When I was a young boy, I saw Windows XP for the first time and thought it looked really nice. My family had an old beige desktop computer with Windows 98, so I spent many months asking my parents to buy the new Windows XP OS. They acquiesced at some point, and my computer’s interface got a beautiful makeover. Unfortunately, the hardware could barely keep up, and the software upgrade slowed my computer down immensely.

That didn’t stop me from trying to make my computer’s interface look better in the following years. Trying, because I often failed. I remember four significant moments:

At a friend’s place, I saw their Windows Media Center OS with the Royale theme. I figured out how to set up to replace my Windows XP default Luna theme. That opened up my mind to how I could customize things further. I now know that the term, Frutiger Aero, describes both Luna and Royale aesthetic.

In high school, I saw the icon animations on a friend’s Sony Ericsson w900, I tried doing the same thing on my w600. I spent many hours on HowardForums doing research, and came to the conclusion that I might need to update my firmware to have a shot at doing this. This was out of my technical depth, and I didn’t want to put my phone at risk, so I gave up. Looking back, Sony Ericsson very much fell into the Frutiger Aero or Metro aesthetic.

I loved how Mac OS X Aqua looked, arguably the precursor to Frutiger Aero (i.e., more like Aero was a response to Aqua), so I decided to try customizing my Windows computer to look like it. As a teenager, I had more time than money, and I really enjoyed tinkering to make changes without minimal costs. Hacking felt fun. I looked into how I could set up OS X on my Windows PC through Hackintosh, but again, my lack of technical depth—as well as risk aversion—kept me from pulling the trigger on it. I decided eventually to just earn some money and buy a real Mac. (This is unsolicited advice I would suggest to a young person in these types of situations; hacking can only go so far, if you want the real thing figure out a way to go get it. It reminds me of a young Donald Glover winning a Nintendo 64 in a contest).

When Microsoft started beta testing Windows Longhorn (better known as Vista now), I caught a glimpse of the new Aero interface and I loved it. I tried, desperately, getting into the beta program. When that finally happened, my computer—once again—couldn’t handle it, plus the OS was very buggy, and so I folded and stuck with modifying my Windows XP to look like Longhorn.

I bought my first MacBook going into my freshman year in university, and I’ve been a steady Apple customer since. While I’m aware Tahoe’s and iOS’s Liquid Glass interface is not popular online, for many good reasons, I must admit that it fits in with my teenage sensibilities.

I’m not interested in making time to hack on my interfaces anymore (I barely even change my wallpaper now!). A significant part of the Mac experience is how beautiful the default interface is.