I've had a long standing interest in developing an OS UI tailored to my needs and interests. When I was younger, I went crazy playing with the Stardock skinning tools for Windows. I loved developing my own window styles and layout ideas. Since then I've had an unscratchable itch.
- I'm not particularly interested in fiddling with the lower level kernel operations, just the presentational aspects. I've been considering some flavor of Linux.
- While I would love to have some basic integrated tools/applications that I create myself, I'm primarily interested in the presentations of basic windowing, toolbars, desktop, and file management.
- I don't want to be locked out from using existing applications, if possible. I, for example, have no interest in writing my own web browser, but having the ability to work existing tools into a design would be a major plus.
- My ideas are sometimes very visual in nature, so the ability to produce more complex transparency effects and unusual window shapes would be useful. More-or-less the ability to reproduce the graphic fidelity of current UI designs for OS X or Windows would be ideal.
- An OS flavor and tools that lets me start with a blank screen and work from the ground up or include basics are encouraged. The idea of a "desktop" in the traditional sense shouldn't be mandatory. Flexibility to do different things is important to me.
What I'm looking for:
I'm interested in what Linux/OS flavors might make sense, what tools / frameworks would be useful for accomplishing the task ( Qt seems to be a popular suggestion here ), and basic info on how / where one might start developing / testing such a UI. I'd also be interested reading about any "personal" UI's that people may have developed.
This is an interest far outside my normal development work, so as a disclaimer, forgive my naivete if I appear to be confused. Corrective insight welcomed.
I realize this is a big question, so thanks to those for taking the time to make suggestions.