I've always liked my desktop to look good; amazingly enough, it helps me be more productive. Now, by good I'm not only talking about making it look pretty, but also about making it as unobtrussive as possible. Mostly, I try to look for something that I can stare at all day without getting sick about it.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty fed up with the Windows Classic look, and particularly with Luna, which I never quite liked, anyway.
Besides good-looking, I need something that's functional and that I can customize for my needs and work habits. Well, a few days ago, I found one that's pretty promising:
The picture above is my desktop running BlackBox for Windows (actually, BBLean) as the default shell, instead of explorer.exe, alongside yzdock for the launch bar at the top. BBLean is actually quite easy on system resources (especially when compared to Explorer), and it's completely customizable in almost every possible way.
And since I can pretty much set everything to auto-hide, I get a nice clean desktop to work with :)
Since I'm on the desktop topic, allow me to rant for a little bit :)
I've done quite a bit of work on several Non-Microsoft OSs, and you know what I miss the most? Screen real-state. See, in most other OSs (Linux included, as long as you use a nice window manager, instead of the abominations otherwise known as Gnome and KDE), you can really multitask, since most applications are usable in windowed mode. On Windows, however, most applications are useless unless you run them in fullscreen mode (that is, assuming you're stuck with a lowly 1024x768 desktop). Some apps that are particularly bad on this are Outlook and, most notably, the Visual Studio IDE.
OK, rant over ;)
