11 ms·

Cairo: Alternative Windows Desktop

187 points by rhim 4y ago

cryptos 4y ago
Can the taskbar be moved to the left side, so that it is vertical?
viraptor 4y ago
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. I remember trying out many alternatives on win2k and that one needed much fewer fixes...
- lrvick 4y ago
  These customization efforts will likely continue to break and frustrate devs into giving up in future updates because proprietary OS vendors like Microsoft and Apple are simply not motivated to allow people to get in the way of their regular overhauls of their preferred brand experience. If you want wide customization of an OS, an open source OS is likely a more maintainable choice.
  - johnfonesca 4y ago
    Even on Linux, the only DE which shines on the customization front is KDE.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      FVWM would like to have a word! queue dr evil laugh
      - chupasaurus 4y ago
        DPI/Scaling configuration?
        lrvick 4y ago
        Every modern graphical linux distro has this as a GUI option.
        chupasaurus 4y ago
        So every modern graphical linux distro has it's own GUI implementation of it for FVWM? Or without sarcasm, it's a Window Manager problem in X, and my google-fu says FVWM doesn't support this feature.
        lrvick 4y ago
        FVWM is a an ultra minimal window manager favoring advanced users comfortable on a terminal. No major consumer focused distros ship with it. Gnome or KDE are likely a better fit for someone that cannot scale DPI on a terminal.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Now someone port it Wine, combine it with the fact that Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux [0] and we're all set! 0: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
  - stuaxo 4y ago
    Try it on wine and document any incompatibilities on the wine appdb
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    Now I want to see an entire desktop environment built with Wine instead of GTK or Qt.
- laumars 4y ago
  I was an author for a couple of alternative desktop shells for Windows 9x. I think Windows 95 was the first time I encountered support changing the desktop shell (then via the ‘shell’ property in one of Windows’ ini files). I remember some of the main uses cases were: 1. Restoring the Windows 3.x progman (Program Manager) shell 2. Bespoke UIs for educational systems in schools and colleges 3. Bespoke UIs for locked down graphical terminals, like kiosks. The shells I wrote were purely aimed at families though. Designed to make the single user OS a little more like a multi user platform. Windows 95 was pretty terrible when it came to different family members using the same computer. It was fun times but I honestly don’t miss Windows 9x one but.
  - signaru 4y ago
    Being able to replace the shell is actually possible since 3.x, also using the method you described. It was fun using Calmira to make win 3.x look like 9x.
    - laumars 4y ago
      Oh wow. That does sound fun. Thanks for the correction.
kleiba 4y ago
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? https://www.cairographics.org/ https://www.cairographics.org/ 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.
- mhd 4y ago
  I think the project's name is referring to the unreleased "predecessor" of Windows 95, which existed quite a few years before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
  - frozenport 4y ago
    would make sense, but the two look quiet different?
  - alrlroipsp 4y ago
    Would make more sense to call it LONGHORN then by this association.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Well seeing as a longhorn is a form of gnu, maybe they should call it that. Shorter.
    - snowram 4y ago
      Like the distributed block storage solution for Kubernetes?
      - alrlroipsp 4y ago
        Ok, zoomer.
- deleted 4y ago
petargyurov 4y ago
Apart from the main desktop overhaul, does this bring a consistent UI across all Windows elements? Windows already suffers from 3 (?) different UI styles; does this fix that or add to the problem?
- laumars 4y ago
  You cannot change that UI toolkit an existing application uses. Only change the theming if that toolkit supports theming, and change the desktop shell. This is true for Linux as well as Windows.
  - p4bl0 4y ago
    On Linux, KDE is able to theme GTK apps to match it's own theme. It has limitations of course but it does a very good job.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      It can do that because Gtk allows for custom themes, so it's possible to make one that looks like Qt. The opposite - making Qt look like a Gtk theme - is also possible. But Windows deprecated support for user-configurable themes ages ago, and none of the new frameworks have it.
    - laumars 4y ago
      That’s not a KDE thing, it’s a Qt and GTK thing. Those toolkits support themes and all you’re doing in KDE is specifying a two different themes (albeit named the same) that is visually similar. However if you look closer at the widgets you’ll notice how theming on Qt and GTK differ, so even the “same” theme across those two toolkits will look and behave subtly different.
  - Uehreka 4y ago
    I think they’re referring to the fact that, within the system apps that Microsoft controls, there are multiple generations of UI design. Like, last I checked I think Device Manager still has a Windows 98-ish look (there are many others).
yathaid 4y ago
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.
- zouhair 4y ago
  I have yet to find something better than Windowmaker[0]. [0]: https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  I'm a linux guy through and through, but there was just something special about being able to play with all the different shells. NONE of them were fully usable the way explorer was, but it was still fun.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It really depends on when. If we're talking Win9x-XP, shells could do everything, and Explorer wasn't really special. From Vista onwards, things started to get "more special", and Win8+ especially killed many old extensibility points.
  - bongobingo1 4y ago
    Curious why you feel that way, when they were all generally cloned linux shells [sic] anyway? eg: blackbox <> openbox (now xoblite), or litestep <> afterstep/nextstep? I guess it was a bit more punk to break windows, from some perspectives. Nostalgic to visit the LiteStep website, looks largely unchanged from when I stumbled across it probably circa 2003. I always enjoyed the crispness of the menu chrome and icons from what I always associated with a "BeOS style". http://www.litestep.net/ http://www.litestep.net/
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      That wasn't my experience.
qwerty456127 4y ago
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.
- cryptos 4y ago
  For me even the top bar on macOS doesn't make that much sense, since the menu might be far away from the related window. This UI concept is not a good fit for large screens (and was never intended to be used with such screens, since the design is from stone age).
  - scratcheee 4y ago
    Whilst your point is fair, I do think the fitt's law benefits are pretty huge (ie the infinitely extending target because it's across the screen edge). It really depends on usage patterns I guess. If you have lots of _really_ small windows then your point is entirely correct, but if people are using large windows then it becomes less clear - there's a fair chance they're moving almost as far to reach the edge of the window for the in-window menu bar, but not benefiting from the screen edge infinite target, at which point the macos model becomes superior. The thing is I suspect the cut-off applies even for half-screen windows these days, I think the benefits of screen edge scale better than the benefits of window edge (since you can always move faster if you don't have to aim well). On the other hand, I guess there's an upper limit to practical window size, regardless of how large screens get.
    - Asooka 4y ago
      Fitt's law makes little sense for touchpads, which are the primary pointing device for macOS PCs nowadays.
    - endgame 4y ago
      The Fitt's Law benefits decrease with the distance you have to travel to reach the bar, though. It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions. Better to just have good accelerator keys (not that any of the major desktops seem to do that in a discoverable way).
mariusmg 4y ago
A "customizable desktop environment for Windows" but the taskbar is fixed at the top of the screen. :(
- retox 4y ago
  More than likely, the majority of your eye's focus is spent in the top half of your screen, for me having the start bar at the top is very natural. If you haven't, I'd give it a try. Having said that, user choice is sacrosanct.
  - mariusmg 4y ago
    I have a UW monitor. The correct position of the taskbar for me is vertical on the right side of the screen. And to occupy as little space as possible, here is how it actually looks https://i.imgur.com/zhYnnKx.png https://i.imgur.com/zhYnnKx.png
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    I've personally put my monitor on a thick book (about CS foundation, fittingly enough) so that most of the time, I'm naturally looking at the middle of the screen where, incredibly, most of the useful stuff actually is. In any case, for me the start bar is mostly useless.
  - hurflmurfl 4y ago
    I think I do mostly look at the top half of the screen, but I somehow reach a different conclusion from you :) There's nothing interesting on the taskbar, so it makes sense to keep it down there. The most commonly used programs like Firefox, IDE, Slack are pinned to the taskbar, so I can invoke them with Win+[1-3]. When multitasking in full screen, there's Alt+Tab. Overall, I feel like the taskbar doesn't have that much use most of the time, but it's nice to have it on the screen just so I can use it as "shortcut cheatsheet".
- hulitu 4y ago
  It does not look customizable. It looks like win 10.
est 4y ago
Is this the same vaporware that supposed to release during Vista era?
- Crono 4y ago
  Kind of, yes. But I don't remember the project being open source when it started. Then there was a long time without any progress and since a few years it seems slightly active again ...
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
I used it for a while in 2018. The only thing that I didn't like... it was still Windows underneath.
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  Yeah, it's a lipstick on a pig
quadral 4y ago
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?
Semaphor 4y ago
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. 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] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep [1]: http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/ http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/ [3]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/
- butthatsit 4y ago
  There also used to be KDE on Windows - exactly what it sounds like, a full Plasma desktop running on Windows!
  - timeon 4y ago
    I was under naive impression that Plasma inspired look of Vista/7.
    - butthatsit 4y ago
      I don't think so, the Aero look and feel was out (in Longhorn betas) way before KDE4 came to be... But perhaps the Windows 7 look was influenced by it. However, the current look of KDE - which is much more like Aero - is very recent, at least post Windows 8. KDE4 as it was at the beginning didn't look like Aero that much IMHO.
- baq 4y ago
  MS PowerToys also feature a launcher and a couple of nice features like mouse cursor highlight on shake and window zones which make 4k portrait mode monitors somewhat usable.
- CoolCold 4y ago
  Used bb4win (bbmean afair) till 2012 I guess, but then it was not developed and not coupled well with Win 7/8 probably, so I came back to Explorer. Nowadays on Win11 I'd probably won't need bb4win anymore.
cakirh 4y ago
mariusmg -> A "customizable desktop environment for Windows" but the taskbar is fixed at the top of the screen. [+1] for god's sake they should update the site immediately!
nsonha 4y ago
Remind me of when this was a more common thing, I used such a DE called talisman, and I remember KDE 4 worked on windows too.
- v-yadli 4y ago
  Yep Talisman! I received a shareware copy of it on a magazine CD. Totally blown away by the true color UI and pre-arranged widget bits here and there. The thing's born in the 9X era but rocks a definite XP vibe.
quyleanh 4y ago
An other macOS-like custom theme for Microsoft Windows? 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. 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.
- top_sigrid 4y ago
  I even hide the menu bar on my Mac so every window always is as fullscreen as a window can be and I have never looked back. When I want someting from the menubar I need to move the mouse there anyways. The only nitpick is, when having an external monitor set to be above the MacBook's one, simply jamming your mouse up to the top won't reveal the menubar as easy and you need to move it exactly to the screen top. Also I don't know how that approach would work with the new MacBooks with a notch.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  When I used windows I always stuck the taskbar to the side since you can generally give up a bit of horizontal estate on widescreen monitors. That was a time when I only had one monitor though, so perhaps that would be more annoying than not with two depending on the side you wanted to put it on.
awestroke 4y ago
Quite nostalgia-inducing with the ugly gradients
HeckFeck 4y ago
Reminds me of Calmira II: http://www.calmira.de/ http://www.calmira.de/ We just need someone to port this to Windows 11 and the shell is usable again.
dang 4y ago
Related: Cairo Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734913 - Dec 2019 (88 comments)
mdtrooper 4y ago
These kind of things, litestep, Cygwin...they are embarrassing things that most of us had they in the past. 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. Well, I mean that yes this projects are embarrasing, but they are good and they help a lot people (include me). Thanks embarrasing projects.
- mekkkkkk 4y ago
  It's also possible to just enjoy Windows. Bragging about being a Linux user is the actual embarrassing thing.
  - mdtrooper 4y ago
    Well, in a IT and others tech fields it is normal being a Linux user. But as say in spanish: "Pa'ti la perra gorda" ...in english "Whatever you say, mate..." .
LoveMortuus 4y ago
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. 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. A quiet black box that's there when I need it.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I use Fences for similar approach. My desktop is empty by default. Hover over certain areas brings up logically grouped icons. Works for me! :-)
- Smithalicious 4y ago
  I'm on Linux but I have a similar setup, with no permanent UI elements at all - I have a script to show a notification with the time and remaining battery (on laptop) and so on that I run when I need to see that info. I use a tiling window manager, three monitors and heavy usage of workspaces.
- reportgunner 4y ago
  > 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 do the same and I rarely click on the Start menu or the task bar, I use Super + [1-4] to launch the pinned programs or switch focus to their windows if they are already running. For other programs I press Super on my keyboard and type the name of the program I want to launch. My pinned programs are Browser, Text Editor, File Explorer, Collaboration app at work and Browser, Discord, File Explorer, Steam at home.
- RunSet 4y ago
  Task bar on the same side of the screen as my "mouse hand" just feels correct.
tryptophan 4y ago
As opposed to menus like this type of desktop, I like to use launchers for everything. 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. I just type a few letters and it opens the folder/program I want.
- ThrashAbaddon 4y ago
  What do you use for that?
  - bilekas 4y ago
    https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/
- bilekas 4y ago
  I've been using Flow Launcher on Windows and it's good but doesn't pick up some programs im looking for, I'll check out key-pirranah - maybe it can have better results. I like the idea of "Associate a Keyword to an Item"
bobiny 4y ago
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.
coldacid 4y ago
What I wish Cairo had a shelf like NeXTSTEP (honestly I wish all graphical operating environments had this).
fredgrott 4y ago
For those looking the blackbox version, best alt to LiteStep, that is updated to latest 2021 is this https://xoblite.net/ https://xoblite.net/
- yboris 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing! I've been in love with LiteStep but it's not had any development on it in years - seems to have died. Hoping this will be a good-enough replacement for me.
ChoGGi 4y ago
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. No start menu just a bunch of desktop icons, Dopus is probably the closest thing to a start menu/launcher I have.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
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. 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.
vegetable 4y ago
Virustotal profile: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c84ce4f35dfe0ada475f680551d653d264855a1d477ead3af5c0564e8b74a4a7 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c84ce4f35dfe0ada475f6805...
lostmsu 4y ago
Wow. And it is written in C# too. I am going to try integrating it with my WPF-based tiling window manager. It supports Windows 11, meaning you can actually upgrade and replace its crippled taskbar with this.
yellowapple 4y ago
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.

187 points by rhim 4y ago

Can the taskbar be moved to the left side, so that it is vertical?

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. I remember trying out many alternatives on win2k and that one needed much fewer fixes...

lrvick 4y ago
These customization efforts will likely continue to break and frustrate devs into giving up in future updates because proprietary OS vendors like Microsoft and Apple are simply not motivated to allow people to get in the way of their regular overhauls of their preferred brand experience. If you want wide customization of an OS, an open source OS is likely a more maintainable choice.
- johnfonesca 4y ago
  Even on Linux, the only DE which shines on the customization front is KDE.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    FVWM would like to have a word! queue dr evil laugh
    - chupasaurus 4y ago
      DPI/Scaling configuration?
      - lrvick 4y ago
        Every modern graphical linux distro has this as a GUI option.
        chupasaurus 4y ago
        So every modern graphical linux distro has it's own GUI implementation of it for FVWM? Or without sarcasm, it's a Window Manager problem in X, and my google-fu says FVWM doesn't support this feature.
        lrvick 4y ago
        FVWM is a an ultra minimal window manager favoring advanced users comfortable on a terminal. No major consumer focused distros ship with it. Gnome or KDE are likely a better fit for someone that cannot scale DPI on a terminal.
actionfromafar 4y ago
Now someone port it Wine, combine it with the fact that Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux [0] and we're all set! 0: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Try it on wine and document any incompatibilities on the wine appdb
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  Now I want to see an entire desktop environment built with Wine instead of GTK or Qt.
laumars 4y ago
I was an author for a couple of alternative desktop shells for Windows 9x. I think Windows 95 was the first time I encountered support changing the desktop shell (then via the ‘shell’ property in one of Windows’ ini files). I remember some of the main uses cases were: 1. Restoring the Windows 3.x progman (Program Manager) shell 2. Bespoke UIs for educational systems in schools and colleges 3. Bespoke UIs for locked down graphical terminals, like kiosks. The shells I wrote were purely aimed at families though. Designed to make the single user OS a little more like a multi user platform. Windows 95 was pretty terrible when it came to different family members using the same computer. It was fun times but I honestly don’t miss Windows 9x one but.
- signaru 4y ago
  Being able to replace the shell is actually possible since 3.x, also using the method you described. It was fun using Calmira to make win 3.x look like 9x.
  - laumars 4y ago
    Oh wow. That does sound fun. Thanks for the correction.

kleiba 4y ago

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? https://www.cairographics.org/ https://www.cairographics.org/ 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.

mhd 4y ago
I think the project's name is referring to the unreleased "predecessor" of Windows 95, which existed quite a few years before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
- frozenport 4y ago
  would make sense, but the two look quiet different?
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  Would make more sense to call it LONGHORN then by this association.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Well seeing as a longhorn is a form of gnu, maybe they should call it that. Shorter.
  - snowram 4y ago
    Like the distributed block storage solution for Kubernetes?
    - alrlroipsp 4y ago
      Ok, zoomer.
deleted 4y ago

petargyurov 4y ago

Apart from the main desktop overhaul, does this bring a consistent UI across all Windows elements? Windows already suffers from 3 (?) different UI styles; does this fix that or add to the problem?

laumars 4y ago
You cannot change that UI toolkit an existing application uses. Only change the theming if that toolkit supports theming, and change the desktop shell. This is true for Linux as well as Windows.
- p4bl0 4y ago
  On Linux, KDE is able to theme GTK apps to match it's own theme. It has limitations of course but it does a very good job.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It can do that because Gtk allows for custom themes, so it's possible to make one that looks like Qt. The opposite - making Qt look like a Gtk theme - is also possible. But Windows deprecated support for user-configurable themes ages ago, and none of the new frameworks have it.
  - laumars 4y ago
    That’s not a KDE thing, it’s a Qt and GTK thing. Those toolkits support themes and all you’re doing in KDE is specifying a two different themes (albeit named the same) that is visually similar. However if you look closer at the widgets you’ll notice how theming on Qt and GTK differ, so even the “same” theme across those two toolkits will look and behave subtly different.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  I think they’re referring to the fact that, within the system apps that Microsoft controls, there are multiple generations of UI design. Like, last I checked I think Device Manager still has a Windows 98-ish look (there are many others).

yathaid 4y ago

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.

zouhair 4y ago
I have yet to find something better than Windowmaker[0]. [0]: https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
I'm a linux guy through and through, but there was just something special about being able to play with all the different shells. NONE of them were fully usable the way explorer was, but it was still fun.
- int_19h 4y ago
  It really depends on when. If we're talking Win9x-XP, shells could do everything, and Explorer wasn't really special. From Vista onwards, things started to get "more special", and Win8+ especially killed many old extensibility points.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  Curious why you feel that way, when they were all generally cloned linux shells [sic] anyway? eg: blackbox <> openbox (now xoblite), or litestep <> afterstep/nextstep? I guess it was a bit more punk to break windows, from some perspectives. Nostalgic to visit the LiteStep website, looks largely unchanged from when I stumbled across it probably circa 2003. I always enjoyed the crispness of the menu chrome and icons from what I always associated with a "BeOS style". http://www.litestep.net/ http://www.litestep.net/
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    That wasn't my experience.

qwerty456127 4y ago

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.

cryptos 4y ago
For me even the top bar on macOS doesn't make that much sense, since the menu might be far away from the related window. This UI concept is not a good fit for large screens (and was never intended to be used with such screens, since the design is from stone age).
- scratcheee 4y ago
  Whilst your point is fair, I do think the fitt's law benefits are pretty huge (ie the infinitely extending target because it's across the screen edge). It really depends on usage patterns I guess. If you have lots of _really_ small windows then your point is entirely correct, but if people are using large windows then it becomes less clear - there's a fair chance they're moving almost as far to reach the edge of the window for the in-window menu bar, but not benefiting from the screen edge infinite target, at which point the macos model becomes superior. The thing is I suspect the cut-off applies even for half-screen windows these days, I think the benefits of screen edge scale better than the benefits of window edge (since you can always move faster if you don't have to aim well). On the other hand, I guess there's an upper limit to practical window size, regardless of how large screens get.
  - Asooka 4y ago
    Fitt's law makes little sense for touchpads, which are the primary pointing device for macOS PCs nowadays.
  - endgame 4y ago
    The Fitt's Law benefits decrease with the distance you have to travel to reach the bar, though. It always takes me several gestures on mouse or trackpad to reach the top bar on modern display resolutions. Better to just have good accelerator keys (not that any of the major desktops seem to do that in a discoverable way).

mariusmg 4y ago

A "customizable desktop environment for Windows" but the taskbar is fixed at the top of the screen. :(

retox 4y ago
More than likely, the majority of your eye's focus is spent in the top half of your screen, for me having the start bar at the top is very natural. If you haven't, I'd give it a try. Having said that, user choice is sacrosanct.
- mariusmg 4y ago
  I have a UW monitor. The correct position of the taskbar for me is vertical on the right side of the screen. And to occupy as little space as possible, here is how it actually looks https://i.imgur.com/zhYnnKx.png https://i.imgur.com/zhYnnKx.png
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  I've personally put my monitor on a thick book (about CS foundation, fittingly enough) so that most of the time, I'm naturally looking at the middle of the screen where, incredibly, most of the useful stuff actually is. In any case, for me the start bar is mostly useless.
- hurflmurfl 4y ago
  I think I do mostly look at the top half of the screen, but I somehow reach a different conclusion from you :) There's nothing interesting on the taskbar, so it makes sense to keep it down there. The most commonly used programs like Firefox, IDE, Slack are pinned to the taskbar, so I can invoke them with Win+[1-3]. When multitasking in full screen, there's Alt+Tab. Overall, I feel like the taskbar doesn't have that much use most of the time, but it's nice to have it on the screen just so I can use it as "shortcut cheatsheet".
hulitu 4y ago
It does not look customizable. It looks like win 10.

est 4y ago

Is this the same vaporware that supposed to release during Vista era?

Crono 4y ago
Kind of, yes. But I don't remember the project being open source when it started. Then there was a long time without any progress and since a few years it seems slightly active again ...

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

I used it for a while in 2018. The only thing that I didn't like... it was still Windows underneath.

onemoresoop 4y ago
Yeah, it's a lipstick on a pig

quadral 4y ago

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?

Semaphor 4y ago

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. 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] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep [1]: http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/ http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/ [3]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/

butthatsit 4y ago
There also used to be KDE on Windows - exactly what it sounds like, a full Plasma desktop running on Windows!
- timeon 4y ago
  I was under naive impression that Plasma inspired look of Vista/7.
  - butthatsit 4y ago
    I don't think so, the Aero look and feel was out (in Longhorn betas) way before KDE4 came to be... But perhaps the Windows 7 look was influenced by it. However, the current look of KDE - which is much more like Aero - is very recent, at least post Windows 8. KDE4 as it was at the beginning didn't look like Aero that much IMHO.
baq 4y ago
MS PowerToys also feature a launcher and a couple of nice features like mouse cursor highlight on shake and window zones which make 4k portrait mode monitors somewhat usable.
CoolCold 4y ago
Used bb4win (bbmean afair) till 2012 I guess, but then it was not developed and not coupled well with Win 7/8 probably, so I came back to Explorer. Nowadays on Win11 I'd probably won't need bb4win anymore.

cakirh 4y ago

mariusmg -> A "customizable desktop environment for Windows" but the taskbar is fixed at the top of the screen. [+1] for god's sake they should update the site immediately!

nsonha 4y ago

Remind me of when this was a more common thing, I used such a DE called talisman, and I remember KDE 4 worked on windows too.

v-yadli 4y ago
Yep Talisman! I received a shareware copy of it on a magazine CD. Totally blown away by the true color UI and pre-arranged widget bits here and there. The thing's born in the 9X era but rocks a definite XP vibe.

quyleanh 4y ago

An other macOS-like custom theme for Microsoft Windows? 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. 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.

top_sigrid 4y ago
I even hide the menu bar on my Mac so every window always is as fullscreen as a window can be and I have never looked back. When I want someting from the menubar I need to move the mouse there anyways. The only nitpick is, when having an external monitor set to be above the MacBook's one, simply jamming your mouse up to the top won't reveal the menubar as easy and you need to move it exactly to the screen top. Also I don't know how that approach would work with the new MacBooks with a notch.
bongobingo1 4y ago
When I used windows I always stuck the taskbar to the side since you can generally give up a bit of horizontal estate on widescreen monitors. That was a time when I only had one monitor though, so perhaps that would be more annoying than not with two depending on the side you wanted to put it on.

awestroke 4y ago

Quite nostalgia-inducing with the ugly gradients

HeckFeck 4y ago

Reminds me of Calmira II: http://www.calmira.de/ http://www.calmira.de/ We just need someone to port this to Windows 11 and the shell is usable again.

dang 4y ago

Related: Cairo Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734913 - Dec 2019 (88 comments)

mdtrooper 4y ago

These kind of things, litestep, Cygwin...they are embarrassing things that most of us had they in the past. 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. Well, I mean that yes this projects are embarrasing, but they are good and they help a lot people (include me). Thanks embarrasing projects.

mekkkkkk 4y ago
It's also possible to just enjoy Windows. Bragging about being a Linux user is the actual embarrassing thing.
- mdtrooper 4y ago
  Well, in a IT and others tech fields it is normal being a Linux user. But as say in spanish: "Pa'ti la perra gorda" ...in english "Whatever you say, mate..." .

LoveMortuus 4y ago

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. 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. A quiet black box that's there when I need it.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
I use Fences for similar approach. My desktop is empty by default. Hover over certain areas brings up logically grouped icons. Works for me! :-)
Smithalicious 4y ago
I'm on Linux but I have a similar setup, with no permanent UI elements at all - I have a script to show a notification with the time and remaining battery (on laptop) and so on that I run when I need to see that info. I use a tiling window manager, three monitors and heavy usage of workspaces.
reportgunner 4y ago
> 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 do the same and I rarely click on the Start menu or the task bar, I use Super + [1-4] to launch the pinned programs or switch focus to their windows if they are already running. For other programs I press Super on my keyboard and type the name of the program I want to launch. My pinned programs are Browser, Text Editor, File Explorer, Collaboration app at work and Browser, Discord, File Explorer, Steam at home.
RunSet 4y ago
Task bar on the same side of the screen as my "mouse hand" just feels correct.

tryptophan 4y ago

As opposed to menus like this type of desktop, I like to use launchers for everything. 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. I just type a few letters and it opens the folder/program I want.

ThrashAbaddon 4y ago
What do you use for that?
- bilekas 4y ago
  https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/
bilekas 4y ago
I've been using Flow Launcher on Windows and it's good but doesn't pick up some programs im looking for, I'll check out key-pirranah - maybe it can have better results. I like the idea of "Associate a Keyword to an Item"

bobiny 4y ago

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.

coldacid 4y ago

What I wish Cairo had a shelf like NeXTSTEP (honestly I wish all graphical operating environments had this).

fredgrott 4y ago

For those looking the blackbox version, best alt to LiteStep, that is updated to latest 2021 is this https://xoblite.net/ https://xoblite.net/

yboris 4y ago
Thank you for sharing! I've been in love with LiteStep but it's not had any development on it in years - seems to have died. Hoping this will be a good-enough replacement for me.

ChoGGi 4y ago

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. No start menu just a bunch of desktop icons, Dopus is probably the closest thing to a start menu/launcher I have.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

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. 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.

vegetable 4y ago

Virustotal profile: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c84ce4f35dfe0ada475f680551d653d264855a1d477ead3af5c0564e8b74a4a7 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c84ce4f35dfe0ada475f6805...

lostmsu 4y ago

Wow. And it is written in C# too. I am going to try integrating it with my WPF-based tiling window manager. It supports Windows 11, meaning you can actually upgrade and replace its crippled taskbar with this.

yellowapple 4y ago

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.