I felt technical and I switched into the Slick theme being "workstation/highend" themed with a gray color scheme, and the next day I felt nice and cheerful and switched into Noia with a blue Keramik theme.

Now everything looks bland, flat and everyone looks afraid on having an style.

It's pretty annoying that Gnome themeing tools, rather than developing and becoming better/more cohesive, were made totally irrelevant

I can't quite understand how "Linux GUI, make it look how you want! Personalized OS!" became "Linux - this one unchangably bland tablet UI on your desktop!"

I know that other WM/DM exist, but Gnome is incredibly popular, often the default, and was so close to being what people saw as the ideal Desktop.

Not just tablets. Every single theme now in /r/unixporn at Rddit looks the same. Either i3, i3-gaps, some catpucchino/nord theme and Gnome/KDE cloning Mac. And, yes, we even tried to clone OSX even from Fluxbox and FVWM, but we had a bunch of several other themes.

social media, especially but not limited to social media revenue models for content creators, demand regression to the norm. When every interesting idea for a video/song/blogpost gets literal orders of magnitude less views, when a clickbaity video with only the most surface-level engagement with whatever "topic" is your usual fare gets far and away the biggest numbers you've ever gotten, its no surprise there is less counter culture.

Take a look at for example the youtube creator dashboard for an established creator, how it directly compares your videos against each other, trying and pushing you to get more numbers, entirely uncaring for anything other than eyeballs.

There is a ton of counterculture. You just need to stop looking for large and noisy groups that are taking most of the attention space. It is just that the hum of the crowd got louder. The signal is still there, it is just the noise that got stronger.

Modern counterculture (for the sake of argument, defined as non-commercial and deeply personal crap produced by marginal individuals) has shifted to mostly online and mostly to expressions that I'm not interested in: most particularly, furries. Furry software, furry art, furry music, furry meetups.

maybe it's because I'm a bit older, but I noticed that too. also noticed that "counterculture" went extremely far off into covid-19 hysteria and has never come back. Seeing anime cons demanding proof of vaccination and strictly requiring masks in April 2023 is just bizarre to me.

I'm not looking for counterculture, I'm quite happy doing my own thing in relative obscurity. I'm merely being nostalgic for when it used to be a lot more visible (physically). Punks, weirdos, hackers, oddballs, flâneur's, were in plain view - their associated shops and hangouts (record stores, counter culture book stores, etc), rowdy pubs, etc. Perhaps they're all just at home on computers now. Or gentrified/normalised. I don't know. Merely anecdotal.