> I also recall this 3D shell where your desktop was basically like an first-person shooter, where there would be a literal desk with files that you could click on, a media wall that would display your photos and so on.

Was it Task Gallery from Microsoft Research?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-tas...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/332040.332482

I loved bb4win, and used whenever I wanted FAST (boy was it). I used Blackbox on FreeBSD for the longest time so it was nice to have similar experiences.

We used to have highly optimized C code. Now the freakin' start menu is a progressive web app that runs react components because even Microsoft hates developing in WinUI. Madness.