cairo shell screenshots:

tired of the way your desktop looks? sick of how no matter what you do with the win­dows themes, it always still looks like… well… win­dows? con­sider repla­cing your shell. to most people, a desktop shell gen­er­ally refers to your start menu and desktop icons, but essen­tially, it’s just a graph­ical layer that makes it easier to use your com­puter. as such, there are a lot of dif­ferent shells, with a lot of dif­ferent looks. some of the more pop­ular ones include:

• litestep (easily the most popular)
• blackbox/​bblean (my per­sonal favourite)
• emerge desktop (a little high main­ten­ance to get it to look nice)
• sharpE (never used it)
• and now cairo shell (aes­thet­ic­ally, like a cross between mac os x and gnome)

out of the box, cairo shell is very easy to install, con­figure and looks very nice without any time-​consuming tweaking. as of right now, cairo shell is still in alpha, but is gen­er­ally func­tional, with nightly builds being released reg­u­larly. i’ve been using it for the last 2 – 3 days, and it is a very impressive desktop exper­i­ence. to be expected from early devel­op­mental releases, there are a few bugs here and there, but the usab­ility is sur­pris­ingly high and i have not suffered a crash. the design is intu­itive and there are a lot of good ideas in this package. if you’re looking to spice up your com­puter, i sug­gest you give cairo shell a try. you can down­load it here.