Classic working in 1903?

Hi sheeperino, and welcome to WinClassic!

It technically does work, however not without some pretty major issues. Context menus don't have any text in them, explorer windows have numerous style issues (such as the back/forward buttons being broken, and the +/- buttons are missing from the navigation pane). The taskbar is broken as well, with immersive/modern styles being seemingly hard-coded to it, resulting broken colors, and text not being displayed on it (however, this is true for any version of Windows 10, not just 1903). Immersive/modern apps are also another issue, since they don't work at all with the classic theme a lot of the time (again, this is true for any version of Windows 10 though). And iirc, UAC is also broken, but again, that's been an issue for a while now.

There may be a few other problems with it, but those are the big ones I can recall off the top of my head. Certain Control Panel pages are also be broken, however those might be fixable by following the instructions in this thread (just keep in mind that this is for Windows 8, but it might work with Windows 10 as well). Task Manager is broken too, but that is fixable, as the one from Windows 8.1 has already been fixed with the classic theme (at this point, it's just a matter of finding the time to fix the one for Windows 10). As an alternative, you can use the legacy Task Manager.

If you're still interested in trying it out for yourself, leet has been working on an awesome program that makes it easy to enable/disable it, which you can find here.

What's surprising though is that the classic theme actually works better in 1903 than it does in 1809. The main reason I say that is because explorer windows don't work at all in 1809. This happened as a result of Microsoft removing shellstyle.dll from System32, which they re-added in 1903. Kind of surprising that they did this, but I'm certainly not complaining about it.


Edit: As 1337ftw pointed out, there are some fixes for things like the taskbar, so definitely check those out. The only issue right now is that they either don't follow system colors, or they have somewhat crippled functionality (depending on the solution you use). So no "true" classic taskbars at the moment.

Thx everyone

Well, that's basically one of our problems now. We can't get a taskbar with system colors. As to the UI, you can just use deskn.cpl (Configure button in my utility) to change the window colors.

Well, not the taskbar. It's an .msstyles file which I don't know how to edit

Implementing automatic editing of msstyles just to change taskbar color is too overkill i think

It must be. It's a style for the utility StartIsBack which changes taskbar.