February 08, 2007

Curious George: Make Windows Pretty Now! I'm sick of the look of Windows and want to make it pretty and/or shiny. Or something. I use Style XP on one machine, but I paid for that years ago and there's got to be some excellentness out there in free, opensource glory. What do you use? See also the Desktop thread.

I'm looking for something to change the theme, style, etc. of the entire Windows experience, while still using Windows. (Yeah - Mac, Linux, I know, I know.) Buttons, start menu, etc. Not just the wallpaper. Any thoughts?

  • Litestep all the way Lite, Free and easy. Like a drunk Elf. www.litestep.net
  • Litestep all the way Not much info on that site without login, but those two screenshots have piqued my interest.
  • Following up on that, wikipedia's list of desktop shell replacements.
  • obligatory: http://store.apple.com
  • Monkeyfilter: Lite, Free and easy. Like a drunk Elf.
  • Vista looks nice. Of course there is no reason to be an early adopter and pay to be a MS beta tester. Also, since nothing looks/acts familiar you can kiss your productivity goodbye for a while. And you will probably need to upgrade your machine to run it. But other than that, it looks pretty.
  • You want to make your windows pretty? Jesus, just get some new curtains. I don't understand you people - you can't do a single fucking thing anymore without double-flickring your gmails and cybering your myspace. GET A LIFE.
  • I stick tin-foil on my windows to make them pretty.
  • 'ere's a loovlee new desktop shell for ya, guv! Jeepers creepers wotta pair o' peepers!
  • I like it!
  • Sweetly! Think RocketDock and LiteStep would play together nice? I don't wanna fool about too much, but Oy! Is Windows ugly.
  • Elim would have to help you on the LiteStep stuff, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
  • RocketDoc, you'll always beeee Home sweet home, to meeeee Good old RocketDoc RocketDoc Tennessee RocketDoc Tennessee /banjo break
  • I have the visual settings on my xp machines set to "best performance" because I'm a l33t gamer and I want the cpu cycles that would otherwise be wasted on looking pretty.
  • Yeah, I spent long enough allocating resources to scraping 10Mb disks as fast as 1994ically possible just to watch the progress indicator creeeeeep along. Screw that. It's 2007 and I want my @#%! flying car and a non-craptastical interface goldarnit! (yeah yeah, Ubuntu, I know.) And these Vista installations just don't seem right.
  • Tried 'em, and got lost. Windoze might be boring, but it's familiar.
  • Since I've installed Ubuntu, my brain has overwritten the MS portion of my head with show tunes.
  • I kinda like RocketDock, but I also kinda think that if I actually used it, some of my Mac-owning friends would just mark me as having a serious case of Mac-envy. Which isn't the case! I like that all my Windoze computers feel like erector sets and that the hardware isn't proprietary. I never feel like I can really get to know any computer that I'm not periodically taking apart. Next computer gets an Ubuntu partition at least, though. ps, fish tick - conchy goodness! it's kinda cute, even.
  • Heh heh, I said erector.
  • Beryl on Ubuntu does look to be the kind of eyecandy.
  • I haven't used Ubuntu now since it ceased starting my fan when necessary, and my processor kept overheating. Solutions to this problem would be very welcome, because I want to permanently moon Redmond.
  • That's a bugger Skrik. Have you tried asking about your problem on the Ubuntu forums? Very helpful and knowledgeable crowd.
  • Skrik, I recommend you put down the duckie.
  • Today's Giveaway of the Day: AltDesk. You'll have to download and install it today if you want it for free.
  • Been playing with Emerge Desktop, and overall I like it. There are a couple of weird bugs, but I love the forced simplicity of it and the fact that you can't dump stuff to your desktop -- it basically forces you to organize your downloads and temporary junk files as you go. Still adjusting to not having a taskbar, but I'm getting there. Here's a screenshot of what I've got so far. More than half of what you're seeing isn't out of the box stuff, but other software I've added to enhance it. Fun stuff.
  • I enjoy the mandelbrot set on Obama's nose. Fractals we can believe in.
  • That's quite nice. It's a little bit gnu-ish, but not in a bad way.