To me a top bar only makes sense when it contains the active window menu like on Mac. Keeping a bunch of disk-browsing shortcuts and a huge empty space always on top seems a waste.
This brings back some fond memories of experimenting with many alternative shells including LiteStep. I remember being able to run Windows XP + LiteStep + Chromium + PuTTy as my daily driver on a refurbished laptop with 256MB of RAM during my student days. Truly the glory days.
I think I might be a bit of a strange user. I have all of my icons hidden, a solid black background and the task bar in the right side of the most right display. I lunch my programs with Launchy, a long dead program, but somehow still works the fastest out of any alternative and I really appreciate the calculator function of it. Must used stuff is pinned to the taskbar, that includes VS Code, Explorer, GnuCash, browser links set to open as individual windows for Gmail, Google Calendar, Discord, Facebook messenger and same configuration but linked to MS Edge for another instance of Discord but with a different account.<p>On my main monitor I don't have any bars or anything, if there nothing open it's just a black screen, if it's sunny, sometimes I can't even tell if the display us turned on and that's how I like it.<p>A quiet black box that's there when I need it.
An other macOS-like custom theme for Microsoft Windows?<p>As both macOS and Windows user, I would like to minimize the task bar, menu bar height as small as possible, to maximize the display area of current using app. I prefer access to the apps, windows by keyboard as much as possible, because I feel it's quicker than click to icon or access through mouse.<p>One habit which I've dropped is changing wallpaper. I hadn't seen and didn't care about my wallpaper for a long time ago. There is always one window display on my computer. If I leave my desk, just lock it and unlock when I back.
One of the last few projects which still support modern windows releases. I hope we'll get a revival of alternative shells for both windows and macos one day.<p>I remember trying out many alternatives on win2k and that one needed much fewer fixes...
Cool, that still exists. Some years ago I was into all that desktop customization and tried this, LiteStep [0] and Blackbox/bb4win [1] but ended up with BlackBox.<p>Nowadays, all the customization I need is a tool to fix the taskbar position that someone who probably uses a portrait mode monitor moved to the wrong spot [2] and a launcher [3]<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.startallback.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.startallback.com/</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://keypirinha.com/" rel="nofollow">https://keypirinha.com/</a>
As opposed to menus like this type of desktop, I like to use launchers for everything.<p>I like key-pirranah the most. Configuration is on the harder side as launchers go, but it has been rock-solid since then for over a year.<p>I just type a few letters and it opens the folder/program I want.
Apart from the main desktop overhaul, does this bring a consistent UI across all Windows elements?<p>Windows already suffers from 3 (?) different UI styles; does this fix that or add to the problem?
Wow. And it is written in C# too. I am going to try integrating it with my WPF-based tiling window manager.<p>It supports Windows 11, meaning you can actually upgrade and replace its crippled taskbar with this.
These kind of things, litestep, Cygwin...they are embarrassing things that most of us had they in the past.<p>The road is difficult, now I am a normal user of GNU/Linux, but when I started this road, this kind of embarrasing things was my crutch or walking stick. The last step is the laptop/computer has only a partition with GNU/Linux, when it happens, you walked the more diffult part of road.<p>Well, I mean that yes this projects are embarrasing, but they are good and they help a lot people (include me). Thanks embarrasing projects.
Reminds me of Calmira II: <a href="http://www.calmira.de/" rel="nofollow">http://www.calmira.de/</a><p>We just need someone to port this to Windows 11 and the shell is usable again.
For those looking the blackbox version, best alt to LiteStep, that is updated to latest 2021 is this<p><a href="https://xoblite.net/" rel="nofollow">https://xoblite.net/</a>
What is the RAM usage like? I don't know how themes work for windows, or is this directly modifying the GUI? Is this an application which needs to be running to display this theme?
At one point I experimented with using this to turn the Hyper-V Server version of Windows (i.e. the free one with no desktop to speak of, intended purely to run as a hypervisor) into a desktop OS. It did indeed work as a desktop... but unfortunately there was so much else gutted out of that version of Windows that I gave up and went with Windows 10 LTSC.
I like the top bar and the neat bottom one. But I prefer having more space on the screen. I have an AutoHotkey script to show task bar only on key press so it's not toggle by accident. Then it's always fullscreen-like experience.
I run a mixture of SharpEnviro, Emerge Desktop, and a couple of ahk UIs, (clock, alt-tab, cpu monitor) it's a bit odd looking.<p>No start menu just a bunch of desktop icons, Dopus is probably the closest thing to a start menu/launcher I have.
Yeesh I’m getting some Rainmeter/Stardock PTSD. If you're into this interior decorating and don't need Windows, Linux will blow your mind.<p>In high school, if you had one of these tacked on Windows UI things, you were likely the kid who took the Apple sticker that came with your iPod nano and slapped it on your Windows laptop.
mariusmg -> A "customizable desktop environment for Windows" but the taskbar is fixed at the top of the screen. [+1]<p>for god's sake they should update the site immediately!
Sorry for asking, but am I right that this project has no relation whatsoever with the well-established Cairo library, which has been around for almost 20 years?<p><a href="https://www.cairographics.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cairographics.org/</a><p>If so, it would be a pretty terrible choice of name for a project with a focus on something that's visual (an alternative Windows desktop), given that cairolib is a graphics lib. I, for one, have been rather confused.