well.. i think, looking at "replacement shell" realated sites would help you much more, than asking in here.. but we?ll see, what comments you?ll get =)

true, and I have done just that...but I was hoping I might get some personal opinions from people whose opinion I can trust, and I noticed that several people mentioned using shells, so....

My first shell was Cloud9ine. To this day it remains my favorite.
My opinions:

LiteStep: If you download the OTS installer you will have pretty much no problems. Link Simplicity will be installed as your theme by default, which is a good thing.

Sharpe: A lot of people consider this a beginner shell. There isn't a lot of configuration you can do it as far as I know. It is really slick looking though. Screenshot Download it at Low Dimension

GeOshell: My experience with GeOshell is pretty meager. I did a couple of themes and that was about it. Cloud9ine and GeOshell are very similar looking. Site

Blackbox4Win and Bluebox: I'll leave that description to somebody who uses them, I've only used Blackbox on Mandrake.

Finally for descriptions that are superior to mine: Choose your shell

Benefits of Alternative Shells: (usually, anyways)

-More stable
-More control over user interface
-No more goddamn Windows logo on your start button (if you choose to have one, that is)
-l33t

Deficits of Alternative Shells: (usually, anyways. These are with the popular shells listed above)

-It takes a few days to learn the new interface
-And even then, it takes forever to get use to the new interface
-Scares the crap out of guests
-Other users tend to be cryptic and quite generally Linux-y about discussions (That's Linux-y, NOT Unix-y. Unix-y is more like Multics-y than Linux-y, and Multics-y still concerns oneself with understandability. BSD-y and Solaris-y are NOT Unix-y. I'm talking about UNIX R1, 1973 for that matter)
-Scares the crap out of relatives
-Users usually get to rearrange everything because the replacement shell doesn't read positions from the same part of the registry (or at all... Thank you, Talisman!)

-=-=-=-

As you can see, alternate shells have their benefits and deficits. Now what I'm looking for is a good KDE replica, but I suppose that's totally irrelevant now, isn't it?

There's my official oppinion. Shake well before serving.

thanks for the input so far...especially thanks for the links, I had seen some of those but others were new to me. Do these shells run on top of Explorer, in place of it, or just sort of around it, as a totally different thing? I know it takes the place of explorer as your shell, but is it actually replacing it or just being used in place of it (did that make any sense?). It sounds like it might be worth at least playing with on the other computer, which iis expendable and therefore great for experimenting....actually, looking at the options I may just install it on another user account.

"scares the crap out of guests"
-sounds great!

-J

You'll probably still use Explorer to browse your files. They will replace your desktop/start menu. To see what I mean go Start>Run>Explorer.exe

I run a combination of blackbox ( http://www.bb4win.org ) and 2xExplorer ( http://www.netez.com/2xExplorer ).

I configure mine to be as small as possible. The desktop menu has no icons and styles are easily made and amazingly configurable considering it's rendered w/ text settings only. Basically, many of the adantages of the original blackbox.

Shells run better when run as a replacement as opposed to standalone. The blackbox betas are more friendly for running over explorer than the last final release.

Oh, I gotta write a whole big post on this. Figures I gotta run. I'll deffiantely get you using liteStep when all is said and done. You'll love it!

I say go with LiteStep. Nowadays its basically idiot proof now that the installer and OTS is here.

I agree on the OTS. Simplicity is very well put together.

|[Y'know, I can't really say I like the LiteStep OTS installer. It, for no reason whatsoever, decided that no user on my Windows 98 machine had sufficient priveliges to install it. Not good.]|

You shouldn't be using windows 98 anyway. Thats old and outdated technology.

I'm going to run far, far away now and hide.

I installed Litestep on my machine on another account and found it totally disorienting at first. I can see how it could be freakin awesome if I made my own skin. Unfortunately, however, Litestep screwed up my machine somehow and bled over into my other user account, and when I was in the middle of logging on, the taskbar and desktop of my normal user account just disappeared, leaving only my background and an explorer window. Uninstalling Litestep fixed the problem, but I wasn't real happy with it doing that in the first place.
-J

You're not on Windows 98, too, are you?

As taken from The official site of the LiteStep Installer


"set LiteStep as shell [option of setting shell for current user or all users on NT/2k/XP]"

I don't see a 98/ME mentioned there. Maybe thats what the problem was.

LiteStep isn't a program you just install. It's a shell, and you need to know what you're doing or you'll get crazy stuff like that. That's user error, not LiteStep, but of coarse, Litestep is going to get blamed. -.-; This isn't uncommon though. Lot's of ppl have a bad first time with LiteStep, but give it a second chance and end up loving it. I really think you should try it again, but better prepaired. What OS are you on, and did you fully reboot before trying it out? How many user accounts do you have, and what shell do you want for each?

I've installed it on my 98 manchine, and my friend's XP machine. It works awesome on both. It sounds like you are on XP or 2000. Dude, M$ made the shell an SOB to change in those, so you really need to know more about it, if that's the case.

As for you own themes, how about how just look throught the themes others have made, try them out, and see which one you like. Then just mess with it until it does what you want. Adding modules really isn't too hard. Takes a little reading the first time, but is easy after that.

(Red: MS has had it be an SOB to change since NT3.1)
(JohnnyFist: Well, it's not really 98 anymore. I'm teh l33t hax0r, remember? I'm gonna bring this ol' OS up to l33t standards!

But you'd better run. )

oK, I have 2k, and I installed it on a second administrator account. I checked it out, didnt really know what to do with it, and decided to go back to it later. Then I logged back into my normal user account and went about my business (there was a full shutdown and reboot in this time as well). much later, while I was doing a logoff/logon, my taskbar wouldnt load. In effect, I ended up with nothing but CTRL ALT DEL and my hotkey shortcuts, as well as one window that was open. I'm not saying I'll never try it again, but it certainly didnt make me happy about it

Addy: One line of text is a lot easier then multiple registry entries. User error is much less likely too. Main advantage 2000+ systems have is that you aren't strandid if there is no shell.

Jay: Read this article on setting the shell in 2000/XP. I know of an app to do this for you, but you need to know how to do it yourself so you can trouble shoot. Also, do you want to just set LiteStep as the shell, set the shell by user, or use a shell changer?

start->run->gpedit.msc->user configuration->Administrative Templates->System->Custom user interface

helped? =)

My goodness how things have changed. <-- Not aimed at the use of alternate shells OR OS's either.


/me shakes head.

demlak: Sound like that would make things easier.

Red: NT3.51 does that too. Stop being exclusive!

(And I never said it was better. Just that NT has _always_ done that.)

I use the registry with this string:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\
In the list of values you should see:
Shell "explorer.exe"

Jay: when things went bad, did you check what was running? Was explorer or litestep on? It sounds like a problem in how the shell was set, and you ended up shell-less.

I didn't, but only because I was more interested in getting my explorer shell back...I'm positive that that is exactly what happened though. My complaint is that I bothered me that it hijacked my shell from another user account, not that it happened....conflicts are somewhat expected when running a shell like that...just hopefully contained

The problem seems to be that the shell was improperly set in the registry. I'll ask arround and see if I can verify that.

The policy editor way of setting the shell never worked for me under XP. I need to set three registry settings to switch a shell.

Not too hard though, just replace the appropriate "shell=" lines in the registry.

Ya, that's the thing with XP. It's shell is set funny.

Jay: the shell didn't 'spread' to another user account. It was set for "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE", which means all users.

|[:z]|

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