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GNUStep GUI

Window Maker 0.80 Released 189

Posted by michael from the road-less-traveled dept.
An anonymous submitter points out that Window Maker, the window manager behind GNUStep, is now up to version 0.80. There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes, as well as a Changelog.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Window Maker 0.80 Released More

Window Maker 0.80 Released

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  • Improvements (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Gryftir ( 161058 )
    Maybe it's just me, and if so I apologize, but I have yet to see anything all that new from windowmaker.

    • Re:Improvements (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're right, but it's not a Windowmaker lack; if one needs tons of features there are KDE ang Gnome. I strongly hope that WMaker will never become fat and slow like these ones. Wmaker is a great wm, and definitely rocks once completed with the ultra-fast desktop manager ROX. [sourceforge.net]

      • Re:Improvements (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Window Maker is a window manager - it draws pretty borders around windows and lets you move them. KDE and GNOME are "desktop environments" -- an interapplication communication protocols and a collection of applications. Entirely different beasts.

      • Re:Improvements (Score:2, Informative)

        by UberLame ( 249268 )
        It is not appropriate to compare WindowMaker to GNOME (or KDE) since WindowMaker is a window manager, and GNOME is a desktop environment. It would be more appropriate to compare WindowMaker and Sawfish(the windowmanager that GNOME defaults to). Further, there is no reason that you can't use both, like having the gnome panels and desktop tools running, but using WindowMaker instead of Sawfish (which I have done in the past).

        Now, GNOME2 can be pretty sluggish. However, Sawfish itself seems to be reasonably fast (and low CPU usage) on my P2-200. I doubt that I would feel the same way about sawfish on a 486 (which I typically use WindowMaker or blackbox on for speed). The whole construction of sawfish fasinates me (it is basically written in lisp), and I keep wanting to find a way to integrate it with emacs and my other lisp programs). However, I haven't yet had the time to investigate making sawfish behave in a more WindowMaker like maner. It should be possible though.
  • ..I for one love the simplicity of WindowMaker - it was my WM of choice up until a year or so ago.. plus it always seemed to look really funky and unique when you got it skinned, and chucked in a few dockapps :)

    • All of these slim WMs are good for 486s, but on a 1ghz CPU, or even my 400mhz cpu, speed really isnt the issue because its fast enough. Then it comes down to which interface has the most features, and is the easiest to use.

      • i agree about ease-of-use, but not most-features. i've used various incarnations and combinations of gnome/enlightenment/sawfish/kde and liked them just fine, but always found myself coming back to afterstep/windowmaker/blackbox (the latter has been my wm of choice for about six months) no matter what machine i was running. i suspect it's because most-features and ease-of-use tend to work against each other.

        it's also probably related to how i work - the only thing i need is a window manager. i work in multiple terminal windows most times, and don't really care if i can create a link to a file on my desktop. most features like that i don't find useful, and they only offend my aesthetic sensibilities. i want root menus, window shading and multiple workspaces. anything else just gets in my way.

        so, i don't agree that the only thing keeping so many of us in wms (as opposed to environments) is how buff our machine is. good thing we've got choices.

      • ... And by "easiest to use" do you mean "most closely resembling Microsoft Windows, and/or the Macintosh"? It seems that is the sole criterion nowadays for judging ease of use on Linux.

        WindowMaker is easy enough, and I have quick access to all my favorite applications. By eschewing the feature-encrusted "desktop environments" I free up a heck of a lot of RAM and CPU cycles I can use for extra Mozilla windows, editor sessions, or for playing FlightGear. :)

  • umm (Score:2, Redundant)

    by diamondc ( 241058 )
    if this was a 1.0 release then for sure i'd probably be
    great to put the headline on the front page, but it's only
    at .80, with not THAT many improvements+features.
    • if this was a 1.0 release then for sure i'd probably be great to put the headline on the front page, but it's only at .80, with not THAT many improvements+features.

      Many of us have been using WM for quite some time (years). Just because it hasn't reached a trivial number revision doesn't mean it's not news worthy.

    • Re:umm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Khazunga ( 176423 )
      You obviously don't know WM. Windowmaker's version numbers grow veeeeeery slowly. True open-source fashion. Good stuff takes time to get right. Just like good wine. :-)

      And for all of you out there, who have also never tried windowmaker. Go, and take it out for a spin. Use it on your productivity desktop for a week. It's diferent, it takes time to get used to, but it pays. It never, ever stands in your way. You don't realise it's there, until you start something else by mistake and you miss yer'ol wm. That's the signature of good things!

      • Re:umm (Score:5, Informative)

        by Glytch ( 4881 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @09:42AM (#2754696)
        In a way, I wish I had never discovered Windowmaker. I've been spoiled by it too much. I'm too used to 0% cpu and 0% mem usage (as measured by a whole slew of cpu and mem meters) from my window manager. Every time I try out a new build of KDE or Gnome, I get to impatient and irritated and go right back to Windowmaker and DFM.

        Damn you, Alfredo Kojima! Damn you to hell! ;)

    • Re:umm (Score:2)

      by Otter ( 3800 )
      if this was a 1.0 release then for sure i'd probably be great to put the headline on the front page, but it's only at .80

      Why do people think something magic happens when a "1.0" gets slapped on some software? To the point where Evolution gets a story for its 0.99 release [slashdot.org] and another a month later for the 1.0 release [slashdot.org]? Like something magic happened with that extra 0.01.

      And like Khazunga said, WindowMaker is very stingy with version numbers. The 0.5 release was far more stable and complete than most 1.0 software, commercial or hobbyist.

      • Something magical usually does happen with a 1.0 release - API freeze. Not something particularly magical to the end users, but very useful to 3rd party developers.

  • Windowmaker (the UNIX way) vs KDE (Windows way) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bronster ( 13157 ) <slashdot@brong.net> on Thursday December 27, 2001 @08:26AM (#2754551) Homepage
    Now that I've put all the flamebait in the title...

    I'm quite impressed with KDE for general use, but damn is it slow to start and a little clunky to use. Even on a PIII/866 (current home box) with 512Mb memory, it's really not quick. There's also heaps of background tasks running providing 'services' to all those windows.

    The end result is a slick user experience (once you're logged in), but also a more Windows feel - cutesy icons everywhere, preferences almost-all-in-one-place-but-don't-try-anything-tri cky. Widgets that just don't fit right if you resize or change your fonts (I blame this on bad coding - both in Windows Apps and in KDE Apps). A help system that looks nice, but pops up half off the screen if you're on an 800x600 laptop.

    Enough about the off-topic stuff though, to Windowmaker.

    I started using Windowmaker all of a couple of years ago (boo, hiss - before that amiwm a lot (reminded me of the Amiga, and was good over networked X sessions because it's so light weight - looked good on grey dumb-terminals too) - also twm and fvwm on VNC sessions, and on my Sony NWS-3410 which sort of worked, just, as an X terminal on good days.

    Anyway, I've always been impressed with the simplicity of Windowmaker - dock apps have enough room to really show useful information (two wmbiff docks gives the 10 most commonly used mailboxes, mix in some fetchmail or isync and custom mutt command lines for each, and it's a one click mail solution). Back when I was using Linux as my primary desktop on the laptop, and Windows was just a VMware that got booted up for the occasional Word.doc, Windowmaker was a massive productivity boost over the others.

    I still think that if I was using a Linux desktop for work rather than experimentation and games (ksame here I come!), Windowmaker would plain let me get more work done - KDE has too much kruft. With a desktop menu with 3 options:

    rxvt

    * exit

    * save

    - yep, that's it, and a docked netscape (now Opera or Mozilla) launcher, what more does one need? Not much for programming, mail (the wmbiffs above) and web. Any other tools can be launched from a handy shell quicker than navigating those menus. Sure it costs in time to learn, but it pays off bigtime in productivity, and the speed and simplicity of the WM means it's never in your way.

    The improvement in Windowmaker I've enjoyed recently is that windows now automatically appear over blank bits of screen rather than over other windows. I really like that.

    P.S - my config has everything in the top right corner, docks going down, minimised icons going across - 4 virtual screens (Main,Work,Net(Web),Personal) - Netscape/Opera auto-launches on Screen3, Email on Screen2 or Screen4 depending on Mailbox, rxvt's on current screen. All is happy.
    • Careful.
      I was once flamed to high hell for even using KDE and windows in the same sentence. I also am a WM junkie and agree wholeheartedly with your post.

      Good job.
      • Careful.
        I was once flamed to high hell for even using KDE and windows in the same sentence

        Don't worry, I have thick skin, and the whole point of KDE (that I can see) is to create an environment that people who like Windows will be happy in - an integrated environment where everything works with everything else, and looks the same (while themeable of course).

        I think that's a great goal, and I know lots of people who enjoy using it already, and will enjoy it even more when there is more consistent support. Heck, I'll probably have a KDE boot on my machine for when I want that sort of thing, but WM or similar (blackbox looks nice too) are the way to go for seriously productive VI work.

        Oh shit, now the Emacs crowd will be flaming me too. Oops.

      • you forgot to mention the coolest part (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        wmflame, the system load monitor.

    • Hear hear (Score:3, Informative)

      by mav[LAG] ( 31387 )
      I've just upgraded to Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] 3.1 (which I can highly recommend by the way) and I was not looking forward to compiling and installing all of Gnome and/or KDE from scratch. I even got halfway through compiling Gnome 1.4 before I tripped over the fact that a key system library needs the new Gtk+ which doesn't want to run with many other Gtk+ apps I have. Anyway, out of curiosity I grabbed WindowMaker because it was a) small and b) needed very few dependencies - the basic image libraries I think was all and since I had those I needed nothing more.

      I'm not going elsewhere anytime soon. WM is fast, easily configurable and almost as pretty as E without chewing half the CPU. And to echo the sentiments of Bronster, it doesn't get in your way.
    • Well, I just run KDE 2 with its Windomaker/Step-style theme, and turn off a lot of the crap. ;-)

      (That's something that some people fail to grasp about KDE - it just defaults to looking vaguely ms-windows-like)

      Regarding the fonts, my fonts look lovely with KDE once I switched to using the antialiased ones - Qt and KDE can use the new XRENDER/Xft font subsystem of XFree86 these days.

      Another problem a lot of people have is that they are running their X Server at 75dpi, when in fact many modern displays are closer to 100-120dpi (mine's 120dpi...) - I've yet to see a distro configure this properly (for a quick fix, start X with the command line -dpi option set to something approximating your display, or configure it in your XF86Config file). Since correct font rendering depends on knowing the physical size of your display, most people end up with really tiny looking fonts, since their X server thinks the display has a lower DPI than it really has.

      Regarding the load time of KDE - one major problem has been traced to the inefficient way the standard dynamic linker loads C++ shared library files - a new release of the linker will fix that, and produces a huge improvement in C++-on-linux application startup times in general (this is not just a KDE problem). Coupled with the slowly-stabilising-to-de-facto-standard C++ ABI given to use by gcc 3.x, this should make linux C++ development easier and much less painful than it has been historically.

      Personally, I'm not all that fond of C++, but lots of people are, and lots of commercial/niche applications on Win32 and commercial proprietary unix are in C++, so making C++ on linux work better is definitely worthwhile.

      • Debian Testing gives you an option for that when you're setting up the X server, IIRC. I think Potato did too, but I'm not sure. Its been a long time since I installed Potato. Load time with the 2.2.2 Debian KDE packages has also dropped way down, even from 2.2.1. I think they may be using nonstandard compile options, but it runs very nicely. Even on "only" a P3/600 with 256 megs RAM. The fonts look nice, even without anti-aliasing.

        I find it far nicer than WM ever was. I can configure key bindings for just about everything. The config tool actually lets me configure everything about the environment, not a just few things (and for everything else, go to the config file).

        One thing that's always puzzled me about "Unix" style windowmanagers. If they're written for programmers, then why do they require you to remove your hands from the keyboard to do just about everything? Windows lets you use keyboard shortcuts for almost anything, and so does KDE. So why does everyone else require you to use the mouse?

      • Another problem a lot of people have is that they are running their X Server at 75dpi, when in fact many modern displays are closer to 100-120dpi (mine's 120dpi...)

        If I wanted nice large fonts, I'd run at 640x480 or 800x600. I think a lot of people use 75dpi fonts not because their display is 75dpi, but because they run high resolutions so they can get more on the screen.

        • Re:Windowmaker (the UNIX way) vs KDE (Windows way) (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          But that's a deeply silly way of having large fonts in this day and age.

          Basically, you're _much_ better off running at the highest pixel resolution that's available, and correctly setting your DPI so that you can use points (or even millimeters) to specify font sizes. - that way, if you want larger fonts, you set the font size to "16 points", and if you want smaller fonts, you set it to "6 points". On a 1600x1200 120 DPI display with antialiasing, a 6 point font is perfectly legible, and a 16 point font is absolutely beautiful. The "point" is a measure of the font's physical, real-world size, so correctly setting the DPI to a higher value on high DPI screens simply means that the font is the correct height on screen, but more legible.

          Basically, increasing the pixel resolution and correctly setting the DPI should increase the level-of-detail on-screen, while allowing a "10 point" font to be the same height, as measured with a ruler held up to your screen. In 640x480, you won't see the serifs clearly on "Times", but at 1600x1200, it'll be almost like reading a newspaper.

          People seem to screw this up a lot, but it is incredibly important for desktop publishing. I can hold a printed A4 sheet up to the screen on my system, and set the zoom factor in the word processor or in ghostscript to "natural size"/100%, and the sheet will be exactly the same size as it's on-screen representation.

          Windows used to screw this up, X Window System was designed not to screw it up, but then application coders got at it, Mac OS X (via display pdf/quartz) and NextSTEP (via display postscript) got it right.
      • Regarding the fonts, my fonts look lovely with KDE once I switched to using the antialiased ones - Qt and KDE can use the new XRENDER/Xft font subsystem of XFree86 these days.

        Once I got the xfs-xtt server working in Debian and talking to the X server ( not the most fun thing in itself ), I discovered that Konsole is absolutely horrific under antialiasing - font corruption leaves little bits of pixel-dust all over the screen, it's nearly unreadable, very jerky. Unfortunately, without switching back to rxvt for all terminal stuff, there's no easy way to avoid this that I can see.

        Yes, the antialised fonts look pretty, apart from the previously mentioned font-size and widget size problems that lead to things looking wrong (fonts running over the edges of their widgets and looking really messy). I guess this is either slack programming (it's a 12 point font, so give it n pixels rather than measuring the size of the text in the current font), or the font-rendering layer is reporting the wrong values for antialised text.

        Anyway, I'm sure I could be using KDE more sensibly - and indeed I could have chosen the 'look more like Windowmaker' choice - but if I wanted that, why not just use Windowmaker in the first place? KDE apps will still start their DCOP server and chat to each other just fine, and I have all the nice bits of Windowmaker like wmbiff (see my previous post about how useful that was).


    • KDE isnt all that quick thats why i dont use it.

      But enlightenment, has tons of good features, Its very fast, its very stable, Its my favorite.

      WMaker has nice features too, but when it comes to usability thats a completely diffrent story. Dont forget the ability to totally customize your interface, nothing compares to E. E even supports the latest features of Xrender, really I think E is cool.

      KDE is ok but its too much like Windows.

      Gnome is another Windows clone, just not as fancy as KDE.

    • I still think that if I was using a Linux desktop for work rather than experimentation and games (ksame here I come!), Windowmaker would plain let me get more work done - KDE has too much kruft.

      I hear you. My window manager nirvana has come in the form of Blackbox, which is even more minimalistic than Windowmaker. It replaces icons with blazing quick dynamic menus--an elegant solution once you get used to it. It also supports WM dock apps.

      • My window manager nirvana has come in the form of Blackbox

        I quite enjoyed it the couple of times I've played with it (when my laptop's hard disk was failing, and the KDE install was corrupted, but I couldn't be bothered cleaning it out - blackbox was the only other window manager that still worked ;)

        I'll have a play with it on the new SCSI 10,000rpm drive that's arriving later today - oh what fun.
    • You're comparing apples and oranges.

      KDE is a desktop and Windowmaker is a window manager. There is a big difference between the two. I know several people that use KDE on top of Windowmaker.

      Of all the window managers available, Windowmaker is one of the best (I would rank Blackbox slightly higher). But that's all it is, a window manager. It that's all you want, great! But some of us like a desktop. An integrated file manager is just damned useful (and a part of the original NeXTstep that Windowmaker/GNUstep copies). File associations are useful when done right (KDE gets them mostly right). Applications that work together are awesome.

      rxvt
      * exit
      * save
      - yep, that's it, and a docked netscape (now Opera or Mozilla) launcher, what more does one need?

      If that's all you need, go for it. Many days that's all I need. But sometimes I want more. To assume that what you want is what everyone else needs is the height of hubris.
      • If that's all you need, go for it. Many days that's all I need. But sometimes I want more. To assume that what you want is what everyone else needs is the height of hubris.

        Indeed - which is why I didn't ever say, or assume, that that's all that everyone needs. What I was saying is that compared to a KDE (complete managed desktop thingy) session, a Windowmaker sessions is lightweight, and doesn't get in my way.

        I can see that Blackbox has serious support too, and will certainly be evaluating it once I get my system back into multi-OS mode (would you believe I managed to wipe all my Windows partitions by having the wrong hard-disk plugged in when I format c:;format d:'d it. F$#&*(ing grr. Anyway, it's all coming back together now - not that anyone cares (or should) - my stupid mistake. Doh!

        File associations are difficult because it relys on .ext Windows style stuff - I think it's a lot better using Mac style RSRC forks, but that's just too difficult to cruft in - maybe Amiga style $filename.info (or more like .$filename.info would work - something that doesn't mean reading the start of every single file in the directory). I don't create text files with a .txt extention on Linux, and I don't intend to start. Sure using file(1) and magic helps, but it's expensive on scanning a directory.
  • There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes

    Actually, that's GNUS. After all, we mustn't ignore the 15 years of hard work by the GNU Project, which has made all existence possible.
  • and you're married you can call it widow-maker as well.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @09:10AM (#2754625)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • With all the talk lately about how cryptic and information-less the Linux kernel changelogs are, I just now noticed how refreshingly descriptive the WM changelogs are (and have always been).

  • the TERMINAL! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pegasus ( 13291 )
    GNUStep, all nice and shiny, but one most missing feature fron {Open|Next}Step is the terminal with the search capability! When are we going to get it?

  • Do we still need wsetfont, a small utility to configure fonts for various languages?

    Since font specification of Window Maker is based on Latin-1 and not internationalized, non-Latin-1 people need to invoke wsetfont to display our native language on the window titles.

    I tried to write a patch, like I wrote a patch for TWM, Sawfish, IceWM, and so on. (Thus, all we need to do is to set locale [i.e., LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL variable] for these window managers to handle i18n characters.) However, it was difficult to write a patch because Window Maker is made from two parts of core and widgets. I had no idea how to communicate the mode (XFontStruct mode or XFontSet mode) between the core and widgets. Are there anyone who are willing to try this problem?

    (I wonder how many non-Latin-1 people live in the Slashdot community.)

  • debian packages (Score:2, Informative)

    by datalife ( 17290 )
    There are already debian packages in
    unstable .. sweeet.

  • GNUStep is the future (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GNUStep is the future, forget KDE and GNOME, they are doomed by their implementation languages, not suitable for real OO programing, and the making of real components (KOM like COM is a hack). We already have an standard to follow (OpenStep), and the OSX applications can be backported. Once the GNUStep folks reach completion, then a real UNIX'y desktop will appear, and not another Windows-wannabe.
    • Bah. Real men don't strive for OpenStep, they strive for Genera (http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~moelle r/symbolics-info/symbolics.html).

      Now that was real programming.

      (OK, I confess, I've still haven't actually used it, since Symbolics machines are still worth quite a bit of money, and I can't afford the mid range machines, and the low end ones take more space/electricity than I can supply).
    • Sounds like the hurd argument.

      Let them eat cake.

  • thanks a lot folks for the effort!

    after using kde eversince, i shifted to windowmaker about an year ago! and it has grown on me. the shift was particularly because of the speed of kde, and me getting more comfortable with the bash prompt. and i havn't regretted the move at all.

    what i like in wm is 1. speed, 2. use of very minimum resources 3. minimalistic approach. you get just as much as you would require in a normal session. nothing more nothing less!

  • Re: WindowMaker 0.80.0 (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ralphj ( 164586 )
    Though I didn't really notice any big differences in WM 0.80.0, it's still good to see that development on this project is still going on. I've tried KDE and Gnome, and kinda liked them both, except for two things: speed and lightness. I'm now all the way back to WindowMaker, and runs brilliantly on my AMD380. My PC know feels faster than ever. For example, if a friend of mine tries to surf the net, rip a CD to mp3 s and plays music with Winamp on his 1GHz WinME machine, the responsiveness of the computer drops dramatically. On my machine, I can do the same things without a hassle, music never skips, etc.

    The only thing I miss when running WM, is a decent filemanager. For diskoperations, etc. I'm happily running MC in a terminal, but when I want to browse through a CD and open up photo's or mp3's "on the fly" I'm rather stuck. Konqueror and Nautilus are too heavy for me. Has anyone got a lighter alternative?
  • ...was the day i managed to actually crash it, while doing slightly dumb things with preferences. Up popped a dialog box informing me that Windowmaker had suffered a segmentation fault, and asking me if i would like it to restart itself. (and that is the ONLY time i ever managed to crash it, unlike, say, Enlightenment or Sawfish)

    That is the most graceful crash handling i have ever encountered. Beautiful! I've been a loyal user ever since.
    • And...how exactly is that different from our good friend:

      "General protection fault in module BLAHBLAH.DLL at address 0xFECA1234. Press Enter to terminate the application. Press Esc to return to the application. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart Windows"

      Hell, the only one of those options that'll get any useful result is the restart one...
      • The difference, is that when you click restart, your screen flickers for a half second and all of your windows return to exactly where they were as if nothing happened.

        Crashes in Window Maker (which are damn infrequent) make me wonder why they even bother to tell you that WM has crashed. A Window Maker crash has never scared me or caused me to lose more than 1 mouse click's productivity.


        -Peter

  • My Linux desktop experience dates back to RedHat 5.1, when Windowmaker and Afterstep were both part of the default install. While I always admired the NeXT (the cube is the coolest machine ever), I never had the chance to spend any time using one. I would like to know which WM is a closer approximation of Nextstep's GUI.

    For maximum compatability with current software, I have been using Gnome, Enlightenment with an OpenStep Theme, and a GTK OpenStep theme. All of that bloat really eats the resources. It would be nice to run a lighter WM and only call Gnome and KDE into memory as needed.

    I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based software?

    • Re:GTK vs Windowmaker vs AfterStep (Score:5, Informative)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @12:14PM (#2755162) Homepage
      I haven't used AfterStep in a while, but if it's still more or less similar to the 1.0-era AfterStep, then it's not really all that similar to NextStep.

      AfterStep began as a hack to FVWM 1.0 (originally, the dotfile format was almost identical) and thus is much more similar in terms of the way it behaves for the user to any other of the "old-school" window managers, with a dotfile to control behavior and little in the way of dynamic configuration or application management once you're in.
    • > I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based
      > software?

      As another poster remarked, the Qt & Gtk libraries run just fine under AfterStep, so at most all I have to do is type something like ``gcalc &" to run a given application. (The only Gtk app I still use is Electric Eyes, which I configured to launch from Wharf.)

      As for using some of the benefits Gnome offers behind the scenes, AS has a ``Gnome" module that handles all of that.

      Geoff

  • I'll admit to being a newbie to WMs. Most of my Linux work has been shell access only. But I'm trying to put together a experimental desktop system out of some spare parts and would like to have more than a single console available.

    I'd like to find a feature comparison of various popular WMs. I want to find which is the best WM for me. Does anyone know where I could find such a thing?

    I don't want to start a flamewar. This is an honest question. "Best" is a highly subjective term. But I'd like to find one that's best for me, because that's what matters.

    Some will probably answer with the question "Well what are you looking for in a WM?" so that they can make a recommendation. I don't know. That's why I'd like to find a good comparison. I might see a feature listed that I hadn't thought of. There are just too many WMs out there to do all the research myself. If push comes to shove I'll probably just pick one, install it, and use it. I'd prefer to make an informed decision.

  • Easter (Christmas?) Egg (Score:3, Informative)

    by ppetru ( 24677 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @11:27AM (#2754999) Homepage
    There's a nice surprise in WindowMaker, but you can only see it on the Christmas eve. Take your system date back to December 24, then run wmaker, right click on the desktop then pick "Info Panel" from the "Info" menu to see the egg.

    I only tested this with version 0.70 but I think it works with 0.80 too.
  • If you run X on a machine with 32 megs of ram and a small processor (P75+), you don't *NEED* to run TWM or Blackbox. Windowmaker runs quite nicely on a config that small, and has more features than both combined.

    Besides the small memory footprint Windowmaker also features icon sized programs that sit at the bottom of your screen, called "docapps" which are usually monitoring programs. They take up very little space, and can provide tons of operational information at a glance. If you run windowmaker check out WMMon, WMCalClock, WMNet and WMApm (if you have a laptop).
  • if you have microsoft windows, gnome or kde, go read and enjoy your new workstation... [linuks.mine.nu]
  • I moved from sawfish/GNOME to KDE to WindowMaker over the course of this year.

    It makes you realise what a pig KDE is in terms of resources. GNOME is faster than KDE but isn't anywhere near to KDE as far as 'Desktop Environment' functionality goes.

    WindowMaker needs a fair bit of work put in before all the icons/miniwindows for your apps behave as you want them .

    It is not immediately clear how to suppress multiple application icons for apps like xmms, or to override application icons supplied by the apps themselves like NEdit. Nor is it obvious how to actually dock an app like WMClock

    Once you figure this out (and i think 0.8 has some extra features in this department), i find WindowMaker to be the most useful desktop environment available on Linux.

    Currently, i use OS X primarily, and Window Maker absolutely blitzes it for speed, even on a lower-specced machine (P3-500 vs. G4-550) I also run Window Maker on XDarwin for X apps on the Powerbook.

    I don't quite know why a minor upgrade to this package warrants a Slashdot story, but i might as well take this opportunity to thank the WindowMaker team for making my computing life easier.
  • I have been an faithful WM follower since around 0.20. I still use it on all the slower machines. But I switched to Enlightenment (higly tuned to have the feel of WM) because of the missing support for Xinerama in WM.

    Today, most of the videocards come with dual monitor support. It's easy to put the old 14-15" next to the shiny new 17-19" one. But using WM in this setup is a pain ... Don't get me wrong - I love WM but after the 100th window that popped up half in a monitor half in the other and the 100th maximized window that took both display - I gave up.

    I want my Xinerama (and I don't have enough coding capabilities to add it myself and contribute the patch :( )
  • Does anyone care to share their experiences using KDE as the desktop environment and WindowMaker as the window manager? For example, how is it done and what visual elements of each show up on the screen? Does one still get to enjoy KDE's antialiasing of fonts under this method? Thanks :-)
  • It would be nice, if for things that require a filename (ie, appicon), the configuration boxes would be xdnd enabled. Put this in throughout the wm, and then I would have a truly integrated environment between a filemanager (ROX is the one I use) and windowmaker. X direct save would be an added bonus.

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