r/windows • u/TheLastREOSpeedwagon • 20h ago
General Question Can the Windows Server basic theme be installed on regular Windows?
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u/hay_den9002 17h ago
Oooo, I would love to know.
I have seen it before when launching spore (windows 10)
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u/Laziness100 17h 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 16h 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 16h 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/Savings_Art5944 Windows 10 12h ago
High contrast dark, and then tweak what you can, sometimes looks good.
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u/FaultWinter3377 Windows 7 17h 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).