Convertible

The ThemeTwister tool, located in the Settings submenu, is one of the highlights in Twister UI. ThemeTwister lets you quickly customize the entire desktop environment with just a few mouse clicks. The developers have based the appearance of the available environments on other operating systems' graphical interfaces, such as Apple and Microsoft Windows. In particular, ThemeTwister allows newcomers to overcome any inhibitions in using Linux by imitating the look and feel of a familiar interface (Figure 3). Under the hood, however, the Xfce desktop remains active.

Figure 3: ThemeTwister lets you bring the look and feel of Windows and macOS to the Linux desktop at the push of a button.

The visually emulated interfaces' original operating concepts are also largely retained in Twister UI. For example, in iTwister, a clone of Apple's macOS interface, you will also find the macOS controls in the window titlebars.

Matter of Opinion

Twister UI starts the Xfce desktop with the default selected theme, but you can use the LightPad application to display the tile view familiar from the Gnome desktop environment. To this end, the developers added the LightPad launcher to the system. You will find LightPad in the modern desktop themes section of the desktop dock. The tool superimposes the tile view over the conventional desktop when called (Figure 4). To exit it again, just press Esc.

Figure 4: LightPad brings a Gnome-like tile view to the desktop.

Frugal

Despite many visual effects, Twister UI uses minimal resources. For example, the system only needs about 500MB RAM when idle with the system monitor open. The CPU load is also kept within reasonable limits, which means that Twister UI can be used without problems on older computer systems with less powerful, dual-core processors, and little RAM. A minimum memory size of 2GB is recommended for smooth operation to allow even heavyweight applications such as LibreOffice or Firefox to run without noticeable latencies.