14 DAY TRIAL // Windows isn't quite the most eye-candy operating system out there, but third-party apps can really come in handy whenever you want to change the way it looks.
Linux, on the other hand, provides better customization power to users and lets them change virtually everything about the operating system, starting with icons and ending with title bars, fonts, and window layout.
They say that most early Linux adopters are trying to make the open-source platform look similar to Windows in an effort to turn it into a much more familiar working environment. Some people, however, are going for the other way around, customizing the standard Windows elements to look like those in Windows.
So is the case with the screenshots you can see in this article, which present a Windows 8.1 installation customized with third-party tools to look like Linux.
While it surely looks appealing, mostly thanks to the flat icons and the new window design, such a concept doesn't make much sense for Windows users who might find it very difficult to adapt to so many drastic changes in terms of design and position on the screen.
The taskbar, which is now moved to the left of the screen, just like Unity, might not come in very handy to someone who's used to finding it at the bottom of the desktop, while we're pretty sure that many will miss the clock, which is no longer placed in the right bottom corner but in the middle of the screen.
Again, this concept does look really great and neatly mixes some modern design elements, but there's no doubt that this isn't the direction Microsoft would ever plan to head in.
The creator of this design, DeviantArt member Chef-of-KH, said that it was all made possible with the help of customer icons, wallpapers, visual styles, apps, and a tweaked version of Litestep.
“It took me a while to get Litestep 0.25.0 working on a 64-bit Windows 8.1 machine. I didn't took the new development builds because they just don't work with the modules that are required for the FCOAR skin. But the problem is that 0.25.0 doesn't work properly on Windows 8. So I'm running Windows Explorer as shell and Litestep on top of it. To prevent the Windows' taskbar from flickering through Litestep, I wrote a little Win32 app to hide it. That's how I finally got Litestep working on Windows 8.1 without losing all 8 features,” he said.