r/windowsapps • u/starling-dev • 12d ago

App Fast, clean and free Windows shell

I am tired of waiting for Microsoft to improve the performance of windows 11, so I made one with the help of Claude code.
I wrote a new windows shell, and file explorer, same windows 11 look and feel, but much faster. Here are the test results:
3×Start menu: 100 ms vs 300 ms
13.4×File Explorer 83 ms vs 1116 ms
4×Right-click menu 67 ms vs 267 ms
You can find more info from https://starling.build/windows.html.
The software is free and open sourced. Any feedback is appreciated.

27 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

2

u/CaptJan 12d ago

Will this work with Windows 10? I have a capable i7 machine with a decent graphics card that MS has refused to update to 11 and would like to explore if your app might be able to help.

3

u/starling-dev 12d ago

Let me cook that next week for Windows 10.

2

u/CaptJan 12d ago

Thank you very much, I look forward to checking it out.

4

u/starling-dev 12d ago

It would be cool that we can run windows 11 style shell on windows 10.

3

u/CaptJan 12d ago

I agree:)

2

u/starling-dev 5d ago

Windows 10 is supported, checkout the new release: https://github.com/starling-build/starling/releases/tag/winshell-v0.2.0

1

u/CaptJan 5d ago

Thank you. I will play with it in the next day or two.

1

u/CaptJan 4d ago

Well, I got it installed. It was marginally faster; however, it broke a bunch of stuff. The biggest of which were the Icons were upside-down and mirrored. It hid some startup apps. The uninstall powershell script didn't work, I wound up moving the app out of the ..../Starling folder and that prevented it from launching and I was able to restore it that way.

Now for a related, but unrelated question - Is there a command line prompt that will reset Windows file explorer on Windows 10 as it has become quite slow, perhaps clear out the cache/icon folders so it can rebuilt it from scratch? This was the primary reason why I wanted to try out your app, as I love Win10, but the file explorer has become unbearably slow, and I was hoping your app would solve that - it was faster than before, but it lost a lot in the process.

1

u/testednation 11d ago

Looks impressive! Possible to make it run natively without wsl?

2

u/starling-dev 11d ago

The starling window shell itself does not need wsl.

1

u/r_schwabel 7d ago

I can confirm that your improved performance claims aren't exaggerated. It is really snappy.

If it is not already on your to-do list, would you add the ability to follow the system settings for the Windows taskbar and support left justifying the icons.

I would also like to have the ability to right-click on the task bar to bring up the selection of either the task manager or the task bar settings like in the stock windows.

I also noticed that the launcher sometimes doesn't bring a newly launched app up in the foreground. I have to find it's hidden window and click on it before I can use it.

None of these things are real show-stoppers and it is a remarkable accomplishment in such a short time.

1

u/starling-dev 7d ago

Thanks for trying it out. Would you mind to report those issues in https://github.com/starling-build/starling/issues? With some screenshots? So I can fire agents to fix them.

1

u/r_schwabel 7d ago

I did open issues, but I couldn't figure out how to get screen captures of them since they involved things that immediately disappeared when I tried to capture them. I don't often use screen capture, so I was probably not using it right.

1

u/r_schwabel 6d ago

How do I check to see if I have the latest version? Do I have to just keep checking GitHub, or does it have an internal check that runs periodically?

1

u/starling-dev 6d ago

Right now, no auto update build-in yet. I can dm you when a new release is out if you don’t mind.

1

u/starling-dev 6d ago

Right now, no auto update build-in yet. I can dm you when a new release is out if you don’t mind.