r/windows • u/TheLastREOSpeedwagon • 2d ago
General Question Can the Windows Server basic theme be installed on regular Windows?
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u/Laziness100 2d ago
Not to my knowledge. The Windows Server core installations from WS2012 onwards use this tjeme in place of the Windows 7 basic theme, which is buried under the hood on full installations of Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and all their successors. You'd need to unhook some styling resources from dwm.exe - the compositor, which handles animations, transparency effects and is a hard dependency for anything without Windows 7 compatibility in mind (including critical components like the new taskbar, action center, start menu, UWP/WinAppSDK apps among many other things).
It might be possible to pull of, but it would probably take a lot of effort while possibly breaking with updates or system maintenance/recovery operations.
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u/TheLastREOSpeedwagon 2d ago
Now I'll ask you one better, can the 7 basic theme be enabled in Windows 8/early 10. Because I remember using RDP sometimes you would see the basic theme for a split second and I can still see it when using legacy window-in-window programs like old Photoshop and Soulseek.
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u/Laziness100 2d ago
You could unhook resources from dwm.exe and it will fallback to the basic theme, but doing that already is problematic for the UWP platform. IIRC Windhawk has mods specifically for restoring the basic theme as well as separate fixes for dome issues, but like any kind of mod of soft patch, it's not guaranteed to wotk on subsequent versions of Windows.
Windows inside windows are a different story. They are drawn by the application itself, which is why it isn't composited by dwm.exe and retains the 7 basic theme (or the metro bssic theme you pictured above on WS core installations).
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u/FaultWinter3377 Windows 7 22h ago
Technically yes, but only on the window borders/title bar unless you get a custom visual style, and as long as you don’t want to use any Metro/UWP apps. Windows 8.1 would work better because the desktop mode is still essentially Windows 7. So if you boot to the desktop and set up a start menu like OpenShell, then yes the basic theme could be usable. In Windows 10 the taskbar and start would look wonky but would likely function.
It has to do with how DWM works. In Windows XP and earlier, it didn’t exist. In Vista and 7, enabling/disabling aero turned it on or off for the user. But in Windows 8, it was required in a system context to allow for the metro apps to work. Because of this, Microsoft hasn’t updated the parts of their themes that hold the non-DWM parts of the windows, which is why it still looks like the Windows 7 basic theme.
DWM composites windows… essentially an entire picture of every window is stored in memory regardless of whether it is visible on screen or not. But it only applies to top level windows.
The “basic” or non-DWM version stacks windows. The simplest way to think of this is that the only part stored in memory is what is visible on screen. Child windows (such as the Photoshop example) aren’t composited. I think this is because all buttons and menus and the like are technically child windows too… and the resources to composite all of those would be much higher. But there could be another reason, idk.
So the basic title bar/border is there, and technically can be enabled in any version of Windows if DWM can be disabled. But your mileage may vary.
And the buttons/menus etc won’t take on the Windows 7 style, as these are still being defined by the newer style. The reason for this is that each version of the OS since Windows Vista has one main visual style called aero.msstyles. This includes all the buttons and menus and stuff. But it also contains two other sections: one is the DWM section which contains the composited title bar and border, and is usually updated. The other is the basic version, which hasn’t been touched since Windows 7.
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u/hay_den9002 2d ago
Oooo, I would love to know.
I have seen it before when launching spore (windows 10)
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u/Savings_Art5944 Windows 10 2d ago
High contrast dark, and then tweak what you can, sometimes looks good.
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u/FaultWinter3377 Windows 7 2d ago
Should be possible. In fact, there is a theme called aerolite that comes with Windows. Apply this, then find a way to disable DWM. The best way I’ve found is to use a program that will disable DWM per app like BasicThemer, but there are some workarounds to completely delete DWM (but I would NOT recommend it unless you know what you are doing).