Cairo Desktop Environment

It looks rather interesting. I didn't realize Windows 10 was hackable enough to do this. The name made me think of the Cairo graphics drawling library initially.

I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alternatives to the default Windows shell environment.

A good example of an early one is Norton Shell for Windows:

http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html

Then later there were things such as LiteStep, bbZero and even KDE at a time.

Personally, I actually used ReactOS shell as my default shell briefly, judging its workspaces functionality to be worth other trade offs at the time. I believe it still works in Windows to this day, though it may still have bugs that don’t happen on ReactOS itself.

Even though Windows isn’t really “hackable” for a long time people found a way to do many things, especially companies like Stardock, using API hooking and other somewhat brittle tricks, and Microsoft somewhat embraced it. For some good reasons and some bad, modern Windows is a lot more limited in this regard and there’s not much to replace the old hackability.

here a few more recent ones, but all stalled: https://www.online-tech-tips.com/software-reviews/7-best-win...

Litestep could be really pretty https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=litestep

I've been using search for everything since Windows 7. Just have to remember the first 3-5 letters, or a word, and I could open any programs and folders/files. The windows key was my desktop, the actual desktop is blank and black.

Windows 10 has a messed up search, it shows useless (for me) stuff first, and never learns to prioritize results based on previous searches/keywords/accessed files. Maybe there's a way to fix that, that would be great.

Reminds me of the good ol' days of Litestep. Before I discovered Linux I customized my windows shell to the max on XP