WindowMaker Development Resumes, Has First Release Since 2006 192
First time accepted submitter brad-x writes "A new team of developers has recently picked up development of WindowMaker, and they've added many new features, including improved support for the freedesktop standard menu layout and Mac OS X style application and window switching from the keyboard, culminating in a new release, 0.95.2. A basic changelog is available on the newly redesigned website."
Woooo! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Woooo! (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think that I first came to "Chips & Dips" in '96 or so, looking for Rob Malda's DockApps - and his Window Maker news.
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I can't remember, but it is likely I came here for the same reason. I wrote a patch for wm back then that added scale and tile options for the background, which was accepted (but rewritten). I have been using it for my vnc sessions for a long time. I get good response time with it. Still one of my favorite window managers, and I really like the color scheme.
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Come for WindowMaker, stay for the Duck Pins.
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I was an enlightenment junkie back then myself...
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Oh. Me, too. Between crashes. :-)
I liked that Rob ported his applets to E. DR .09 and .13 were the big ones, right?
Raster's vintage televisions, with animated luxo-lamps for the desktop selector were a high-point.
I was happy when I got this to compile and run on Solaris 7... I think it meant a million dependencies built for GNU tools and XFree libs.
Re:Woooo! (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, Window Maker is awesome as a light weight desktop system. 3
Aside from compatibility improvements, I say don't fix what isn't broken.
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It is, in my non-authoritative, non-exhaustive, and ultimately meaningless opinion, the most attractive of all the WMs. It also used to have a LOT of nice themes, maybe thousands, on Freshmeat. I don't know what happened to them, though.
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I've been using WindowMaker almost continuously since the 90's. In addition to be much more lightweight than any DE:
Relase? (Score:2)
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Did you mean release?
It's a more technically sophisticated method of distro - sharks with lasers.
and you thought they were only for weapons!
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Cocaine !
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Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually use WindowMaker on my personal dev-server-slash-tertiary-backup-desktop. It's an old piece of junk - Athlon 900 FTW! - but it still runs, and I don't have to worry about breaking anything important.
I've tried various window managers and desktop environments. KDE, even a 2.x release, is too slow. Same for GNOME. Most of the rest are too capability-light for me to seriously use. But WindowMaker hits the sweet spot of "runs fast on old crap" and "is actually usable".
This is the same machine I keep a copy of Firefox 2 on, since anything after that doesn't so much "run" as "walk".
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior to upgrading the hardware (2-3 years ago?), I had an old K6-III for my server, and Window Maker was awesome on it. I still use it for the VNC attachable desktop I have running in the background to keep all my projects open so I don't have to restart my apps each time I log in. I don't need anything that lightweight any more, but, it gets the job done well, and doesn't crap out in the VNC "box" like KDE or Gnome.
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Try NX. All you need is a working sshd and it's wayyyyy faster than VNC.
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Been using NX for years, I love it.
Wish there were some more updates to nomachine... are there any other clients out there that are more up to date?
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> and doesn't crap out in the VNC "box" like KDE or Gnome.
Xfce4 works quite well inside VNC too.
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Actually, it was a BSD box. And no, I don't claim I was hosting a lot of crap. I didn't claim I had a lot of memory. You just made a lot of assumptions. I used it to rip flac files, sever a few web pages (that only about a dozen people used), some development, and for some network file storage. A 386 would have been fine if I could get my hands on it, but the nice part about that system was the WHOLE computer used not much more energy than a modern "low energy" cpu used.
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Working smarter is good
Evolving is good
Staying stuck in 1996 is not
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Are you by chance a Gnome 3 developer?
Progress for the sake of progress alone, that's what you say, right?
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Pretty much everybody who's tried Gnome 3 thinks it's a gigantic pile of donkey shit. I can't think of a single person outside either canonical or the Gnome 3 dev team who would waste their time with that garbage.
Must have touched a nerve, I see. Get back to trying to stump your stupid Neo Freerunner, whatever the hell that is. Sounds Chinese anyway.
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If it ain't broke... don't fix it. If a machine that is not "cutting edge" (or dare I say "old") and it still runs, why throw it out?
My machines are not cutting edge by a long shot... but I tend to use things until they finally wear out, rather than the hamsters in the upgrade wheel, tossing out perfectly good hardware for the "next big thing"....
Thinks like Windowmaker and lightweight distros are giving purpose to old machines that are still very much useful. (And I've got a stack of games for my PC that r
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The CPU on that machine used 12.5W power.
I eventually upgraded to a quad core process, more because I wanted to do mulit-core software dev than any other reason. I got the lowest power quad core I could find - 45W. At that point, the CPU uses more power than the entirety of my old K6-III
So, until I needed to, yeah, sticking with the "90s tech" was good because it saved me energy, and I got NO advantage from upgrading.
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I also have a fondness for some of the more robust WM's in lieu of full blown desktops. I thought WMaker was neat, but Fluxbox is what I really enjoyed. I got lured away by compiz years ago, but I've been thinking of going back because Gnome/Ubuntu is imploding, and KDE is not to my taste. Anyway, check out Fluxbox, if you never did.
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e17 would be my desktop of choice... entirely modular, so if you just want a basic window manager with nothing else, you can have that, but if you prefer a full blown desktop environment, you can have that, too. What I have mine set up as is somewhere in between... I guess you could call it a desktop environment, in that there is a sort of taskbar/launcher thing and I have a clock and calendar widget loaded, and I have compositing effects turned on, but it's a far cry from what you see from Gnome or KDE the
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Try Bodhi Linux... they're a minimalist Ubu derivative, and e17 is the only officially supported DE. It's based on LTS, so as of this writing, some of the stuff might be a little outdated, but they maintain their own versions of a *lot* of software, in their own repos, so it is mostly up to date (and it's pretty much on the bleeding edge when it comes to E builds, with a new one usually every couple of weeks... the lead developer is very much in contact with the e17 developers, and is keeping it up to date)
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Have you tried Firefox 10? In terms of javascript, it leaves 2.x in the dust. It has also cleaned up long standing memory leaks.
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No, I'm still on 9.0.1 on my secondary backup desktop (primary desktop's in the shop). The 10 update's been downloaded, I just can't be assed to restart. Problem is, anything after 3.0 seems to run very poorly on low-end devices. The new ones (post 4.0 - the 3.0 series was terrible for me) improve performance on high-end devices, but seem to use more than 384MB of memory.
To put it simply, new_machine(2.0) old_machine(9.0).
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LXDE is fine as a windows 95 clone, it's what I use on a recent piece of junk - VIA C7 1.8GHz. along with firefox 8 which has fast javascript and patched memory leaks. LXDE may feel boring, too conventional and gtk based, but that's you use nowadays if like me you weren't on linux in the good/bad old days, or if you're lazy.
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OT but I use Blackbox on all my headless servers as a VNC GUI when I need one for the same reasons; its functional and yet very fast with very low memory requirements. On the odd occasion when I need a remote GUI on a server, I can launch 'vncserver' with blackbox in the xstartup and know it will be ready almost instantly with nearly no impact on the server's performance.
Yay? (Score:5, Funny)
If you really want to make your modern operating system look antiquated, isn't it easier just to go back to doing everything from the command line?
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I thought doing everything from the command line makes one look like a sophisticated hacker...
In truth, though, I believe people made a mistake when they gave up the keyboard in favor of graphical trickery. If you take the time to cobble together a shadow of such a system, it becomes very clear that a keyboard-centric environment is one of the most superior modes by which to compute, because the keyboard is currently one of the most (if not the most) superior modes by which to communicate with a computer wh
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GUIs and CLIs are both tools like any other, and some tools are better suited at some tasks than others. I don't think either will go away, nor should they.
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The first suggestion was to use existing CLI utils, augmented with new CLI utils. (In fairness, there were some other ideas that did make it in and script-fu is similar in spirit to cli apps)
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Fair enough. I would place keyboard-centric as just another tool, however. It's good to have options.
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Except for the fact that the "graphical trickery" makes things like graphic design, non-linear video editing, and numerous other tasks far easier than a CLI would be? Just because your tasks are limited to things that a keyboard might be best at doesn't mean everyone does.
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Except for the fact that the "graphical trickery" makes things like graphic design, non-linear video editing, and numerous other tasks far easier than a CLI would be?
Well, maybe, but I think the pseudo-dispute arises more from things like all the time I find myself wasting with GUI tools that make me wade through several windows, each of which needs to be laboriously guided down through the directory tree, to do what could be done in 1/10 the time with a simple cp or mv or ... command. I've wasted a lot of my life on idiotic simple-minded tasks like that, which are fast and easy with a CLI, but achingly time-consuming in a GUI.
Not that I couldn't think of a quick an
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Then you must not do much of it at all then. Having to remember countless arcane keyboard combinations for things that can be more easily done graphically would be a pain in the ass. Again, you can wank to your keyboard only interfaces all you want if that's how you like to work. Most people don't.
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I personally do quite a bit of audio and video editing as a paid hobby, and 95% of the work I do can be done completely via the keyboard shortcuts built into the software.
Even for things I don't use often enough to memorize the shortcut to, It is generally faster to hit the shortcut for the menu it is under and then look at the item I want to get it's hotkey. (Firefox example: ALT+T for Tools, then P
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Let's sum up this post:
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The amount of misinterpretation/spin in your reply is astounding.
Yeah, but admit it: It was funny. I think that's what 19thNervousBreakdown (768619) was going for. I've already posted, so I'll just have to hope that someone with mod points will give him (her?) one or more.
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Like jc42 said, I was mostly playing it up to be funny. I know I didn't make a solid argument; I wasn't trying to.
That said, your your point about keyboards being the best is explicitly circular logic, which among its other flaws is what led me to "target" your post. You should lose the persecution complex, and investigate the poor arguments you've made. Communication is much more satisfying when you can do it effectively, and while a little ethos and pathos goes a long way when it surrounds a solid logos,
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*nods*
Have fun now, off ya go!
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I have yet to find a GUI that can replace good old Unix pipes for complex work. I can imagine someone developing a drag'n'drop development system like the old "Forest and Trees" software that works similarly but I can't see any benefit to doing so. As it stands now, I can do *anything* from a command-line and simply *lots* from a GUI. That's why I use lots of terminal windows in a GUI on my desktops ... best of both worlds.
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I even find myself repeateadly pressing F12 and wondering why nothing pops out when occasionaly using Windows.
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I remember an interview at this small company just shortly before I gave up looking for work (five years/thousands of resume's 15 interviews, NO job)! The 2001 class of romper room emptied into the conference room where the "interview" for a low level desktop support person was being held. The oldest kid asked me if I preferred "CLI's" and I replied no, I like my one button solutions to make life as easy as possible. I gathered that to be one of the "cool kids" you had to "like" "CLI's"!
I did NOT get th
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I've been using WindowMaker as my window manager since sometime during the nineties. I use it to keep open lots of xterms, a few emacs windows, Thunderbird, Firefox clearly assigned to virtual desktops. That's all I need for work. I tried using fluxbox, but after I had to do post-mortem debugger resuscitations one too many times, I found out that I don't need fluxbox's tabbed windows, and that stability easily is the most important issues for my "focussed window determination software". Every once in a w
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I swear to god, I read what you wrote and it's like I was reading my own words - well, except for the part about emacs ;-).
WindowMaker user since 1999 here, still using it on Ubuntu 11.10.
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The problem is, there aren't enough screenshots promoting the command line.
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Expo and Scale (Score:2)
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In a more perfect world there would be a protocol for compositors and window managers to communicate so you could implement such things in a single place instead of reimplementing it umpteen times in each environment :(
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Isn't this basically what xcompmgr and cairo-compmgr (despite their current apparently abandoned state) use?
Re:Expo and Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
xcompmgr was always just the demo/reference compositor... IIRC it had (still has?) memory leaks... cairo-compmgr almost works but for whatever reasons goes out to lunch whenever changing display settings (I might have a laptop and external monitor so that makes it really, really unusable for me).
Unfortunately things like Expose can't be implemented in an external compositor now (at least not in a flashy or particularly usable way)-- there's no way for the window manager to say "hey can you do this fancy animation crap for me". AFAICT there is only a window property that communicates the translucency level of a window available. The same goes for fancy iconization effects, graying out unfocused windows, wobbly dragging, etc.
And so every window manager ends up having to implement its own effects using its own internal protocol... it's a hard problem figuring out the needed common ground (especially when GNOME and KWin both appear to be actively divorcing themselves from X11). I've always wondered how hard it would be to at least make Compiz a library that other window managers could integrate (some construction needed) to gain compositing and effects... but I'd rather whine about how CLIM had a transformation and frame management protocol in 1995 that could do all of this without radical replumbing like X11 does ;)
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e17 has that. It's part of the "composite" module. Load it, and set up a binding to launch the pager... perhaps different names for it, but essentially the same effect. I have mine set up with edge bindings on the screen... I put the mouse in the bottom right, it launches the "scale pager", which is essentially an expo-like desktop switcher. I put it in the top left, it launches scale for all windows on the current desktop, and bottom left is bound to scale for all desktops.
Surprisingly light on resources,
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Thanks for the link !
I tried e17 ages ago and it was one of my few favorite window managers. Never did spend any time configuring it but your posts make me want to check that out.
Nice to see we have some choices!
* Ubuntu -> Gnome
* Kubuntu -> KDE
* Bodhi -> Enlightenment
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I was wondering about this. Isn't it possible to have a complete desktop environment based on GNUSTEP, w/o having it sit over either X or Wayland, but just have it run on the OS - be it Linux, BSD, Minix or Hurd - just like OS-X does? NEXTSTEP used to use Display Postscript - what does OS-X use? Can't something like that be used in making this GNUSTEP DE?
As an aside, I've seen GNOME 3.3 being modified to look like OS-X in Comice-OS (an Ubuntu based distro), but is the effect the same as GNUSTEP, or is
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OS X uses Display PDF.
And, yes, there have been some GNUStep OS attempts using the Linux kernel, but none of them ever gained traction and now all are badly out of date.
WindowMaker is awesome. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is WindowMaker still relevant? (Score:4, Interesting)
I never "got" WindowMaker. I gather it was good back in the day, when docks were kind of a special feature. But these days even Fluxbox has support for dock apps. So why WindowMaker?
Re:Is WindowMaker still relevant? (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes all you want is a window manager. You don't need an integrated file manager, dvd burner or media player. WindowMaker is tremendously fast, stable and memory efficient.
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Indeed. I actually can't wait to try dropping KDE for Window Maker once again. BTW, did they revert the name or something, to remove the space again? I haven't RTFA yet.
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The WindowMaker look and UI (being NeXTSTEP and not some hacker's idea) is pretty good.
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I played with Windowmaker back in the day. It didn't seem particularly special to me. I think I particularly hated that awful paperclip in the corner. When Blackbox came out, I was all over that. It was fast, spartan, easy to configure, and supported dock apps.
What I'm really asking here is what's the actual benefit of doing things the NeXTSTEP way? I don't get it.
Re:Is WindowMaker still relevant? (Score:4, Informative)
What I'm really asking here is what's the actual benefit of doing things the NeXTSTEP way? I don't get it.
The NeXTStep dock keeps things that you fix to one place in the same place so you can use muscle memory to find them, whereas when it was remade for OSX it was designed to prioritize looks and so it wanders around the display. It has folders, which is a cool thing for a dock to have, and which was taken out for OSX. It's nothing you can't get with other docks, but it's sensible by default and at the time it was pretty groundbreaking.
One release in 6 years? (Score:4, Funny)
(Yes that was a sex joke)
cool (Score:2)
WindowMaker (now Window Maker) was the first X11 window manager I liked, after having used CDE (shudder), fvwm95 (double shudder), bowman, and AfterStep.
Congratulations and thanks to everyone involved.
They will definitely have a niche.... (Score:4, Interesting)
With a lot of people unhappy with the direction Gnome 3 and Unity are going. WindowMaker is a nice light window manager. It's what I use to use until active development stopped. I will look at it again for sure.
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The only problem is those people are anti-change. So a *new* release of WindowMaker won't work for them either.
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Or they just happen to disagree with you on what changes are actually beneficial and which are just needless churn so some UI designer has something to do?
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No. I'm pretty sure you're describing the sort of person who would fork a window manager and make it work for them. I'm describing the people who want computing to have frozen in time. The people whom Gnome 3 will never work for because it will never exactly replicate twm.
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And seriously "so some UI designer has something to do"? You find that the open source community has too many UI designers? Because I find the exact opposite to be true.
wrong (Score:4, Funny)
No this would be the second release since 2006. 0.95.1 was released 2.5 weeks ago.
Sweet!! (Score:3)
I've missed the elegance and flexibility of Windowmaker and have always wished that it had stayed current. Looking forward to having a great way forward vs. that unity garbage!!
development has been going of for a while now (Score:3)
i've been following the development for more than a year. i've even contributed a fix for a null pointer exception on the menu editor.
the only news for me is to see it back on the news. which is a great thing in the sense that it'd bring awareness to this great desktop manager.
i've tried using KDE, gnome, several *boxen to name a few, but i always go back to windowmaker.
the killer featuer to me is the automatic cascading of new windows. i often need to open more than a dozen terminal windows to do my job, and having them cascaded across several virtual desktops is a helluva lot more eficient than any other method (and no, tabs don't work for my workflow)
Next up: Blackbox (Score:3)
WindowMaker has a special place in my heart, right next to BlackBox [sourceforge.net]. I still look at them and go "cool".
I hope someone revitalizes BlackBox, too. It was just plain neat.
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As I posted elsewhere in this story, I still use Blackbox regularly. Its fast and simple and works very well for what it is -- and the menu configuration is quite simple too. The only WM I miss using regularly is Enlightenment -- I haven't tried a release in over a year but back on 0.95 and 0.96 I was really thrilled with my GUI in a way that I haven't been since. Here's hoping 1.00 lands before we leave this rock ;-)
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Have you tried Fluxbox? It's a fine modern alternative to BlackBox.
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If you don't want the dock, why bother with WindowMaker in the first place?
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What!? Blackbox has to be the single most forked window manager of all time...
Try:
Openbox
Fluxbox
Hackedbox
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/RelatedProjects [sourceforge.net]
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
what do the little squares do? (Score:2)
I remember using afterstep on damn small linux and found the little squares confusing, esp. when launching an app resulted in twice the little squares, one of which seemingly functioned as a task bar button. maybe the point it for it to look cool. well, I liked it better than OSX.
Yay! (Score:2)
Yay! I've always *loved* Windowmaker.
I've used it for years! (Score:2)
I was and still am a fan of WindowMaker, for all the reasons others have given. Lately I've switched to GNOME because I find myself constantly mounting thumb drives and DVDs, etc. In the old days there was a wmmount app for the dock that did this, and you set up your fstab so the mount points were all defined. These days I don't configure fstab. I'll have multiple USB drives plugged in and GNOME will just assign the mount point a name based on the volume label and mount them. If WindowMaker could do th
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You could use Window Maker and GNOME together. It is not difficult to set up. I have been using them together for years.
wmfire (Score:2)
I love WindowMaker. Monitors are square, therefore my persistent icons and helper apps should be square also. It's the best way to manage desktop real estate. And it's lightening fast. I'm very gracious that the project continues on.
wmtop, wmblob, wmcalclock, wmjazz, wmbinclock, wmchess, wmcube, wmtetris, wmgrav, I can't get enough!
Now, if only I could find a version of `wmfire` that actually works, I'd be 100x more productive!
Window Maker Live ISO (Score:4, Informative)
There is a project on sourceforge to remaster a standard Ubuntu 11.04 ISO image into a Window Maker Live ISO. It is based on a small scripting framework which relies on the Ubuntu Customization Kit for the creation of a working Live CD, and has the very latest Window Maker 0.95.2 as the only and default graphical user interface. It is also very preconfigured, so that one is able to just start using it already at first login.
The project is currently hosted at sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive [sourceforge.net] and also provides some ready made live ISO torrents for interested people who don't want to have to remaster an Ubuntu ISO image on their own. Any feedback and possibly even contributions are very welcome.
Does Happy Dance (Score:2)
I use KDE 3.5 for day-to-day but always install WM as a backup.
Also rocks for VNC sessions.
I am very happy to see someone take up development of Old Reliable again! Huzzah! Thank you!
Re:1990 Called (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nooooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Window Maker has had pretty bad multi-display support, when I got a new laptop a summer or two ago I looked for replacements and discovered ... Sawfish is alive too [wikia.com]. I'm using it now with xfce-panel and gnome-session (2.x since 3.x hates me) and it's pretty tolerable (supports all of the new window hints and session management stuff ... giving me something that's almost as reliable as what I had with Window Maker a decade ago). I really, really miss the dockapps [unknownlamer.org] though... the network and cpu monitors available nowadays blow and I've never really gotten over now having a dock app to control my music player ("media keys" get the job done but you get used to doing things a certain way when you've done them that way for a decade and all).
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Except Window Maker predates Mac OS X...
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Wow... someone pissed in YOUR post-toasties, didn't they? Take a pill, and realize that on matters of taste, there is no argument... if someone thinks Gnome 3 is shit and bloated (it is, I've got proof) that doesn't mean the $4000 you spent on an overpriced Alienware machine because daddy sued another person into oblivion is now officially worthless. I mean, he'll sue another grandmother raising her grandkids and you can afford the Alienware SUX 5000, complete with alien-shaped penis on the side... I'm sure