My Windows Desktop has not changed, but here's my current Linux Desktop. I spend most of my time on Linux anyways, so it changes more than the Windows one.

Behold, my 800x600 desktop:

Note: Yes, I know the icons cover the awesomeness of the wallpaper, I keep it at 800x600 since my vision isn't good enough to read most text at 1024x768 or higher desktop.

ph33r the frozen over hell

Bloody hell, if your eyes are that bad, get glasses! :o

I love the linux desktop. so very l33t.

here's my organic desktoppery:

beginning

currently

Top marks for finding all the collateral images (except for the base one, which is my own photo).

someone mind helping me figure out where to get those type of desktop customizations and showing me how? those task bar and desktop utilities plx

Brings new meaning to the term "wallpaper"

Where did you get the vistual stuff for that? Looks like the kind of thing that I'm looking for, not too minimalistic, but lets me get rid off the excess I have...

Bump

been messing with my visual styles + reshacking system32.dll - result.

I like that BG, would be nice in a 'cool blue' colour i think.

SpaceJesus has fake Gentoo, here's real Gentoo. Nice windows shot btw SJ.

Been messing a bit more with msgina.dll
Uses the same imageset for the windows logon screen aswell which is cool

My desktop , Landscapes FTW.

Is that objectdock and scaled-up NS resources I see? They don't look half-bad either. Did you filter them? If I remember right the ones in the spr file are 32x32...

Also, my new(ish) desktop, plus my laptop running windows with litestep (which is soon to be wiped and go kubuntu-only)

Desktop linked because it's a high-quality PNG @ 3200x1200 :o

The best desktops are linux. If you don't want to take that leap, check out litestep, an excellent alternate shell that focuses on performance and stability, but is easily extensible to provide some awesome graphical flare, like this:


I'm using a minimalistic custom theme in my laptop shot, along with a custom Window Blinds theme to make the explorer-based windows match my litestep theme. There are some good ones if you browse through their pages and, while that is a community site, not the official dev site, they do have the main project for download and a couple of community-made installers (you would otherwise need to manually replace explorer.exe as the shell). Note that you can still use explorer as your file browser if you wish, though I'd encourage you to check out Total Commander.
Another great feature of litestep is multiple virtual desktops, something that windows is severly lacking in. There is a project to bring the compiz/beryl 3D cube to windows, though I can't remember its name, and last I heard it wasn't even in alpha.

If you really want lean and mean with as little overhead as possible, use Damn Small or Xubuntu. But if it just has to be windows, check out blackbox, though I've barely even tried it myself, it does come highly recommended.

The sidebar on both of my windows installs, which behaves very similarly to the Mac dock, is called ObjectDock, made by the same people who later on made Window Blinds. The most useful thing is the ability to symlink it to folders, to expand a fly-wheel of all files in there, but it also has widgets such as battery power and local weather. This screen shows how I have mine setup.



Sorry for the double post, but I figured this thing needs its own post.

a worthy topic bump...

(resized from 1440x900) I sorta edited my visual style but mostly just to the extent of recoloring, partly because i'm lazy (whoever invented the default green on blue theme should be shot)
i'm most interested in what spacejesus did to get his results

yup in use now


my second profile in works

He hex'd the windows resource files to point to different pictures. If you've never done hex editing, it is quite fun, but I would definitely NOT start out by hexing your own OS. Start with something small and simple. If you've played WC3 online, you'll have heard of WC3Banlist. That is a great example of how to do it, I taught my friend using it and now we both run custom versions of the beta. You can change many things, but the easiest is strings. For example, the beta has an autorefresh feature that temporarily fills the game with fakeplayers to refrtesh it in the game list. By searching through the compiled executable, you can find the strings that are both the fakeplayer's name and the command string you type in-game to run it. We changed the name to a greenish-coloured VOMIT and the command to /pukezor (That's one thing to watch out for, there are two types of strings, fixed and null-terminated. In a null-terminated string you can insert pretty much anything, but a fixed string, like the command one was, requires it to be the exact same number of characters. So instead of /vomit, or even /puke, we had to use /pukezor, which happens to be the same number of characters as /refresh).

It sounds like he did essentially the same thing, but to an internal windows DLL that controls the visual resources used by the OS. Basically, he went in and searched for the strings that contained the default pictures (they would not contain the pictures themselves, rather pointers in the form of a file location or resource location within another compiled file, more likely) and changed them to instead point to his own custom files.

And spacejesus, if you're reading this, have you found the resource location to the windows bootstrap picture? There's a copy of it in the windows directory, but it's only a copy, as changing it doesn't replace the image when booting up.