Advanced skinning, individualized desktops, animated icons, shiny colors and flashy windows: which alternative shell (for Windows) is the best? Introduction
Talisman Desktop 2.6 and LiteStep do exactly the same thing: they provide an alternative to the standard Windows Explorer shell. What's the use in this? Well, let's not make a huge deal of it: Windows looks dull.
Some years ago I entered the world of KDE. I was astonished with the possibilities it provided. I could make my desktop look exactly the way I wanted it, icons, window borders, appearances and so on. I had this itchy feeling "Why can't Windows do this?" Besides the occasional wallpaper-change and color-scheme alteration, it just lacked the advanced skinning features KDE (and the other window managers as well) provided. But I was persistent. I just had to accomplish the same thing in Windows. Quite easily I discovered Stardocks WindowBlinds, followed by IconPackager, and other programs from their ObjectDesktop.
But still I was not satisfied. No matter how many exotic themes I applied to my WindowBlinds, It still was not what I was looking for. I wanted something more radical. And so LiteStep emerged on my hard disk. It was a revelation. It was exactly what I had been looking for: not just a different label, but a whole new drink.
LS (LiteStep) was (and is, don't worry) configured through .rc files, easily editable with every notepad application. This led me to believe that changing your standard shell in Windows was something obscure, for the more techy user (editing configuration files by hand always reminds of "some other OS"). I just could not believe this idea was being commercially exploited. I hoped it was, though, because I just did not want to put so much effort into Windows (hey, that's where my Linux install comes in).
One day, in my favorite PC magazine, I found out about Talisman. It did the same LS did, but easier, or so the creators of Talisman stated. Yeah right. I kept on using LS, but I kept Talisman in the back of my head. The screenshots in that magazine looked kind of nice. I started doubting already.
Anyway, since I tend to experiment quite a lot on my computer, I bought Talisman and installed it, removing my LS. And now I have been happily using Talisman for some months. I think it is time for a comparison between these two major shell replacements for Windows.
Criteria
Before starting with the actual comparison I would like to explain the criteria I used.
- Installation: Installing and applying your new shell should not be much of a hassle; it should not damage your system (i.e. placing a wrong entry in the system.ini) and so on.
- Themes: One of the most important points, in my opinion. I will try to address (a) the quality of the themes, (b) the installation, and (c) their availability. I will not talk about the configuration here, since that is more something that belongs to point three.
- Ease of use: A difficult point, since every theme offers a different approach to how you use your desktop, so one theme is more usable than the other. But certain features are similar through all themes, such as the right-click menu, configuration menus, and so on.
The actual versions used were LiteStep Installer v2.1 (by Omar), and Talisman Desktop v2.6 (build 2601).
The following configuration has been used:
- AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1400 MHz);
- 512 MB SD-RAM;
- Ati Radeon 9000 128 MB DDR-RAM;
- C-Media CMI8738;
- Realtek 8139;
- 17" Compaq V75 Monitor, running at 1280x1024, 60 Herz;
- Windows XP Professional/Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.
