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there's no reason to get vista so fast yet. XP is still function and it cost a fortune to upgrade just for a little better lookat most. I'll stick w/ my window blind.

Want Windows Vista (sidebar and all) without DRM?

Ingredients:

Windows XP
Desktop Sidebar ( http://www.desktopsidebar.com/ )
Style XP ( http://www.tgtsoft.com/ )

There's your Windows Vista. ;-)

Who modded you as insightful?! You clearly don't know wtf you're talking about!

If you and the modders bothered to take a look at TGTSoft's FAQ, you'd notice that they explicitly state that StyleXP is not a skinning engine.

What is Style XP?
Style XP is not a skinning engine. It uses Microsoft's built-in visual style engine, but enhances it by providing many useful tools. Style XP can import, select, rotate, and manage Themes, Visual Styles, Wallpaper, Logons, BootScreens, Icons, and Explorer Bar. Future versions may support sounds, cursors, screensavers, and packages of all the above.

Pfft, what a shameless plug for a sub-standard product! Jeez louise...

I use TGT Soft's Style XP to display different themes, but my main UI addition to XP is YzDock. Its development has been stopped by Apple's legal team the last time I checked, but you can still find it.
Basically, it's a dock just like in OSX, and it's incredibly customizable, supporting things like the recycling bin, etc.

Aqua is really slick, but eventually it gets old, wheras there are dozens of really nice looking themes for KDE

(do you mean Luna, XP's default visual style, or did you really mean Aqua, OS X's interface?) This article was more about icons than look & feel. While many people may not like the Playschool look of the Luna widgets, I've never heard anyone complain about the new icons.

However, if you want to talk about look & feel, you can change that in XP just as well as in KDE. ThemeXP has a bunch of good themes (called "Visual Styles" for XP), and you can either search Google for the uxtheme.dll hack to allow you to use those themes, or pay for TGTSoft's StyleXP (TGTSoft used to host a free hack for uxtheme.dll, but it no longer worked on XP SP1; thus you should search google for the hack if you don't feel like buying StyleXP).

Second, my list. Almost all of my favorite programs are already mentioned in the +5 posts, so I won't list them all (there are a lot). Here's what's left of my top 25 or so programs I definitely install on a fresh Windows reinstall, in no particular order. Everything is free, unless otherwise noted. I don't think any of these are open-sourced, though.

• ObjectDock - OS X's sexy toolbar that expands when you mouseover is now available for windows, too. Tons of useful plugins available, such as a weather tracker and system monitor.
  
• Yz's dock - no link for this one because Apple killed it with a C&D letter. Same basic concept as ObjectDock; marginally better IMHO. If you really want it, google for yz_dck0083.zip.
  
• StyleXP - I can't believe no one's mentioned this one yet. Windows skinning, anyone?
  
• Crimson Editor - yet another lightweight (i.e., fast) file editor with extended functionality such as automatically coloring source code files.
  
• MetaPad - extremely lightweight file editor, a replacement for notepad.exe.
  
• Sothink SWF Decompiler - good for when I want to grab an image or sound out of a flash file.
  
• Google Toolbar - yes, it's created by Google, the next Big Brother, but I like the pop-up blocker, and the privacy issues are moot if you take the time to uncheck one box.
  
• Middle Man - for people like me who still use AOL's bread-and-butter AIM client, this is a great unofficial plug-in. Removes ads and adds a ton of new functionality.
  
• Peer Guardian - another biggie that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned before. Blocks the RIAA and its ilk from connecting to your machine.
• Total Recorder - (shareware/demo) captures all audio output and logs it to a wav or mp3 file. Good for stream ripping.
  
• NetLimiter - (shareware/demo) limit your maximum upload/download speeds, optionally on a program by program basis. Some firewalls already have this functionality, though... but not all.
  

SXP uses the msstyle format - the same format Windows uses. Windows, by default, does not allow other 'visual styles' other than the WinXP style(Luna) and the Windows Classic design. This is where SXP comes along. SXP overwrites the restriction on Windows' visual styles. Hence, you can now use other visual styles. SXP skinning tech. is really just a hack. SXP's skinning technology is Windows' itself. Ergo, SXP's skinning doesn't, at anyway at all, give additional system slowdown. Its "native skinning."

Might be a good transitional tool for Windows users looking not wanting to give up their eye-candy interface initially.
I'm not sure that's the salient issue. Windows user who are savvy to Linux know about the great eye candy that is available for Linux. Frankly, if it came down to eye candy, projects like Enlightenment offer no advantage over ObjectDesktop, WindowsBlinds, and StyleXP. And so far, Microsoft's ClearType anti-aliasing technology is subjectively better than anything I've seen on MacOS or Linux. Note, this is an admittedly subjective evaluation. I found a Q&A that speaks to the technical quality of ClearType that is beyond my comprehension. The fact is, my eyes have never been happier! I work heavily with numbers and text. Show me how to anti-alias old Linux apps like xv and rxvt, and I'm yours!

As a longtime Windows user who does appreciate Linux, what keeps me from making the switch are three common issues that I and the thousands of Linux advocates and zealots still haven't resolved:

1. I, like most Windows users, spend a lot on Windows software. Windows software typically costs about $40-80 online or in stores. That's quite an investment. In order to let go of Windows I would have to write off my investment in software as a sunk cost. But what if I want to keep using that software? What do I do, toss it out? Maybe I should sell it all off on eBay? This is why Linux is an easier sell to first time computer users; there isn't an established dependency. There is a good amount of good software that doesn't run on WINE or any of the WINE spinoffs. Testing to see if my apps will work under Linux can require that I pay good money for Win4Lin or VMWare. WINEX is a gamble since I have to pay before I can try it out, and according to the site, none of what I run works!

2. I like my a Windows apps. I don't abandon my apps just because there's a new operating system in town. I still use a few DOS and Windows 3.1 apps. I also have MacOS and Amiga apps sitting around. Why should I abandon my favorite apps like MS Office XP or The Sims (I've bought all the expansions) just because there are shiny new alternatives available on Linux? At the end of the day, I bought my computer in order to compute, not so that I can fight a revolution. Being a Stallmanista is kinda cool too, but I want to use what I want to use... ultimately isn't Linux and open-source about freedom of choice?

3. I need to use specialized proprietary applications like SPSS, and I happen to use some hardware that isn't support under anything but Windows. For some apps, I just can't use an alternative. And for the hardware, I'm not talking about winmodems, I''m talking about video capture devices and software that rely on the current DirectX and DirectShow. It doesn't matter whether an alternative exists, I won't use it for reasons other than stubborness.

So far, the only solution has been dual-booting, which has its own problems, and purchasing a second computer.

[KDE] Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.

All of that is available in Windows. Get TweakUI from the Power Toys page and you can enable X-Mouse if you like focus-follows-mouse functionality (personally, I don't like it, but to each his own). You can also theme XP with StyleXP from TGTSoft (or if you don't want to pay, you can find the uxtheme.dll hack on google -- search for "uxtheme.dll SP1", no quotes). Tons of themes are available.

However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for.

That's just organization. There's nothing stopping you from organizing your Program Files menu on the Start Menu in Windows. KDE has a nice organization because it comes with a lot of apps to begin with. Windows on the other hand tends to rely on separate software, and each installer wants to have its own top-level menu. Don't let it. Some apps play nice, like all of Microsoft Games Studio's games -- they all install under "Microsoft Games" rather than having one menu for each game. So, organize the menu if you don't like the default.

Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.

Try the Virtual Desktop Manager, again from Power Toys. It does multiple desktops correctly, though it does have some other issues. Also, I guess I'm not familiar with KDE's file manager/CLI (I assume you mean Konqueror?), but remember that the Konqueror design is essentially Explorer/Internet Explorer's design -- it's really little more than a container for other objects. There's a Power Toy to open a command prompt from a folder, or you could try something like this instead, a command prompt explorer bar to put a CLI directly in the explorer window. Is that what you mean KDE does?

Sure, right out of the box KDE is more configurable and has a little more functionality (virtual desktops, mostly). But with a little work and using only that which is built into Windows or Power Toys provided by Microsoft directly (ie, not replacing your shell with something like LiteStep, or paying for something like StarDock's WindowBlinds) you can make Windows (XP) do everything that made you choose KDE over Windows. The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux :).

No, it's not. My task bar is two rows high, one for app buttons, one for toolbars. The Start button is on the top row, not the bottom one.

You're right, I missed this case because I never use a stretched-out taskbar. Quick Launch goes over on the side of the screen, single-line taskbar goes at the bottom. In its single-line configuration, the start button is infinitely deep along the screen edges (again, at least in the Luna theme, maybe not in classic).

It has nothing to do with IE. Many applications open windows that way. Part of the problem is that Windows allows this pseudo-maximisation without detecting that the window occupies the full desktop (or maybe almost all of it, with some tolerance) and snapping it into true maximised mode.

True, but I've never seen any app psuedo-maximized other than IE when browsing "bad" (*cough*pr0n*cough*) sites. IE shouldn't allow that, or should allow for some way to programmatically go maximized via script if people must have this feature. (I guess on lower resolution screens, you might have windows that open up covering the entire desktop without being maximized, but XP won't let you run in anything less than 800x600 unless you really force it). Yes, maybe Windows should do some sort of detection on almost-maximized windows. I bet you could write a small app that would do that.

None of this changes the fact that the rounded corners suck from a usability perspective anyway. Some of us tile windows side-by-side when using two versions of the same program on different documents. Your window isn't maximised, but you still have cornering issues.

If you're running tiled, the worst that can happen is you click on the space under the window. However, the rounding of the corners is only a few pixels, so you have to really be mousing for it to hit that. Anyway, if you don't like rounded windows, do something about it (btw, the tgtsoft page has the freely-available uxtheme patcher, so you can patch your uxtheme.dll and use different visual styles without having to buy StyleXP).

Yea, but I'd been getting tired of the Windows Classic theme (it'd been seven years), so I downloaded the ux theme patcher and installed Aikon XP. I like it enough that I eventually bought Style XP (from the same company that puts out the ux theme patcher).

Blackcomb was supposed to be nt 5.2, but they made it 6.0 so that longhorn can become 5.2. If you want your XP system to look like Blackcomb, right here, right now, do the following.

1 Load Style XP onto your XP system.

2 Choose one of the many styles from this site, themexp.org in which I did a simple recursive search for blackcomb. There is even one for "The Matrix" lovers.

3 Change your splash screen. These are also on the link above.