1. Does anyone know where I can find the old version of Litestep?

2. I want to use Litestep on my desktop, but my brother doesn't, so is it possible to only run Litestep on my desktop?

bump.

http://www.customize.org/forum/8024

or anything else, I guess, that you could find from google: "old version lightstep" except without quotes.

I found that, but the link is bad.

I don't know why you'd want to use the old version of litestep, as it uses more resources and isn't compatible with as many themes and is more unstable.

The new litestep installer (omar version) has built in options to choose whether you want it for your whole system or per user. All of this can be found at litestep.net.

I use litestep on my laptop because the laptop is crappy and it performs better than explorer.exe on xp-home.

1. Beats me.
2. I believe so. At least, I think I recall reading that when I installed a version early last year. I stopped using it a few days later because I completely hated it and it hogged the same amount of resources explorer did.

The resource uses are based on the theme says the holy Yecti...

bah, I'll get the new version, if it sucks then I'll wait till I can get my old version back. But my friends had it and they said it was teh suck.

The resources are very dependent on your theme. I always go for a minimalistic setup when setting up my desktop no matter what shell I'm using. It just so happens that I can have a desktop better tooled and cleaner looking that explorer.exe and use less resources :).

I've only had great experience with the new builds of litestep when compared to the old ones. I suppose experiences would vary system-to-system, though.

I just wanted the regular theme that it came with. I ended up getting new litestep, it's just as good as the old, the only thing is it's a big bigger and takes up a bit more space.. oh well it's still sexy and fast.

I'm addicted to tweaking and customizing every little bit. I'm a fiend for customization:o

I'm running the newer verison, and it hasn't given me any trouble. I too run a minimal theme., it's just a few icons in the top of the screen, that's it. MinMax

Guh. Litestep was dreadful when i tried using it. Felt totally klunkly kludgy and generally bass-ackwards. Even after spending days tweaking themes and plugins it still felt totally gross, like it could have so much potential but instead just sucked.

It never felt clean or sleek or anything, more like a showcase for horrible bright 3d-gradiented themes that took up half your desktop with eye-searing ugliness, putting all the controls in the very middle of the screen or such. Eventually i found a lighter-weight gnome-ish theme, but even that one just felt bogged down and unwholesome. With all the claims of amazing customizeability i always felt trapped and claustrophobic and somewhat gypped.

I will say, however, that Yecti was most helpful and informative during my brief and ill-destined foray into litestep.

However not long after that failure, i was informed about blackbox 4 windows, which was incredibly exciting, as i had used blackbox to great extent [and still occasionally use when i'm not on my love-child of Enlightenment] under linux. It is similar to litestep in that it is fully themeable and rc configurable and plugin-oriented. However that is where the similarities ended.

Bb4win was like instant nerdvana, it was everything Litestep had tried to convince me it was and then miserably failed my expectations. It was small, minimal, lightweight, sleek clean fast easily configurable and customizable, and mindbogglingly sexy. Where Litestep tried to force me to suit myself to it, and trying to do the reverse just felt tedious and frustrating, bb4win was smooth and responsive, instead of trying to hammer a mousey desktop environment paradigm into it, it practically leaped into accord with my desires and necessities for a shell. It was everything i could ever ask for in a windows-based shell and then some; finally here was a windows shell that was a joy to work with. I would recommend it approximately a million times more than i would Litestep, and for that matter would recommend it to anyone who wasn't planning on switching, either.

I believe this is the most recent picture i have of my xp boot, however i've switched to a different theme recently [ldc]:
http://dor.nullmind.org/arc/dsk28jul04.png

Though for the last couple months i've been solely on gentoo + E [except for over wintereenmas break where i booted back to xp to play kotor nonstop] which is if anything even more beautiful a thing than xp + bb4win.
http://dor.nullmind.org/arc/dskwireframe16jan04.png

Hmm. I tried out that Blackbox thing, and it seems nice... but it's not changing the look of the windows (and their contents). So all my programs look exactly the same, with the new flashy toolbars and titlebars, which looks decidedly bizarre.

Any ideas?

When I tried Litestep about a year ago, I was very frustrated by lack of drag-and-drop (at least for desktop icons; litestep liked putting desktop icons willy-nilly, and I couldn't drag them to their rightful places). Please tell me it has been implemented in the newest version.

Or maybe I could try bb4win. Does that support drag-and-drop?

Blackbox was awesome, but I still ended up using Explorer again after about a week. It didn't like a few of my programs, namely ObjectDock, and getting a setup I wanted was a slight pain.

All in all, I liked it a whole hellova lot more than Litestep, and if I actually felt motivated to spend more time with it, I'd probably be running it right now.

My current level of desktop customization involves moving the taskbar to the top of the screen, different icons, renamed icons (My Computer, etc.), ObjectDock, WindowFX, and WindowBlinds.

For the titlebars and scrollbars and such, you'll need summat like WindowBlinds for themage. Also for bb skinning you'll want to use a different plugin than comes as default, i believe it's called bbLeanSkin.

There is also a slight trick, sometimes if youre messing with windowblinds themes and re-applying and such, you'll need to turn off bb skins [easily accomplished from the main menu] temporarily, or the other way around, i don't recall exactly, just that there was sometimes a bit of wonkiness.

I found a gorgeous lcars theme for it a while back: http://dor.nullmind.org/arc/diropuslcars.png

This is no different from Litestep, at least to my experience, i felt rather misled by all the screenshots where Litestep showed themed scrollbars, and never ever mentioned you needed a seperate program for that.

The thing to remember is it's a totally different paradigm from Explorer, with hotkeys or even mouse gestures if youre so inclined you can bind most any function you could need, eg program execution for a slight example. Beyond that there is a fairly comprehensive menu which can be accessed by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop instead of being confined to one start button.

One thing i really liked to use was ctrl-win-p which would toggle all of my plugins off resulting in a perfectly blank clean desktop, nice for things like playing nwn in windowed mode without all that other stuff getting in the way and distracting me. [regarding nwn or morrowind, at least when i was using it, sometimes it was necessary to go through the plugin settings {most have a context menu} and turn off always on top, as this could {understandably} interfere with the window gaining proper focus for rendering speed and such]. That and the skinning thing are relly the only things that were issues for me before i figured out the workarounds [which are really painless and coherent].

As to desktop icons, well, i've always had a very tidy desktop, all my desktop icons in explorer consisted of my computer and then 3 folders i accessed persistantly. There are ways to set up desktop icons and show folder contents even on the desktop, but i never really bothered with that, because it felt superfluous.

If you are so inclined, there are even plugins that allow you to create special objects [which could look like an icon for instance] that would execute commands or certain scripted actions or such at a click, i never did anything with those, as stated previously, however some of the possibilities seem pretty wild.

As to an actual /explorer/ replacement, eg for My Computer and such, to avoid the cumbersome intrusive overhead into such a secular environment, there are a number of quality file manager replacements. My personal favourite was Directory Opus, which allowed among other things multi-pane browsing [think old win3.1 file manager], as well as being able to open up an ftp server in one pane for easy transfers [this was important as i am incessantly moving files to my server].

if your still looking for the old version of Litestep try

http://www.oldversion.com/

wasn't able to check whether they had it as the site seemed to be down when I posted this but its worth a look.

Yeah... I get better stuff to do with my time than go through and configre Windows to look pretty. Most of my friends are using ThemeXP or whatever and to tell the truth I don't think my time should be wasted in such an endeavor. I just changed the colors in Windows to something I can stand.

I consider a new shell to be more than just pretty. With a new shell, I can completely customize windows to work well with how I think. It actually makes me more efficient (since I mostly use computers for non-game related stuff anyways). Having a customized toolbar with everything I need at my fingertips is awesome. It looking 10x better than explorer.exe is a bonus. It running better (in my particular case) is a super bonus!

Hmm. If I have to do that much crap for this BlackBox thing it's really not worth it. Why not just integrate all the necessary plugins into the main package? Is there really anyone who wants to replace their titlebars but not the windows themselves? It's bizarre.

Better yet, you need to get two matching themes - windowblinds for example and litestep.

Hassle.

Although I did enjoy dabbling with Litestep for a while, but settled back with windowblinds alone

Litestep is, although it comes with an easy installer, an advanced shell replacement. I've tweaked my setup for well over a year before it was completely perfect. I have a (what some would call huge) graphical environment that's techy, and uses WAY less resources than XP's explorer. And I have a hard time functioning without right click access to my custom popup. ... Windows is hard to use now.