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http://www.bb4win.org/

It's a shame you can't just change the desktop on Windows or OSX to something what you like.

Sure you can. Windows desktop (icons etc) is explorer.exe used as a shell. There had been many other replacement shells for Windows. For example, here is BlackBox - look at the screenshots there.

Am I the only one who thinks the Ribbon "perl" idea seems like a fix for a problem almost no one ever had (the old standard menu bar)? And generally is a worse implementation because it adds an extra click for no apparent reason?

The idea of Ribbon (and similar UI solutions) is that all functions that are frequently used should be one click away, and this may be achieved by stuffing some functions that are rarely used further than they used to be.

In case of browsers, at least, I wholeheartedly support this - I've had main menu disabled in Opera for a very long time. I never use it. Why would I want to?

Also, I must be the only one who got used to double clicking on the title bar to restore/maximize the window - how do you do that now?

Surprisingly enough, you double-click the title bar (or whatever is left of it, anyway).

Or, you use the normal maximize/restore button in the top right corner of the window

I know I'm a power user

If you're a power user, why would you want the main menu? Don't you just use keyboard shortcuts (and, in browsers, mouse gestures)?

They are the reason for this abomination that is the ribbon. While everyone else is trying to save space, they're bloating things

Sigh. Not this myth again.

Office 2007 Ribbon is narrower than the default set of toolbars in Office 2003. And, of course, you can minimize it (and just use the shortcuts).

Regarding your other complains - hopefully you can understand that a single UI won't work for everyone, and the natural way of handling this is to make it work better for most people, even at the expense of the few who got used to the old (and often less efficient or less intuitive) way.

If you find that Win7 shell UI isn't to your liking and annoys you way too much, well, it is still replaceable as it had been since Windows 95, and there are plenty of alternatives. Heck, you can run Blackbox if you want.

There are several alternative shells for Windows available.

e.G.
http://www.bb4win.org/news.php

But there are many others.

Still, it's not something that makes a lot of sense in a company environment, and normal users will never do something like that.

After months of fighting with Explorer (I don't want to know the details of all images and videos), I decided to drop Explorer by installing xplorer2 lite.
If you want to get rid of Explorer altogether you'll need to install a new graphical shell (like Blackbox), which saves RAM, CPU cycles and (can be) easier on the eyes.

Sounds to me like the problem is your window manager. MDI is effectively dead; it's window managers not applications that should be responsible for managing windows. If you're stuck on MS Windows try replacing the bloated default shell with something better and faster.

PS: It's always been done like this!

BBLean http://bb4win.org/ is another one similar to Fluxbox.

IIRC = if I recall correctly. I seem to remember that the version of BB I tried replaced the standard windowing system completely. Have a look here http://www.bb4win.org/. There was also some LiteSTEP available for Windows that worked pretty well.

Take me back to the days of BlackBox

Go for it:

http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/

http://www.bb4win.org/news.php

KFG

While the new verification might decrease the amount of people who pirate the new Vista, I do not think it is going to increase sales and I definitely do not think it is going to decrease pirating. People who need windows will either crack the verification, deal with the "lite" version, or stay with their current version of windows. I truly think that MS is going to see a lot of people defecting to OSX and to Linux. Apple is already making it's case and it will continue to grow. The people who use Linux know that it is a viable option, but it is still looking for it's breakthru performance to jump into the mainstream.

I jumped ship to linux a month or so ago when my windows registry got corrupted. Ever since Vista's inital announcement I have been planning on changing, and the corrupt registry was the final nail. I have no intentions on ever going back to windows, and I think that if Linux could market itself to more people, it would change a lot of minds, too.

Why is booting less and less into windows so important to you? I agree that I'm not a fan of the operating system, but it's not the worst out there. And it's certainly not painful to boot into.

And if you really don't like the look of windows, check out BlackBox. With all the plugins and skins availible it's a good alternative to making windows look better.

I'm pretty sure they could do it, but why not make as much as possible in house if you can? They aren't a bunch of idealistic programmers communing to build a better tomorrow. They are a company that, successfully, makes a lot of money. When I am making money by the truckload, I am pretty certain I will ignore the complaints of small foundations telling me I need to adhere to their standards when they only have a small market share.

Well, I guess that rant was mostly about browsers, because thats where I usually see complaints. Active Directory and WMP though? This is getting down right stupid. Next people will sue them because they bundle Explorer with windows.

"We should be able to choose Litestep or BlackBox instead of Explorer when we install Windows! Boo! Why doesn't M$ make everything open and standard? That has to make it better right?"

In the case of the Linux desktops, you could probably hack something together that would work without those components. Arguably you could in Windows too, I guess, by having the Task Manager open (since it allows you to run programs by filename). But Windows is designed as a distribution to use IE as the main shell program. If you kill IE in Windows (go to Task Manager, find "explorer.exe", and kill it - or just crash it, there are plenty of ways to do it), you lose the desktop, the Start menu, and the taskbar. IE is the shell that most people interact with. (It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)

Ah, but Explorer is not the only shell for Windows, there's Litestep, Blackbox for Windows (and its offspring), and for the truly hardcore, progman.exe :-) (it still runs on W2K last I tried, although you do have to create all the groups yourself, and no system tray too)

Try using a different desktop, been able to switch between workspaces and roll/unroll windows will make you see how needless the MDI paradigm is.

Probably not without a lot of tweaking and extra work. Windows' desktop environment is fundamentally different from X, so I don't think that a full port of KDE is a reasonable expectation. There are, however, some nice Windows clones of *nix shells (e.g., http://www.bb4win.org/), and there is of course always Litestep.

Not for Windows.

No offence, but I don't think you know what you're talking about.

Ho ho.

Well the first thing I did with the wretched XP machine they gave me at work was to install Blackbox for Windows. Plus some wallpaer from Deviant Art

Not only does it make the machine pleasant to use but it confuses the hell out of my colleagues :)

And here I was thinking Microsoft was going to officially support the BlackBox for Windows effort. Silly me.

It's nice to see MS embracing an open source window manager like this.

Blackbox for Windows is not a window manager but a replacement shell. There is no proper way to fundamentally change Windows behaviour (ie disable the click-to-front policy).

Personally it is not so much the operating system as the window manager.

I use fluxbox becase I like being able to scoll between virtual desktops with my mouse scroll wheel.

My friend's desktop has at least three "New Folder's" and who knows what they contain :x

As for I, when on windows, because I went nuts with the organization of icons in windows on my desktop, I use Blackbox for Windows which brings the black/fluxbox minimalist shell to windows by replacing explorer and creates the iconless environment that I always loved.

A few years ago, before i started using Linux seriously, I started building an almost free/open Windows XP system. Here's the basic breakdown of the so-called free system:
Shell: http://www.bb4win.org/
Burning prog: http://www.burnatonce.com/
DC client: http://gempond.com/odc/
Graphics: http://gempond.com/odc/
IM: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
Browser:
Mail: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Office suite: http://www.openoffice.org/
et cetera...
But then it dawned on me: All these programs are avaliable under GNU/Linux.

That day was the day that i switched to Debian. I haven't looked back.

Because as we all know, it's virtually impossible to run Linux software on any other systems.

"Or that i'd prefer to use fluxbox (I know, I know, it's not right now, but think outside the lil box for a second) instead of that horrible gui that XP uses?"

*Ahem*

http://www.bb4win.org/

I would really like to see the shell opened up.
Microsoft over the years has really focused on providing a better and better user experience. Based on the current demos, Avalon will only move this goal further.

However, I am unconvinced that a single user experience is right for me. Explorer.exe may be a wonderful environment for 95% of users, but true customization (not just theming and custom animations) can only be acheived by having third parties contribute their own innovations.

Some environments already exist that replace explorer.exe: Litestep and BB4Win. These programs are only marginally useful as they were not programmed against the specs, and will likely no longer work under Longhorn.

I believe that a fair amount of teenagers+ who migrate to Linux do it not for the OpenSourceness, but for the possibility to tweak their environment. Wouldn't it be great if one day we had a variety on Windows such as this ?

I myself have tried many alternative shells for Windows. I understand what you say about your wife not wanting to use the laptop with the new shell... my family almost killed me when GeoShell popped up on them.

However, have you actually tried Fluxbox? Fluxbox is so damn fast you wouldn't believe it. Sure there are no desktop icons, or much of anything for that matter, but it's very nice once you get used to it.

To see what I mean, try downloading bb4win, a port of BlackBox (Which is slightly less featurefull than FluxBox)

I guess you've never heard of bb4win then, eh?

Couldn't you simply set the shell to your application for the applicable users? It's the Windows equivalent of setting the WM to your app on Linux, which was already suggested. I know it can be done on a per-user basis - you might want to ask the people at Blackbox for Windows how they got that done.

Blackbox for Windows is REALLY small. BTW, I tried GeoShell on my old Win95 laptop, and it SUCKED HARD (stuff overlapping, etc.)

Blackbox for Windows. Its very nice and well put together.

there are free desktops for windows available.

And with litestep no Linux WM can compare, cause it's real customizable.
And maybe kahakai can compare, when it has more snipplets to make things easier.
Geoshell is from the Programmer of the Explorer, because he need something to debug the Explorer during development. And the concept of bars is just like the concept behind gnome.
There is also a blackbox port for windows.
And there is much more.

just my 0.02

A Good Thing To Do would be to visit bb4win and using their tutorials, install Blackbox* as the default shell instead of Explorer :) Then you can edit the BB menu and for instance create an item that lets you launch arbitrary programs..

*Warning: Do not try this if you suspect your wife/husband/whatever tries to beat you unconscious with a baguette every time you attempt it.

Blackbox runs on windows

Here for 2k/XP users