I posted this on some discord servers but forgot to post here lol.. Anyway https://github.com/jmacato/VistaRenewed if you want to take a look at the code. Not ready yet for plug and play install.

I've always wanted to see Windows Vista's aero running in its full glory, without having to hunt down old hardware, and given that VM's have advanced over the years, it should've been more than possible to get that fancy effect running properly (VirtualBox tried but yeah...)

So when i saw https://blog.getutm.app/2026/introducing-triton-directx-11-driver-for-qemu/ I got the inspiration to try and port it to Vista's WDDM SDK. After a few weeks worth of debugging and much chagrin, i was reaalllly thrilled to see Aero alive again!

Then i when i was playing with it, i kinda wanted to have a more well-rounded experience with it, so i figured, wine can replace IE with gecko right? that's just replacing MSHTML afaik... then it hit me. CEF -> some shim that fakes MSHTML -> iexplore! And boy surely did it work!

The sidebar stuff was relatively easy given it's just a collection of small html + js widgets.

anyway thank you for listening in to my crappy TED talk! Hope you find this of use or something :)

Note: Made with AI-assistance. This is just for fun anyway :)