Classic Shell: Forum

There are 3 actually. Metro Color Variations in the main post, and two pastel color variations. What other type of skins do you want? These are only the mods of the Metro skin. All other Classic Start Menu skins work on Windows 10. The built-in Smoked Glass skin and glyph icons suit the look of Windows 10 too. See this thread: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5220

On Windows 10, Classic Shell can set the Taskbar to be opaque, transparent without any blur, or glass. It can also adjust the Taskbar opacity from 0 to 100.

You can also make the Start Menu skin you are using - opaque, transparent or glass.

The default Metro skin is great. If you want to use a different skin, here are my recommended Classic Start Menu skins to use on Windows 10:

If you are using a glass taskbar or transparent taskbar without glass, the built-in "Windows Aero" skin looks great too. Or use the Winaero Skin: http://winaero.com/download.php?view.69 (It was designed for Windows 8.1 but works well on Windows 10 too with a transparent or glass taskbar). Adjust the taskbar opacity as you want from the "Windows 10 Settings" tab - whether you want to use glass or transparent (without glass). Then switch to the appropriate skin from the Skin tab. You can adjust the Start Menu glass opacity from the "Menu Look" tab or disable glass for the Winaero skin by unchecking "Enable menu glass" option so it uses plain transparency.

If you are using an opaque Taskbar, I modded this Metro-colors based skin for the Classic Start Menu with the following changes:

- Menu is opaque, left column is also colored like the Metro skin but now matches color of opaque taskbar
- Scrollbars are colored
- Glyph for All Programs and Shutdown button
- Main menu arrow similar to taskbar arrow
- Circular/round user picture are slightly bigger and partially outside the menu
- Skin uses dark colors on Windows 10, but same skin works well enough on Windows 8.1 too (IMHO)
- Light colors and Black text option for both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1
- Font is changed to Segoe UI Semibold for greater clarity
- Color scheme tweaked to use different colors for submenus
- There is a bug in the Windows 10 OS Color engine which sometimes, although very rarely, causes it to set the value of the $StartBackground color entirely different from your chosen $SystemAccent color. For this reason, this skin avoids the use of $StartBackground color on Windows 10.

Download and screenshot attached to this post:

Any feedback, suggestions or questions are welcome.

EDIT: Another light/pastel colors Start Menu skin for Windows 7 style available below. Scroll down to download it.

Note that any skin mods such as this one which are based on the Metro skin and depend on the Windows 8/Windows 10 color engine will not work on Windows 7.

beautiful skin , would love to have it transparent for windows8.1
can i download the blue one?

The download links are just above or below the screenshots. Click the link that says "Metro Color Variations.skin7" to download it. The color is not hard coded but rather it follows your system Metro color that you set in the Settings app.

I haven't updated them yet for transparency after the Windows 7 style supported transparency. Anyone else who wants to add that, go ahead and modify it.