Talk:LiteStep

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the LiteStep article.

Article policies
This article is part of WikiProject Free Software, an effort to create, expand, organize, and improve free software-related articles.
Start rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale
Low rated as Low-importance on the assessment scale
This article is within the scope of Computing WikiProject, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to computers and computing. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale
Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale

[edit] Notability

I think that the notability is established in that it's one of the oldest and most widely used shell replacements for Windows. As for sounding like an advertisement... well, yeah, the article does, but the notability is definitely there. -- 134.173.56.177 20:50, 11 June 2007 (UTC)


It's been several years since I've thought about the history of Litestep. Litestep was mentioned as well as featured on the Lockergnome mailing list several times. Litestep was also featured on Chris Pirillo's Des Moines, IA based weekly radio show in October 2001. It was mentioned on The Screensavers show on TechTV a couple times, and was given its own section of the show on day (I believe this was in 2004 or so. Due to TechTV not existing any more I doubt it's possible to find any reference to that specific show any more). It has been distributed on a few magazine cdrom's over the years and has received mention countless times.

It was well known by the general Windows power user populous, though it was definitely more popular around 1999 - 2003 than it is now. During this time there were numerous Litestep related web sites online. Most notable among those were the old floach.pimpin.net (no longer exists), ShellFront.org, Desktopian.org, Shell-Shocked, litestep.net, litestep.com (no longer exists), litestep.org (no longer exists), LS2k (no longer exists), blizzle.org (no longer exists), etc. I know that ShellFront was at one time seeing roughly 500000 individual visits a month (in 2004).

Litestep had its own official FAQ site, a documentation project, several official IRC channels, multiple mailing lists (http://wuzzle.org/list/litestep.php), and its own newsletter for a while. Litestep had a user count project once which, if I recall correctly, topped around 64000 users back in 2001. All of the skin/theme web sites had specific sections for Litestep themes. Some of them also had sections for Litestep modules. Themes.org, a desktop theme site for UNIX/Linux environments once hosted Litestep themes as its only Windows desktop section.

I understand that this is all largely unsubstantiated at the moment as I don't have the time to search back for articles and references that likely don't exist any more (since so many of them existed online seven or eight years ago) but I can easily go on and on.

Here is one site showing the prominence of Litestep over the years as a Windows desktop shell replacement: http://desktopian.org/shelltree.html

Joel Parker (rootrider), previous Editor of floach.pimpin.net, Founder/Editor/Owner of ShellFront.org, co-maintainer of Modulo, and Co-Editor of Litestep.net


I agree that the article reads. like an advertisement. However, some of the links that were present at the bottom of the page were relevant material, and I used them frequently to look for new shell themes. Why, exactly, were they removed? User:Jfoldmei 05:53EDT 6.12.2007

[edit] Timeline

Is Litestep still in development or has it officially ended? I understand that the Litestep Installer is no longer available.



Litestep is being officially developed through lsdev.org and #litestep on the freenode irc network. It has been active since 1997, though obviously not as much in the last few years. (Joel Parker) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.107.0.73 (talk) 04:53, 4 September 2007 (UTC)