Alternative Desktops for Win32?

BRock97 asks: "After having made Linux the default desktop on my laptop, I have gotten into the mode of wanting to make all my desktops pretty, including my Win32 gaming machine. There are commercial programs out there (such as Object Desktop), but at a price tag of $50, I want to do a little more research before I toss down that chunk of change for eye candy, which leads to my question. Anyone use such freely available shell replacements such as geoshell or LiteStep? Comments on stability, speed, and such? The themes look impressive and the available modules (especially for LiteStep) looks extensive. For that matter, anyone use Object Desktop" Microsoft offers some UI tweaking tools, but I'm not aware of that many all-desktop replacements out there. Are any other projects in the works aside from the ones listed? How difficult are such projects to work on given Microsoft's attitude on control of the Win32 desktop?

Comments

Progman

[Trevelyan]

I tended to open system.ini and change the link:
shell=Explorer.exe
to
shell=progman.exe

for that nostalgic win3.1 look, with the added bounus that ur machine boot loads faster, and since progman dont load/run all the stuff in reg, it has less crap loaded, and to me is far more stable.

ofcoure i found a better way, and now run debian, but i still do this on uni machine. as well as set the background to c:\windows\logos.sys (stretched) just to confuse the luser who uses the machine after me >:)

geoShell

[gmaestro]

I'm forced to use win98 at work, and few weeks ago I installed geoshell. Very nice, multiple desktops and other toys. I cannot detect a difference in speed on the PIII-667 I use at work.

I see some comments about liteStep's installation. for one, I couldn't find anything on LiteStep, and geoshell's install was effortless. I'm very happy with it.

Comments from a long-time LiteStep user

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used LiteStep for about 2 years, off and on. It's extremely versitile, customizable, and a great replacement to the explorer shell. With all these bonuses, come drawbacks though.

The biggest problem comes with the step.rc and individualization of themes. Simply put, the author creates a theme to his tastes, with his layouts, with his setup. When another person installs this theme, they are required to use his layout, or modify it themself. So basically, you have to understand how to use the step.rc to fix any quirks you don't like about it. Thankfully, this process has gotten a lot easier with standardization of themes, though LSDistro and more recently OTS. The entire setup is moved away into personal .rc files which the themes can't touch. They simple pull the info from said files and use them for the formatting. This applies to popup, hotkey, and variable setups. Before this, one would have to install multiple instances of LiteStep and use a shell selector to switch between the themes. Now LS has modularity and can switch themes on the fly.

Another problem is the community itself, which has had it's ups and downs in the past few years. Currently, the main LiteStep site is down and the LiteStep theming community has floundered. This is the second time this has happend in the last few years and it sets us back when it comes to innovative theme development. We've also seen a bunch of our influential users/developers drop out of the scene from stupid users abusing them.

As long as you can get over the learning curve of modifying a step.rc file and you can adapt to the new shell enviroment, you should do fine with LiteStep. However, until litestep.net comes back up, don't expect to find a ton of themes or help setting it up.

On the horizion, we're looking at litestep.net coming up in a few months or so, as well as the much antisipated release of version .24.7 and a new dev. team dedicated to continuing to improve on LiteStep.

Litestep

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been following Litestep on and off since b.24 (I think) and find it to be the best shell replacement bar none (including *nix managers). It is the most customizable shell around and has recently become very modularized with the introduction of the Open Theme Standard. One other thing that has helped it become easy to use (good) themes as a newbie is the ability to make themes resolution independant in the latest dev builds by using environment variables such as $ResolutionX/2$. Theming has been made even more tolerable with the introduction of third party scripting modules such as mzscript.

I do find the modules a little annoying and unstable sometimes but the Litestep core is solid as a rock (as far as i can tell). Ther are only two other things that bug me about Litestep.

• 1) No built in Z-Order handling for modules
• 2) No built in variable management

Apart from that I highly recommend it to anyone who is a wee bit computer savvy and likes to be able to change EVERYTHING about their desktop.

PS I'm not really a coward, Slashdot just wouldn't let me sign up.

:: trankillity ::

More props for Litestep

[snol]

Litestep is what I use when I boot into Windows; if it didn't exist I probably would've moved to Linux much earlier. It requires that you play around with rc files and spend a few months getting to know modules and their quirks before it works really well, but really there are no limits once you get it going. My question wouldn't have been about alternate shells for windows, my question would've been whether there are any unix desktop environments that come at all close to comparing to Litestep. I'm probably being a little unfair to the multitude of other shells out there but really once I got the hang of Litestep I found it had so many possibilities that I didn't feel inclined to try any others.

Re:Serenade and others

[xannik]

I have been using Serenade for about 6 months now and I have to say that I am very impressed with the performance and speed that Serenade offers. Not to mention the user interface which is significantly better than the default explorer shell. Many new themes have been posted to skinbase.org recently showing the power of themes that Serenade offers. Serenade, although in the alpha stage, is a very mature product and the development is very responsive to user requests. The shell is written in VisualC++ and in the future will be adding scripting support for users to easily develop their own plugins using an interpreter based language (Romeo). If you want a shell that is extremely configurable yet light on resources (so light in fact that it takes up less resources than the default explorer shell), then try Serenade. It has an easy installation and should you decide to go back, uninstall is easy as well. Just follow the information on the website. Exciting things will be happening with the development of Serenade in the future, so keep your eyes on www.courtah.net. Xan