You’ll soon lose the free Windows themes available on Microsoft’s official page. The company has decided to scrap the themes, citing the gradual loss of interest. You’ll still be able to download themes from Microsoft Store.
On January 21, Microsoft updated the support documentation, which was reflected on the RSS feed. So unless you’re subscribed to RSS feed, you’ll likely never realize Microsoft is killing off legacy themes store unless you manually visit the page.
The new banner briefly explains the reason behind this decision with a redirect link to the themes collection on the Microsoft Store.
We were confused about the statement as it felt that the themes would be hosted somewhere else. In our tests, Windows Latest searched a few theme names listed on the official page of the Microsoft Store. Sadly, none of these themes appeared in the search results.
So, it’s confirmed that once the page is gone, you won’t be able to find them anymore. However, these themes haven’t been updated in a while, so you’ll find mostly old designs.
Since Microsoft is pushing the Store page as an alternative, we decided to check it out. The search shows an abundance of free themes meaning you don’t need to spend anything unless you care for a very specific design. We noticed that the filters to narrow down search results are somewhat broken.
If you try to narrow down all the free themes, you cannot list them all at once. Instead, you’ll have to pick something like the Top free option which just showcases a handful of themes.
That means you’ll have to endlessly scroll down the themes page to find a free theme. It should be of Microsoft’s top priorities to fix this filter problem in the Store app.
The page also highlights the Windows 10 end-of-support date this year.
Windows 10’s going away
Microsoft has slowly updated most Windows-related pages to reflect the retirement of Windows 10. Last year, we thought that Microsoft would consider extending the shelf life of this decade-old OS, especially because it has a positive reception among users compared to Windows 11. But Microsoft didn’t budge and October 14 is the last date.
After that, a paid one-year extension is the last resort, and then millions of users must pick between a new Windows 11 PC or another operating system that can get a few more years out of the PC.
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