I’m not talking about the new start menu with the metro apps. I actually don’t mind that, and rarely use the start menu in windows 7 anyway.
What I’m talking about is the flat, ugly design choices about everything else. They’ve chucked Aero out the window - no more transparency, and nice colors. No more buttons that look like buttons. But rather simply flat, borderless markings on a flat surface. Nothing has shadows or bevels for a raised look, few things have separators or boxes. The whole thing is very ugly to me.
It appears as per step 2 of this guide, someone more or less tried to fix exactly what I was hoping to fix. But the link to the actual theme pages is expired, and I’ve been unable to find them elsewhere on the internet.
I know there are hacks to restore some transparency to window borders, but they’ve got their own bag of problems, and they definitely don’t replicate the feeling of windows 7 completely.
So I was hoping someone might know if the files linked in the above article are available somewhere on the internet that I didn’t find (the extended theme files that require the UxStyle app to override), or some other way that I could get windows 8.1 to look more like Windows 7 in terms of the interface.
Again, not talking about metro, talking about the ugliness of all the stuff the DWM renders.
Aha, I was able to find where that theme moved to. Here.
Doesn’t quite do the job - it can’t do the blurred transparency effect on window borders among other minor things, but it’s an improvement.
The third party transparency/aero glass utilities I’ve seen make the borders completely transparent rather than the blurred transparency, which is too distracting if you have windows on top of windows. It also doesn’t fix the ugliness of the new windows explorer.
Related question, is there some way I can get windows explorer to separate libraries and computer (with hard drives listed) on the left pane? Instead of having it all globbed under “this pc”.
What does the theme at that link actually do? I do not care about Aero, which I never thought to be a particularly attractive or useful feature of Windows 7, more a sort of showing off by interface designers. However, I do agree that the relentlessly flat design of 8 (which seems to be the result of a silly anti-skeuomorphic fashion amongst designers) is both ugly and harder to use, as it makes buttons, window edges, etc., more difficult to see. I would dearly love to get some degree of 3D and skeuomorphism back in 8. (Mind you, simply having an easy way for users to customize colors, as existed in earlier versions of Windows, would go a long way towards mitigating the problems I have with window edges merging into their backgrounds. You can do it in 8, but it means editing the registry.)
What I’ve done is create Explorer favorites for all the stuff I use regularly and leave all the other sub-trees minimized. Not a perfect workaround, but it helps.
On my Win 8.1, Libraries is not a sub-node of “This PC”; they’re siblings under the “Desktop” node.
It sounds to me that you LIKE transparency. May I ask why? I don’t want to start a debate, but I am curious. To me, transparency just makes stuff on the front window harder to read. If you want to know what is behind this window, then just move it out of the way. You’re not using a 14-inch monitor, are you?
Just some relatively subtle effects to adjust the aesthetics towards aero. Here’s a screenshot. The active window gains the color of the background - not in a translucent sort of way, just sort of in an averaged color sort of way. But you can’t really see it because I’m showing the taskbar window selection. It makes some icons in the top right for window control look better. A few subtle aesthetic changes I can’t quite notice without a side by side comparison too. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Now - something I noticed with the libraries - there actually IS a libraries section, if I scroll down. Which means those folders under my PC aren’t actual links to the libraries, they’re actually just links to \user[username\documents and such. But there doesn’t seem to be a way to get rid of them. Anyone have any ideas as to how I could reduce the “this pc” section to just hard drives, like the old “computer”?
I’m fond of the whole aero aesthetic. I’m on a 28" monitor. I could live without the transparency, although it does a nice job of blending the whole image together. But aero has a lot of nice touches - the animations, the color palettes, the buttons, the way there are more borders and bevels and shading to clearly separate aspects of the interface. I hate the flatness. I feel like I’m taking a back towards windows 3.1.
Apparently Microsoft didn’t merely disable the aero features, it actually stripped out a lot of the code related to the interface. It’s actually one of the more insidious parts of windows 8 - Aero is fairly graphically intensive and would eat up tablet battery quickly, so they just chucked it out for everything, including PCs.
I was hoping someone basically recreated a way to get that 7 aero interface in 8. Because 8 apparently has nicer internals, and I actually kind of like using live tiles.
Having tried to install the theme at SenorBeef’s link, it appears that you need to install the thing at your link first anyway, then do a bunch of poorly explained configuration (possibly involving yet another download) before installing the theme. Fuck it!
I am with you SeniorBeef. I dislike win8 with a curious passion but I have no choice. I have managed to arrange things so that I do not see the Metro screen and the only metro app I ever use is skype. I have ClassicShell installed and have disabled as many of the features as I can that are specifically designed for touch surfaces.
After all of that I still miss the aesthetic of Win7. One aero feature I particularly loved was the ability to use <win><tab> to scroll through open applications. It was fantastic because it changed the size of the screenshots as you cycled through them so that you got to see clearly what each app was. Kind of similar to what Mac users get all the time. I like the transparency too but can live without it
I played around with add-on glass kind of products when I first got my machine but found them generally unsatisfactory. It sounds like your particular spectrum of preferences is a little different from mine but in my case I have settled on a setup that doesn’t annoy the crap out of me and is workable. But not an improvement on win7. You may eventually settle on a configuration that works for you. Good luck.
I was always a bit puzzled by Aero transparency - I was quite a fan of transparency in Ubuntu, because it actually did something - you could have a transparent/semitransparent terminal window and overlap it with an instruction document or tutorial - this was invaluable for small screen computing without continually switching or shuffling windows around.
But in Win7, it always seemed like nothing much more than a ‘look what we can do’ feature - in fact, coming from XP, I felt for a quite a while that all the window decorations in Win7 had been fattened just so you’d notice they had also been made transparent.
Horses for courses, I guess - and it’s no secret that I like Win8 (including the visual style) - but I do understand and accept that others feel differently.
