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Post by oz on Dec 3, 2023 11:55:29 GMT -8
(aka. A classic themer's dilemma) I'd wanted to make this post for a while for likeminded people. Going into it, just as a disclaimer: Don't mistake me for being pessimistic here. I think it's good to air out some frustrations every now and then, without it impacting the drive to perfection. Rather, it is because of that drive to perfection I am writing this in the first place. I really want to daily drive an immersive vintage Windows desktop. But I have a high standard, within myself, for that immersiveness. If I really wanted that true genuine trip down memory lane I'd just build a vintage computer. It's the daily drive aspect. The daily drive aspect makes all this so difficult to satisfy my insatiable hunger for classic Windows. This forum is a marvel. It proves there is so much you can do, and so much community effort and creativity to make it happen. But it's the jank that kills me. I got to have ExplorerPatcher, WindHawk, AHK scripts, Open Shell, icon changers and registry hacks. A chunk of my RAM just to get within arm's reach of UI heaven. And still I can't get it to look quite right, act quite right. The illusion is shattered too easily. I by no means seek pixel perfection, yet I think a lot of you know this feeling of close but not quite.
Windows eXPerience is god dang close to perfection, as far as an XP desktop goes. And it allows me to just breathe in the bliss wihout the endless tinkering. The hacks are hidden well enough, and smoothly. But unfortunately, being an older LTSC version, some programs I want to use will just refuse, complaining on an outdated Windows. And while I'd like to think of myself as an vintage-Windows-first kind of person, learning to live without certain programs, it just won't cut it realistically speaking.
I dream of when there is some genius who just solves the puzzle. Like the ol' full conversion packs we used to theme Windows XP with, to make something like that possible on modern Windows. I know too well how difficult Microsoft makes something like that to happen currently. But who knows with time what we can figure out? That's why this forum and community is so dear to me, because it's one solution after another that takes us on that path. All of you all's screenshots are only looking better and better. New hacks are found by sheer luck or skill that are mind blowing.
It makes me want to contribute more instead of just complaining like this.
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Brawllux
Regular Member
Yeeting metro settings out of the window
Posts: 280
OS: Windows 11
CPU: Intel Core I5-13500H
RAM: 16GB DDR5 5200MHz
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4060 Mobile 8GB
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Post by Brawllux on Dec 3, 2023 13:59:18 GMT -8
(aka. A classic themer's dilemma) I'd wanted to make this post for a while for likeminded people. Going into it, just as a disclaimer: Don't mistake me for being pessimistic here. I think it's good to air out some frustrations every now and then, without it impacting the drive to perfection. Rather, it is because of that drive to perfection I am writing this in the first place. I really want to daily drive an immersive vintage Windows desktop. But I have a high standard, within myself, for that immersiveness. If I really wanted that true genuine trip down memory lane I'd just build a vintage computer. It's the daily drive aspect. The daily drive aspect makes all this so difficult to satisfy my insatiable hunger for classic Windows. This forum is a marvel. It proves there is so much you can do, and so much community effort and creativity to make it happen. But it's the jank that kills me. I got to have ExplorerPatcher, WindHawk, AHK scripts, Open Shell, icon changers and registry hacks. A chunk of my RAM just to get within arm's reach of UI heaven. And still I can't get it to look quite right, act quite right. The illusion is shattered too easily. I by no means seek pixel perfection, yet I think a lot of you know this feeling of close but not quite.
Windows eXPerience is god dang close to perfection, as far as an XP desktop goes. And it allows me to just breathe in the bliss wihout the endless tinkering. The hacks are hidden well enough, and smoothly. But unfortunately, being an older LTSC version, some programs I want to use will just refuse, complaining on an outdated Windows. And while I'd like to think of myself as an vintage-Windows-first kind of person, learning to live without certain programs, it just won't cut it realistically speaking.
I dream of when there is some genius who just solves the puzzle. Like the ol' full conversion packs we used to theme Windows XP with, to make something like that possible on modern Windows. I know too well how difficult Microsoft makes something like that to happen currently. But who knows with time what we can figure out? That's why this forum and community is so dear to me, because it's one solution after another that takes us on that path. All of you all's screenshots are only looking better and better. New hacks are found by sheer luck or skill that are mind blowing.
It makes me want to contribute more instead of just complaining like this.
If Microsoft didn't make everything a lot harder with each update none of these would have happened. I am not a classic theme user,i enjoy the look of Windows 7-8 but everything is becoming more consistent every day thankfully. We are getting there, slowly but steadily. I can feel that we are getting closer and closer with each step. Can't wait for that day to come. |
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clara
Sophomore Member
Posts: 112 
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Post by clara on Dec 3, 2023 18:59:35 GMT -8
But it's the jank that kills me. I got to have ExplorerPatcher, WindHawk, AHK scripts, Open Shell, icon changers and registry hacks. A chunk of my RAM just to get within arm's reach of UI heaven. While i do get your concern, things did get better. Windhawk mods have outright repleced the need for the explorerpatcher at this point. Running both AHK scripts and windhawk sounds ridiculous to me, since windhawk mods made those obsolete even earlier, and before that we had sct.feh, that was hogging resources way more that windhawk scripts do. Registry hacks just are... just normal system customisation? Like, changing classic theme color scheme is also essentially a registry hack, is this jank too? Poking at registry without knowing can harm the system, sure, but... clogging the RAM? That's weird.
I, of course, don't know what your setup is but in my case explorer.exe with all extensions i use takes 30-40mb at most, windhawk takes less than 800kb, and registry around 2mb. Open-Shell start menu takes only 70kb. Retrobar takes by far the most, being about 35mb. but together that's less than 100mb of RAM in total. i don't want to sound rude, but... maybe streamlining your classic theme setup would be a good idea?
Dreams are sweet, unfortunately, that isn't quite possible in current circumstances, not with Microsoft's attitude towards classic theme. XP system changer packs didn't have to deal with the burden of cobbling remnants of old system together. We do. And it's not limited to Microsoft. As someone who has to fight pointless css updates in firefox, trying to bring MSIE5 theme up to date and who also is VERY perfectionist (i count pixels on screenshots to get things as exact as possible!), it's genuinely frustrating. The closest ones to a magician you seek that come to my mind are Aubery and ephemeralViolette, their contributions to explorer shell modding and overall windhawk script library are astonishing. Genuinely massive leaps forward. I really get your frustration, but things really are much better than they were 2 years ago when i joined this community. Overall user experience is just so much smoother, i don't think there are any compromises to general day-to-day functionality left. That inspires confidence to me.
If i want to get grumpy, the biggest problem for me is lack of a lightweight up-to-date browser for classic theme experience. I'm trying my best to fix up MSFXIE5 theme, but the firefox is the only thing genuinely clogging my memory and considering how modern web operates its barely possible to fix if at all, unfortunately, firefox is the best we have.
Edit: sorry for constant edits, it's 6AM and i tend to blender every other word. apologies.
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kamuisuki
Regular Member
~
Posts: 375
OS: Windows Me
Theme: 5048
CPU: Intel Pentium III-S Tualatin
RAM: 2048
GPU: GeForce 3Ti 500
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Post by kamuisuki on Dec 4, 2023 3:25:46 GMT -8
I'm just thinking about : each new year Microsoft is more and more near from Linux/GNU .
That mean maybe one day we will be able to choose environnement for windows like common distribution , and if its append , that will be easier than ever.
(my english still bad sorry)
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Post by OrthodoxWin32 on Dec 4, 2023 4:57:15 GMT -8
oz I agree with clara that hardware resource consumption is not a problem. The AHK scripts have become useless (they were the largest), Windhawk is well written and consumes little (except the horrible visual studio code IDE), and Open-Shell consumes less RAM than the splash screen. Regarding the seconds point, I quite agree. I've been thinking for a long time about how to make installing customization tools easier. I'm trying with ThemeSwitcherScript, but I'm stuck on the installation of Windhawk mods, which cannot be automated. But I'm pretty close to the goal. The objective of TSS is just to provide what is necessary for the proper functioning of the classic theme, the basic theme and the personalized visual styles (and to be able to switch from one to the other easily), not to automate the customization with pixel-perfect precision. But I think it is possible to write similar scripts for more precise customization. On the other hand, I'm having the same problem as clara with Firefox, I just can't get a classic theme right. Besides, the style of old IE doesn't even interest me, all I want is to get classic theme support for all the controls, but I can't do it.
One thing is certain, it is undeniable that the forum is progressing. Several years ago, it was impossible to correct certain UX elements properly, whereas it is now possible. The main thing that worries me for the future is the increase in apps that work with the classic theme, but display their own controls, or display controls intended to support the stupid "dark mode" which messes up the classic controls.
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Post by OrthodoxWin32 on Dec 4, 2023 5:07:28 GMT -8
I'm just thinking about : each new year Microsoft is more and more near from Linux/GNU . That mean maybe one day we will be able to choose environnement for windows like common distribution , and if its append , that will be easier than ever. (my english still bad sorry) I don't hope for this moment, because I fear that this will be the end of Windows NT-style graphics rendering, and that the classic theme will no longer exist at all. |
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ephemeralViolette
Sophomore Member
Posts: 183
OS: Windows 10 (20H2), Windows 10 (22H2)
Theme: Windows XP Luna, Windows 7 Aero
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: 64 GB
GPU: Radeon RX 580
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Post by ephemeralViolette on Dec 4, 2023 6:25:26 GMT -8
I'm just thinking about : each new year Microsoft is more and more near from Linux/GNU . That mean maybe one day we will be able to choose environnement for windows like common distribution , and if its append , that will be easier than ever. (my english still bad sorry) I don't hope for this moment, because I fear that this will be the end of Windows NT-style graphics rendering, and that the classic theme will no longer exist at all. There is simply no way that they can get rid of GDI, but I also doubt that any of the USER behaviour is going anywhere, since it is exported publicly via user32, so it's generally kept around for backwards compatibility purposes. The worst case scenario would be them moving classic theme rendering procedures into user32 itself (taking it out of win32k) for these purposes, since that would only leave classic theme around for applications that explicitly call the public API functions, where it would be removed from the kernel-mode window DefWindowProc implementation, but I think it's fairly unlikely that this will ever happen.
Besides, they have basically no reason to remove classic theme frames, not even through a refactoring of NTGDI/NTUSER (win32k Rust, perhaps?) code. They're a useful fallback to have and Microsoft have historically been very keen on preserving backwards compatibility.
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Post by R.O.B. on Dec 4, 2023 21:16:35 GMT -8
This is an interesting topic, and one that does resonate with me to a certain degree. I would be lying if I said that the jank that comes with achieving a "perfect" classic theme setup isn't a bit annoying at times, and Microsoft pushing updates that can potentially break things or undo your work can also be rather discouraging. It's pretty much left to us enthusiasts to keep the classic theme experience alive, and Microsoft is only making that job more and more difficult as we move further away from when they officially supported it.
Having said that, as others have pointed out, we really have come a long way. As someone who's been at this for over a decade at this point, the difference is seriously night and day. And I don't even mean just in terms of aesthetics, either. I remember a time (I'm talking when Windows 8 was brand new) when there were basically no tools to achieve a classic theme setup, and doing so essentially meant you were sacrificing some pretty major OS functionality for it. To give an example, just about all of the very earliest methods to enable the classic theme (prior to ClassicTheme.exe) would completely break the login screen. That's right, there was a point in time when we were literally sacrificing our login screens just to use the classic theme! This may sound crazy to some, but it was pretty much our only option, and we largely viewed it as an extremely annoying trade-off until a better solution could be found.
Over time, as more and more tools were developed, Windows started to become much more usable with the classic theme. This was primarily thanks to better methods of enabling it, as well as various other tweaks that help make the experience feel more authentic. Windhawk is probably the biggest game changer we've seen in years. The things people have been able to achieve with it are nothing short of incredible. The community has been able to do things with it that were previously considered to be a pipe dream, and the significance of that cannot be understated.
If I'm being completely honest, I am still concerned about the current direction Windows is heading in. However, on that same note, I am also more optimistic that I've been in a long time. In just 2023 alone, the classic theme experience has improved tremendously. Sure, it's still not perfect, but it's closer to it than it ever has been. In spite of Microsoft's efforts to abandon the classic Win32 UI, we have done a lot to preserve its experience, and I look forward to what this community's future brings.
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Post by anixx on Dec 4, 2023 23:45:20 GMT -8
Over time, as more and more tools were developed, Windows started to become much more usable with the classic theme. This was primarily thanks to better methods of enabling it, as well as various other tweaks that help make the experience feel more authentic. Windhawk is probably the biggest game changer we've seen in years. The things people have been able to achieve with it are nothing short of incredible. The community has been able to do things with it that were previously considered to be a pipe dream, and the significance of that cannot be understated. I think CkassicTheme.exe never broke the login screen. It were the DWM disablng methods that broke it. What it broke is the Wi-Fi flyout in Win8.1, it worked only on loggin screen so one had to temporarily exit session to chose a Wi-Fi. Again, this was not fixed by better tools, but rather by MS itself as Win11 Wi-Fi works well when classic theme is enabled. |
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Post by OrthodoxWin32 on Dec 5, 2023 3:42:41 GMT -8
I think CkassicTheme.exe never broke the login screen. It were the DWM disablng methods that broke it. What it broke is the Wi-Fi flyout in Win8.1, it worked only on loggin screen so one had to temporarily exit session to chose a Wi-Fi. Again, this was not fixed by better tools, but rather by MS itself as Win11 Wi-Fi works well when classic theme is enabled. In Windows 10, the Wi-Fi connection panel also works with the classic theme. Anyway, PeNetworkManager already existed at the time of Windows 8, it seems to me. |
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Post by R.O.B. on Dec 5, 2023 14:47:22 GMT -8
I think CkassicTheme.exe never broke the login screen. It were the DWM disablng methods that broke it. What it broke is the Wi-Fi flyout in Win8.1, it worked only on loggin screen so one had to temporarily exit session to chose a Wi-Fi. Again, this was not fixed by better tools, but rather by MS itself as Win11 Wi-Fi works well when classic theme is enabled. ClassicTheme.exe did not break the login screen, that's correct. That was actually a pretty major selling point when it was new. I was referring to methods that were used before the publication of ClassicTheme.exe (back when we were doing things like renaming/deleting aero.msstyles and such). Those were the days when a classic theme setup really crippled a lot of functionality. |
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ephemeralViolette
Sophomore Member
Posts: 183
OS: Windows 10 (20H2), Windows 10 (22H2)
Theme: Windows XP Luna, Windows 7 Aero
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: 64 GB
GPU: Radeon RX 580
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Post by ephemeralViolette on Dec 5, 2023 17:11:35 GMT -8
This is an interesting topic, and one that does resonate with me to a certain degree. I would be lying if I said that the jank that comes with achieving a "perfect" classic theme setup isn't a bit annoying at times, and Microsoft pushing updates that can potentially break things or undo your work can also be rather discouraging. It's pretty much left to us enthusiasts to keep the classic theme experience alive, and Microsoft is only making that job more and more difficult as we move further away from when they officially supported it. Having said that, as others have pointed out, we really have come a long way. As someone who's been at this for over a decade at this point, the difference is seriously night and day. And I don't even mean just in terms of aesthetics, either. I remember a time (I'm talking when Windows 8 was brand new) when there were basically no tools to achieve a classic theme setup, and doing so essentially meant you were sacrificing some pretty major OS functionality for it. To give an example, just about all of the very earliest methods to enable the classic theme (prior to ClassicTheme.exe) would completely break the login screen. That's right, there was a point in time when we were literally sacrificing our login screens just to use the classic theme! This may sound crazy to some, but it was pretty much our only option, and we largely viewed it as an extremely annoying trade-off until a better solution could be found. Over time, as more and more tools were developed, Windows started to become much more usable with the classic theme. This was primarily thanks to better methods of enabling it, as well as various other tweaks that help make the experience feel more authentic. Windhawk is probably the biggest game changer we've seen in years. The things people have been able to achieve with it are nothing short of incredible. The community has been able to do things with it that were previously considered to be a pipe dream, and the significance of that cannot be understated. If I'm being completely honest, I am still concerned about the current direction Windows is heading in. However, on that same note, I am also more optimistic that I've been in a long time. In just 2023 alone, the classic theme experience has improved tremendously. Sure, it's still not perfect, but it's closer to it than it ever has been. In spite of Microsoft's efforts to abandon the classic Win32 UI, we have done a lot to preserve its experience, and I look forward to what this community's future brings. Arguably, Vista through 8 were more destructive to the classic theme experience than 10 and 11 are. A lot of things were subtly changed around this time (client edge styling), and various things were rewritten to use DirectUI (Windows Explorer list views in 7, Task Manager in 8) with dubious support for classic theme at best. DWM alone has a lot of weird subtle side effects with classic theme, such as window borders spilling over to the sides of adjacent monitors, or window animations being completely wrong.
Windows 10 and 11 focus on rewriting portions of the shell, but since the rewritten components are most often in newer UI frameworks incompatible with classic theme altogether, it becomes more clear that a better alternative is to simply rewrite these programs or use an older version if possible. I think this can be more stable in a lot of cases, and can be a great indicator of the longevity of classic theme. Since alternative components will need to be used more often, there won't really be subtle differences between Windows versions that can get in the way of an accurate or functional theme.
And yeah, maybe Microsoft can remove classic theme from the DefWindowProc implementation in win32k. I think it's extremely unlikely, but even if they were to, I'm willing to bet that a restoration of the appearance would be possible with a negligible impact on performance. Something similar to UxTheme could be created for the purpose of drawing custom classic theme controls.
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Post by R.O.B. on Dec 5, 2023 18:31:21 GMT -8
Arguably, Vista through 8 were more destructive to the classic theme experience than 10 and 11 are. A lot of things were subtly changed around this time (client edge styling), and various things were rewritten to use DirectUI (Windows Explorer list views in 7, Task Manager in 8) with dubious support for classic theme at best. DWM alone has a lot of weird subtle side effects with classic theme, such as window borders spilling over to the sides of adjacent monitors, or window animations being completely wrong.
Windows 10 and 11 focus on rewriting portions of the shell, but since the rewritten components are most often in newer UI frameworks incompatible with classic theme altogether, it becomes more clear that a better alternative is to simply rewrite these programs or use an older version if possible. I think this can be more stable in a lot of cases, and can be a great indicator of the longevity of classic theme. Since alternative components will need to be used more often, there won't really be subtle differences between Windows versions that can get in the way of an accurate or functional theme. And yeah, maybe Microsoft can remove classic theme from the DefWindowProc implementation in win32k. I think it's extremely unlikely, but even if they were to, I'm willing to bet that a restoration of the appearance would be possible with a negligible impact on performance. Something similar to UxTheme could be created for the purpose of drawing custom classic theme controls.
Good point. Windows XP (or more specifically NT 5.x) was really the last version of Windows to ship with a true "classic" UI, with Vista being the first obvious departure from that. My biggest concern with Windows 11 is the eventual removal of what remains of the legacy shell. They are already axing the Windows 10 taskbar, and it has been pretty obvious for years now that Control Panel is on its way out eventually as well. I can easily see them doing the same for other parts of Explorer, and I do think a rewrite of a good amount of shell components will be necessary at some point. But for now, the classic theme experience is considerably pretty decent, and I remain optimistic for the future. Regarding the possibility of Microsoft outright removing the classic theme, I also doubt that will ever happen. The whole selling point of Windows is that it has a massive library of decades worth of software, and I have no doubt that a move like that would break a bunch of legacy stuff. Even if they were to change the implementation in the way you're describing, there's a lot of poorly written software that's still being used by businesses on a daily basis, and there's no way something won't break from that. And really, what would Microsoft have to gain from such a move? The only thing I can see them getting out of it would be a bunch of headaches. A lot of the core Win32 functionality has remained the same for 30 years now, and I don't see this being any different. |
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