So long before I ever got into linux (and the reason I eventually did) I absolutely loved trimming down Windows XP to the bare minimum and rolling my own ISOs to share on sites like Cyberwarez (Now defunct)

One of the major modifications that many people did was.. disable Explorer. Normally this meant you lost your taskbar, filemanager, etc but there existed Blackbox (ported from the very same Blackbox that still exists today and would later spawn Openbox) which would act as a lightweight customizable replacement.

Many forks sprang up adding things like plugin support, additional customization options, or just plain fixes for the changing Windows ecosystem.

Problems began to spring up after the release of Vista and got worse with Windows 7, the way windows handled core aspects of its desktop environment began changing rapidly and interoperability was falling apart, by the time Windows 8 was released most forks were barely functional, an effort was made by some great devs in the community and a mostly functional fork was released that worked decently in Windows 7.

After that though, silence. Any bugs that cropped up just stayed.. the codebase is such a behemoth of OS and library specific knowledge that was mostly written more than a decade ago; not just anyone can jump into it.

TL;DR:
Fast forward 5 years and out of the blue Xoblite (A popular fork) gets a new release, fully working in Windows 10!

So for those of use forced to maintain a Windows installation for whatever reason this is a breath of fresh air.

Man, same here. I first got into bb on windows back in 2009(ish) and with the help of DeviantArt this obsession quickly took me to the world of nix!

Now I just need to convince the sysadmins at my agency to let me run Xoblite on my work laptop!

It's fascinating to see the cross-pollination of ideas from one OS to another.

(27-01-2021, 12:25 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: the help of DeviantArt this obsession quickly took me to the world of nix!

DeviantArt was also my goto place for inspo.

I'm not sure there's anything else like the X Window System that allows this level of customization by delegating the responsibility unto the client. It probably took a while to get xoblite running because of the lack of support and the difficulty of the task (maybe the lack of need too).

My problem with Blackbox was its menu-driven user interface when I had tried it in the early 2000s. Yet, I like that it still exists.