I'm a LS user for about 2 years. I've witnessed the birth of some standards and some modules and still think LS is the best shell replacement for Windows. Now on the horizont appears the next version of Windows and with it a new set of technologies:WinFS,WinFX,Avalon and Aero. These last two will take the space that LS has so well represent these years. I'm aware that Longhorn only will be shipped by late 2005/6 and by that date everything will be different but I'm curious about what the community thinks about this.
For those who don't know about the forthcomming here it is something interesting: http://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=653

M$ has never had a problem with the shell replacement community. In fact they like us very much...we breed programmers for them. Now they will make their quirky undocumented changes as always but we always come through with a fix for it...and if not we could prolly just call up MrJukes, Visi or Chaku.

Or geO. :)

I think I'd still prefer to go with the 2003std kernel and litestep as the shell than to move to longhorn.. Current dev builds of longhorn are kinda shakey and the eventual public release will undoubtedly be Brando-esque in its bloat-factor.

@DeViLbOi: What becomes MrJukes and Chaku ?

@inhaler: the 2003std kernel ???

"Current dev builds of longhorn are kinda shakey" well, yeah. that's because they're like PRE-ALPHA BUILDS. they're not SUPPOSED to be stable yet.

"the eventual public release will undoubtedly be Brando-esque in its bloat-factor" so was xp. just disable stuff. if you disable most of the graphical effects, it speeds up a helluva lot.