Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative.
A lot of Linux (and Windows) users don't realize it, but the amount of work that independent developers put into making Windows 10 (and Windows 8) useful for non-consumer applications, like software development or CAD, is breathtaking. There's probably an order of magnitude more people involved in that than in FOSS desktop development right now. This obviously says a lot about Windows' popularity (which, post-Windows 2000, is actually not all that undeserved), but it also says a lot about just how astonishingly terrible some of its design decisions were. Twenty years ago, the kind of hackery that gave us Windows Blinds was considered amazing, but borderline useless, because who the hell needs that after the age of 16. Today, that kind of hackery is essential because who the hell can use that after the age of 16?
There has been no shortage of poorly-though UI changes on Linux, either, but you can at least avoid them there, because you have several choices of desktop environments.
(Edit: yes, I know about OpenShell. Its last bugfix was in August last year.)
> Classic Shell is no longer maintained. It works okay-ish today, but while it was still maintained, its developers had to regularly fix it, because it does rely on undocumented APIs. It's a pretty safe bet that it won't work in the 2020 release, and I'm not aware of any good alternative.
First of all they did continue it on a fork, but in any case, what's this obsession with recent commits? Lack of recent commits means broken software? Have you actually used Classic Shell? I've been using it for years on Windows 8 and 10 and it's been working fine on both despite the lack of maintenance. In my mind it didn't need any.
I have to use Windows on a few machines, so yes, I have "actually used Classic Shell", and have occasionally hit some of the bugs. I dug into one of them but it's been so long since I've written any Windows-related code that I can't really do anything useful anymore :(.
A lot of Linux (and Windows) users don't realize it, but the amount of work that independent developers put into making Windows 10 (and Windows 8) useful for non-consumer applications, like software development or CAD, is breathtaking. There's probably an order of magnitude more people involved in that than in FOSS desktop development right now. This obviously says a lot about Windows' popularity (which, post-Windows 2000, is actually not all that undeserved), but it also says a lot about just how astonishingly terrible some of its design decisions were. Twenty years ago, the kind of hackery that gave us Windows Blinds was considered amazing, but borderline useless, because who the hell needs that after the age of 16. Today, that kind of hackery is essential because who the hell can use that after the age of 16?
There has been no shortage of poorly-though UI changes on Linux, either, but you can at least avoid them there, because you have several choices of desktop environments.
(Edit: yes, I know about OpenShell. Its last bugfix was in August last year.)