litestep and other replacement shells for windows

[dubesinhower]

so i was googling things today, and i just discovered samurize. so i started googling samurize, and i saw a picture of a windows desktop using the litestep shell.

i was just wondering if anyone had any experience with replacement shells for windows, especially windows vista/7? im especially interested in ease of customization, and ability to use transparency in the taskbar. thanks for the input!

ps, this is my desktop after a day of fiddling with samurize on my new windows 7 pro installation.

 

[dubesinhower]

bump. cmon guys, someone has to know something about litestep...

 

[Concordedly]

Never ever used this. What is the point? A GUI customization?

 

[dubesinhower]

yea its a shell replacement. the standard windows shell is explorer, which consists of the folder browser, menus, and taskbar. pictures of litestep inbound. keep in mind, it was originally used in windows 95/98, so some of these pictures are old.

 

[gamerman4]

Windowblinds is probably the most widely used and the Stardock team has the largest selection of UI customization tools.

 

[dubesinhower]

windowblinds is not a shell. its just a tweaker for the taskbar and other window frame elements. it keeps the original explorer shell.

 

[gamerman4]

windowblinds is not a shell. its just a tweaker for the taskbar and other window frame elements. it keeps the original explorer shell.

Regardless, it is in the same vein. Windows customization and what you said was you wanted "ease of customization", it doesn't get much easier than the Stardock products.

 

[dubesinhower]

yes, but how easy is it to make your own theme in windowblinds?

 

[gamerman4]

Easy:
http://www.stardock.com/products/skinstudio/

sure it isn't free but you didn't ask for that. ;D
Anyways, the initial screenshot doesn't even look like a shell replacement, looks like a dock and sysmetrix.

 

[dubesinhower]

okay lemmie rephrase that. i dont want to use windowblinds. i would like to try a whole new shell.

 

[Droogie]

you should just buy a mac, they're a lot better lol

 

[dubesinhower]

bump. anyone else have any ideas?

 

[gamerman4]

wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell_replacement

 

[dubesinhower]

so after much research, ive found that litestep doesnt work stabley on 64 bit. :/ currently, i'm looking into sharpenvi.

 

[dubesinhower]

i tried out a few replacement shells, including bblean, litestep, and emerge desktop, and let me say, they are NOT what i expected. most of the use their own wallpaper manager, and they have issues if you have things on your desktop such as objectdock and samurize. so replacement shells are not the way to go if you like windows explorer.