Same, but blackbox (bb4win) was my shell of choice. Along with the Win32 Unix tools, Conemu, xyplorer and shell32.dll icon replacements, my Windows back then looked and behaved very similar to a Fluxbox/OpenBox Linux install.
I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on. I forgot what it was called, but it was one of the coolest things ever. In reality it wasn't very practical, but it was still cool. I miss those days of crazy mods and customisation. Everything so locked up and dumbed down these days, in the name of "security".
> I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on.
Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482
I loved bb4win, and used whenever I wanted FAST (boy was it). I used Blackbox on FreeBSD for the longest time so it was nice to have similar experiences.
We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.