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I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alterna

by jchw 7y ago

I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alternatives to the default Windows shell environment. A good example of an early one is Norton Shell for Windows: http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html Then later there were things such as LiteStep, bbZero and even KDE at a time. Personally, I actually used ReactOS shell as my default shell briefly, judging its workspaces functionality to be worth other trade offs at the time. I believe it still works in Windows to this day, though it may still have bugs that don’t happen on ReactOS itself. Even though Windows isn’t really “hackable” for a long time people found a way to do many things, especially companies like Stardock, using API hooking and other somewhat brittle tricks, and Microsoft somewhat embraced it. For some good reasons and some bad, modern Windows is a lot more limited in this regard and there’s not much to replace the old hackability.

core-questions 7y ago
I was just commenting about the Norton Desktop on here a few days ago. I really liked its scripting environment, brought features to Windows 3.1 that modern windows still doesn't expose as conveniently. Ran AfterStep and LiteStep for years. Tried the various blackbox things, but minimal UI isn't for me, I want more functionality out of my UI, not less.
viraptor 7y ago
Do you know what changed recently? The last one I used with an alternative shell was windows 2k and the shells replaced shell.exe. is that not doable these days?
- jchw 7y ago
  The old method of changing the default shell still works. Although I don't think you replace/move explorer.exe anymore, but just change registry keys. When used in embedded systems or kiosks, this type of functionality is commonly needed, so it is unlikely to change. When I talked about things changing, it was more regarding changes that: - Improve security and stability by disallowing software from invading other address spaces to do patching. - Prevent modification of the operating system itself, by more thoroughly enforcing signature checking, file integrity, and with periodic large system updates that are effectively like full Windows version upgrades. These improvements may make Windows more secure and stable for users, but combined with modern PCs that come with Secure Boot enabled by default (and unfortunately, some that came with Secure Boot forcibly enabled during the Windows 8 era,) it makes modifications and customizations more challenging. There's no clean mechanism for which a piece of software like WindowBlinds can exist, and indeed, sometimes running Stardock software in modern Windows can be troublesome. A while back I hit a bug in WindowFX that effectively bricked your Windows install if you were running with Hyper-V enabled. It was fixed by Stardock but nonetheless, with a living OS like Windows 10, breaks like this can happen more often, without warning, and there's still not good alternatives for lots of customization stuff. It's interesting because there are actually still lots of ways in which Windows lets software extend the operating system - probably more than any other operating system, but most of them are very old and not very reliable/stable.

by jchw 7y ago

core-questions 7y ago

I was just commenting about the Norton Desktop on here a few days ago. I really liked its scripting environment, brought features to Windows 3.1 that modern windows still doesn't expose as conveniently. Ran AfterStep and LiteStep for years. Tried the various blackbox things, but minimal UI isn't for me, I want more functionality out of my UI, not less.

viraptor 7y ago

Do you know what changed recently? The last one I used with an alternative shell was windows 2k and the shells replaced shell.exe. is that not doable these days?

jchw 7y ago
The old method of changing the default shell still works. Although I don't think you replace/move explorer.exe anymore, but just change registry keys. When used in embedded systems or kiosks, this type of functionality is commonly needed, so it is unlikely to change. When I talked about things changing, it was more regarding changes that: - Improve security and stability by disallowing software from invading other address spaces to do patching. - Prevent modification of the operating system itself, by more thoroughly enforcing signature checking, file integrity, and with periodic large system updates that are effectively like full Windows version upgrades. These improvements may make Windows more secure and stable for users, but combined with modern PCs that come with Secure Boot enabled by default (and unfortunately, some that came with Secure Boot forcibly enabled during the Windows 8 era,) it makes modifications and customizations more challenging. There's no clean mechanism for which a piece of software like WindowBlinds can exist, and indeed, sometimes running Stardock software in modern Windows can be troublesome. A while back I hit a bug in WindowFX that effectively bricked your Windows install if you were running with Hyper-V enabled. It was fixed by Stardock but nonetheless, with a living OS like Windows 10, breaks like this can happen more often, without warning, and there's still not good alternatives for lots of customization stuff. It's interesting because there are actually still lots of ways in which Windows lets software extend the operating system - probably more than any other operating system, but most of them are very old and not very reliable/stable.