After being a lifelong Windows user for over 20 years, I started testing various Linux distros earlier this year, and I've been learning a lot about what makes it great and what makes it not so great. It's obvious that, despite some annoyances, Linux has a lot that Windows could stand to learn from in terms of user freedom and customization options.

There's one particular element of Linux that's paramount to all these differences, though: desktop environments. This is the most fundamental aspect of Linux customization to a typical end user, to the point where different Linux distros really can feel like completely different machines despite the underlying similarities. And more than anything, this is the feature I wish Microsoft would copy over to Windows 11.

What are desktop environments?

Completely change the look and feel of your PC

Linux users will obviously know what a desktop environment is, but even if you're a Windows user and you don't, you can probably guess where this is going. A desktop environment is a piece of software that provides the primary user interface through which you interact with your PC. On Windows 11, the desktop environment includes things like the taskbar, the notification center, quick actions panel, and Start menu.

With Linux, though, there are numerous desktop environments available that provide radically different experiences. Even if you use the same distro, you can switch to a different desktop environment to have a completely different look and feel. Desktop environments change how everything is presented. The apps that you have open, the app windows, the app launchers, the Settings app, how notifications are shown, and so on. Using a different desktop environment can almost feel like using a different operating system altogether. You can kind of look at it similarly to how various Android skins work; a Samsung phone can feel fairly different to use compared to a Nothing phone, but they ultimately do the same things. On Linux, though, the differences between desktop environments are generally much more pronounced.

By taking a look at the images above, you can easily see how things can be made very different. The first two screenshots are from Ubuntu, which uses the GNOME desktop environment by default. You can see that it uses a floating, centered dock and has a bar along the top of the screen showing some system information such as the time and information about the Wi-Fi connection. The next two show the KDE desktop environment, which also has a floating dock/taskbar, but it spans the entire bottom of the screen and includes system icons in the corner, removing the need for a dedicated bar along the top. And finally, there's Linux Mint, which uses the Cinnamon desktop environment, with a screen-wide taskbar, centered app icons, and a widget in the bottom left corner. You can also see how app windows look different across all three of these environments, and even these three are just the beginning. There are even more desktop environments out there to try.

Importantly, the desktop environment is also just the beginning of the customization options. While all of these desktops look the way they do here, you can heavily customize them in a variety of ways to change how they look and function, adding an extra layer of customization. They all use different systems for this, so the customization options available to you vary a lot depending on the desktop environment, and you can really fine-tune how everything works to fit you perfectly.

As an example, GNOME extensions can radically change what the desktop looks like, to the point where you get something like the screenshot above. That's a Linux distro called AnduinOS, which is based on Ubuntu, and thus uses GNOME, but through numerous extensions, it's been made to look a lot more like Windows 11.

Windows 11 is so locked down

Nowhere near as flexible

After describing the incredible degree of customizability provided by Linux and its desktop environments, it's almost depressing to go over to Windows 11 and see how little you can do with it. There's obviously only one desktop environment, and even within it, the customization options are incredibly limited out of the box. You can change the color of elements like the taskbar and Start menu, and you can also turn off transparency... and that's about it, really. Aside from changing whether the Start menu should have more pinned apps or more recommended items, or moving the Start menu back to the left side of the screen instead of the center, there really isn't much you can do here.

Any proper customization needs to come from third-party developers, and even then, these aren't tools that are endorsed by Microsoft in any way. On Linux, a lot of the customization options are also up to third-party developers, but the desktop environments embrace that ecosystem, which is why GNOME has its extensions platform and Linux Mint has things like applets and desklets all available directly in the operating system's settings. No such thing exists here, and in fact, Microsoft often finds new ways to break compatibility with existing customization software, making things all the more difficult.

This third-party software can customize a lot, but it's typically still limited by Windows in many ways. Though an app like Windhawk can change some fairly in-depth things like the look of the taskbar and Start menu, you're still going to be dealing with the same Settings app, the same window frames, and so on.

We (kind of) have desktop environments on Windows

Some apps try

Windows 11 is simply not set up to have different desktop environments, but some developers have persevered and tried to make it happen anyway, offering a completely different paradigm for how you use your PC. This is still nowhere near the level of Linux desktop environments, but it's impressive that developers have accomplished as much as they have.

A big one is Seelen UI, a desktop interface that's actually mostly based on web technologies, and it looks and feels pretty cool. I went hands-on with it many months ago and it was interesting, but very unpolished. However, it's received a lot of updates since then, and it's (hopefully) a more fleshed out experience at this point.

Another, more robust option I've tried is Cairo Shell, which gives you a whole new app to access your apps and files, even giving you the option to navigate folders directly on the desktop. And then you have options like Rainmeter and xoblite, which can radically change the look of your desktop with different skins, though they require a lot of work to find and learn the ins and outs of the customization options.

All of these solutions are very impressive, but they do still feel like developers trying to make the best out of a bad situation. None of these solutions can truly be built from the ground up to provide a different experience entirely, they're always built on top of the typical Windows desktop, or try to find ways to bypass it, but you'll always see glimpses of the more bland UI underneath.

Windows has a lot of benefits

Customization is an exception

When you look at the differences between Windows and Linux, they run a lot deeper than desktop environments and visual customization, but this is the biggest area where Windows really needs to improve. For all the benefits of having such a highly customizable platform like Linux, there's also big downside in the form of fragmentation of the more basic aspects of the user experience.

For example, it can be frustrating that every Linux distro handles installing packages differently, with both DEB and RPM files for downloading apps, but also a wide range of package managers such as APT, yay, or pacman, all typically requiring different commands or having different repositories. Windows 11 has the benefit of having far more standardized installer formats that work with no frills on any Windows PC, which makes using said PC far easier for any average user.

Linux also struggles a bit more with things like audio drivers and hardware support due to being so reliant on non-profit contributors and having a much smaller user base than Windows, so you're more likely to run into some frustrations every now and then. Ultimately, while Windows can be extremely annoying, the basics generally just work, which makes it easier to stick with.

But just because standardization has helped Windows be a more robust platform, it shouldn't mean it has to be so boring. With these basics in place, it would be fantastic if Microsoft could open things up on the UI side to allows users to customize their experience much further than they can right now. That's one area where the Linux "fragmentation" is actually a benefit, and Windows could really stand to learn from it. Will it ever happen? Probably not, but that won't stop me from dreaming about that day.