Alternative Desktops for Win32? 62
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?
obligitary response: (Score:3, Informative)
Run KDE or Gnome or any of the other desktop environments.
My friend does this on his laptop. It is a very effective solution.
Litestep (Score:3, Informative)
There were many things I really liked about it: multiple desktops, transparent menus, smaller interface features waste less screen space, right-click access to the start menu, etc. I eventually ditched it though mostly because of the start menu issue.
Re:Litestep (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Litestep (Score:1)
Re:Litestep (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Litestep (Score:3, Informative)
Lite Step (Score:2)
If you like WindowMaker, give it a try.
Windows XP (Score:2)
Re:Windows XP (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Windows XP (Score:2)
Progman (Score:2, Interesting)
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 >:)
Re:Progman (Score:2)
geoShell (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Talisman (Score:2, Informative)
Eh? (Score:1)
Hell, just make a desktop full of shortcuts and st the 'taskbar' to auto-hide, and you'll won't have to look at microsofts crappy GUI wigets again.
LiteStep (Score:3, Informative)
Anyways...I have used it NON-Stop everyday that I've had access to a computer (Even at school)
I find that, while setting up LiteStep can be abit hard or overwhelming at first. Great people have been able to help greatly by making distributions. such as Omar's LiteStep Installer [cjb.net] and other great works such as that.
And as far as support... the community is great, IRC and the mailing list are awsome. And almost everyone is friendly and willing to help. Give it a try..
Re:LiteStep (Score:1)
I have geoshell set up on a user in xp, but it crashes as often as it did before r3, imo, and has quirky features. But some of those features kick ass and all have fairly easy-to-adjust registry entry configs (which gets rid of open *.ini, forget to save, allow litestep to take metapad/notepad down with it, etc.).
The real upshot of litestep, though, compared to the realitvely small (or small-voiced) geoshell community, is the willingness to help and support and develop.
So, until they get those gui config editors released with the core modules, I'm sticking with xp explorer (fwiw, better than 98's) and/or geOShell.
Comments from a long-time LiteStep user (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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
The Wonder That Is LiteStep (Score:1)
--Shahms
WTH Are Shells? (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding the question about how MS deals with these shells: Well, the simple answer is that they don't. It keeps us off their back :). In fact, many of the well known win32 shell developers work or have worked at Microsoft. Alternative shells work just fine under Windows.
Now, there are actually a ton of shells (see the list [shellfront.org]) out there for Windows, and most are open source in some way or other. The most popular (and one of the oldest) win32 shells is Litestep, which is GPL'd.
For a somewhat decent overview of shells from a windows user's point of view, check out forum topic on deviantART [deviantart.com]. Alternative Windows Shells basically just replace the Explorer.exe file as the Windows shell... usually also resulting in the replacement of the well known taskbar, start menu, and desktop. Instead, you can use the tools provided by the shell to build your own interface. Shells are very similar to X desktop environments. They do not replace the Windows like a WM does. For general news and info regarding Windows shells, check out the following sites:
Desktopian.org [desktopian.org] also covers Windows and shells news in-depth, along with some *nix related news.
Litestep [graphic-language.net] is the oldest shell still in active development. It is by far the most popular shell (with an estimated 10,000+ users) and the most customizable shell (outside of Graphite). You can create almost whatever interface you want, thanks to the 300+ 3rd party modules for the shell. Litestep also has great support through the LS Mailing List and the IRC channels (#fpn, #ls2k, and #ls_help on irc.openprojects.net). Make sure to check out the following sites for Litestep:
The second most popular replacement shell is geOShell, which is largely a minimalist's shell. It has a GUI configuration for most things. geOShell's main site is geoshellx.com [geoshellx.com]. All information can be found there. They are also supported through the geoshellx.com forums and their IRC channel (#geoshell on irc.openprojects.net).
Most win32 shells out there today are either derived from Litestep or geOShell in some way or other. However, there have been two blackbox 'ports' recently to Windows:
It's impossible for me to explain everything here. However, for any *nix users who need to run Windows as well, these shells offer a great alternative to that drab and boring Explorer desktop. Win32 alternative shells even let you have your X desktop on Windows.
Now, the advantage to Object Desktop (namely DesktopX and objectbar is that it doesn't require that you replace your shell (which is a registry key change in NT and a system.ini file edit in 9x). Configuration is accomplished by a GUI. DesktopX is extremely configurable. Keep in mind that running Object Desktop will use up excessive cpu and/or memory. They can do almost anything, but will also use up resources... unlike most shells.
Hope this helps. Many *nix users are completely unaware of the Windows open-source community and of shells in general. We hope this will eventually change.
Re:WTH Are Shells? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Re:WTH Are Shells? (Score:1)
Litestep (Score:2)
However, I can not vouch for anything about Win9x, I've only just got an XP machine to play with and all I've done is change it back to the classic Win98 UI. If I could find a utility to slightly fade all windows that don't currently have the focus, that'd be enought for me for now.
Obedient windows slave (Score:2, Funny)
easy solution (Score:1)
And it's free too.
Litestep (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More props for Litestep (Score:1)
Re:More props for Litestep (Score:1, Offtopic)
AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.
Steps in roll-your-own:
Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME [gnome.org]
KDE [kde.org]
ROX [sourceforge.net]
foXdesktop [sourceforge.net]
Perltop [sourceforge.net]
Equinox [szm.com]
XFce [xfce.org]
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.
If it doesn't, icedock [prosalg.no] provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm [gkrellm.net] (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish [sf.net] is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager [stanford.edu].
enlightenment [enlightenment.org] is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion [students.tut.fi], a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox [sourceforge.net] is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.
Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys [hocwp.free.fr] is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.
The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.
Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.
Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs [xemacs.org], which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.
Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla [mozilla.org] is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo [cipsga.org.br] Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.
File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror [konqueror.org] can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC [gnome.org] is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus [eazel.com], the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer [sourceforge.net] is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot [freshmeat.net] of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.
Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal [sourceforge.net] extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm [eterm.org] is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm [sourceforge.net] seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm [his.com] is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt [rxvt.org] is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.
Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!
Re:More props for Litestep (Score:1)
Re:More props for Litestep (Score:1)
Windows PowerPro (Score:2, Informative)
Windows PowerPro [windowspowerpro.com], is a pretty good no cost Windows shell replacement. It has a lot of features, but it seems to be more oriented towards productivity than aesthetics. I found it easy to install and configure. It has been around for years, and used to be called "Stiletto". There is a somewhat active mailing list [yahoo.com].
Windows XP (Score:2)
Re:Windows XP suxs (Score:1)
LiteStep - generally for tweakers (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using LiteStep for a few years and now use it exclusively at work. Even got a few of my colleagues to use it. But don't ask for tech support, go to the community to get your answers.
The problem with LiteStep is that it has a fairly steep learning curve. This has improved with standards for themes (OTS) [cjb.net] appearing and a good installer. There are heaps of distros out there but LSDistro and OTS are two of the best. OTS has generally replaced LSDistro these days and most new themes come out as OTS compatible.
Although these installers are in place and themes are more compatible, you still have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and dive into the configuration files to make a theme work the way you want it to. I've found that I generally download a theme and tweak it until I'm happy and then use that theme for ages.
Anyway litestep is one of the best shell replacements out there because:
Re:LiteStep - generally for tweakers (Score:2)
That being said, I think Litestep is a good place to start because it has a very active, strong, supportive community. #litestep on Efnet has many regulars that can help you with your first Litestep installation. LS Docs [slashdot.org] has the docs for the core modules. Also, emailing module authors directly or using the litestep mailing list [wuzzle.org] is also a good way to get feedback.
What makes litestep better than other shells? I would say it's users who care about litestep.
Serenade and others (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Serenade and others (Score:1, Interesting)
LiteStep User... (Score:1)
Use Litestep (Score:1)
Object Desktop (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Object Desktop (Score:1)
My experience with Stardock products is that they are fairly heavy on GDI resource usage and that's something that can be hard to monitor, especially when they are loaded into every program in your system (Windowblinds). Also sometimes things don't operate 100 percent correctly, but they do some neat things like alpha blending on OSes that don't natively support it (though it's shakey at best). The nice thing about Stardock, though, is that there's an actual company behind them, so you can pay some $$$ and get support -- then again, you have to pay $$$.
Pain to Program (Score:1)
For those who don't believe there are hidden Windows API calls, there are. Such as SwitchToThisWindow which actually sets focus to a foreground window (as opposed to SetForegroundWindow which just flashes it in 2000/XP). Combined with obscure things necessary to get shell hooks working and creating icons for InstallShield installers etc, they've successfully made it a pain to program the shells. But so long as people continue to use Windows, we'll keep hacking away.
Litestep (Score:1)
Shell Replacements (Score:1)
Re:Shell Replacements (Score:1)
geOshell is incredibly stable (Score:1)
It uses a very small amout of system resources (I booted the above mentioned desktop system to 99% free resources) and is quite unobtrusive. Hitting Winkey + Z fades the user definable bars out of the way (mighty nice when you're playing a full screen game). The geObars are configurable with the use of plugins and are skinnable.
The only difficulty some people may have is that it does require some registry editing. Keep in mind, however, that editing is only done in geOshell's registry key and will not affect anything else in the OS or other applications.
Try it out. If you don't like it, all you need to do is change the shell from =geoshell.exe to =exploder.exe (or just double click the provided bat file to have it done for you).
LiteStep roxors my soxors (Score:1)
now the obligatory LS links:
Desktopian [desktopian.org]
FPN [mostelite.net]
LiteStep.net [litestep.net]
ShellFront [shellfront.org]
ShellOn (Score:1)
Re:ShellOn (Score:1)