Slashdot Mirror

So if Linux has a feature, Windows can't?

Nobody said that Windows can't have a feature. GP's point was that Microsoft shouldn't get any accolades for implementing something that has been available, depending on configuration and DE, in Linux for over a decade. You don't get a blue ribbon for catching up to where the rest of the racers have already been for some time.

Also, Microsoft has a very very long way to go to catch up to the customization that GTK and KDE have had for decades. That hideous blinding white was one of the reasons I switched away from Windows in the first place.

Plus, this is more than just the file explorer, it's ANY application.

Fluxbox has had this for a very long time. (I used fluxbox for years).
But why use tabs for organization if you could have your window manager (i.e. Awesome, i3) handle the arrangement for you automatically instead?

Hope you're not running KDE on it .. I personally recommend fluxbox http://fluxbox.org/

Depends on what you do with the Linux install, which distro, etc.

A bog-standard Ubuntu install with all the bells and whistles will suck down the battery just as fast as Windows. However, a carefully tuned kernel and a leaner GUI stack (say, something like the old Fluxbox)? You'd have something that really sips power when compared to windows.

Maybe the younger generation just plain forgot that Linux can be customized and stripped for better performance and battery life?

I use Fluxbox. It's lightweight, fast and does everything I need it to.

Fluxbox is, to put it mildly, more awesome than Indian Motorcycles, Sean Connery, Jimi Hendrix and Six Flags combined. ...In terms of linux window managers, that is...

Personally I dislike windows (GUI) servers. The GUI seems to hog to much resources that's really not needed. On my Linux servers I still use Fluxbox as a GUI when needed.

http://fluxbox.org/

If you need a windows replacement, that looks exactly like and functions exactly like windows, you can go to...
a. the store
b. the piratebay

Seriously, fluxbox has everything under right click, and it's easily and fully customizable, and it's pretty lightweight, those are my big 2 arguments for it, besides its had transparency for like a decade lol.

Fluxbox is alive and well: http://fluxbox.org/news/

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

The problem is that the default Ubuntu GNOME window manager is trying to emulate Windows, but it's different, so they think it's going to be like Windows, but are surprised when "Hey, this doesn't work like it does on XP!" You need to give them something better than a Windows UI clone. You're one "apt-get" away from Unix-style WMs available for Ubuntu like AfterStep, FVWM, Enlightenment, or FluxBox. Getting accustomed to classic X window managers (not "I'm copying Windows" window managers) will not only show them "We're not on Windows anymore," but require them to see that there's more to the computing world than Windows.

Imagine you woke up one morning and found yourself in China. It's different, but you know it's different. If people in China act differently or have different customs, the language is different, places have different names, someone can just explain that you're in China, and even if you didn't know a thing about China, you would know that it's a foreign country and you need to learn some new things. New Linux users would understand it better, too. "I'm on Linux, things are different. This makes perfect sense. Why should Linux be exactly like Windows? VHS and Betamax are different, British cars are different, Linux is different too." Now if you suddenly woke up in a place that looked at first glance just like America (assuming you're American), and Wal-Mart becomes the most expensive store, people speak backwards Esperanto, and drive on the left side of the road, you would be confused, and maybe a little scared, wondering why these familiar-looking things suddenly act so strangely. It's the same thing with GNOME.

GNOME gives a false sense of familiarity, which would tend to scare users away. If users say that "Linux" is scary, it's probably because GNOME doesn't act how they expect. They wouldn't even mention something like AfterStep, because they probably don't even know about AfterStep OR know that the window manager could be easily replaced. There's nothing "automagic" about Windows. Windows takes just as much time to learn as any of these, and Windows is so 1995, anyway.
AfterStep
OpenWindows
Enlightenment
WindowMaker
FluxBox
FVWM
Your users (I'm guessing) probably never used anything except for Windows. Maybe the reason why they never got interested in computers is because of the unintuitive Windows 95 interface. Maybe they'd find one of these more intuitive.

or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!

Here you go.

Fluxbox lets you do something that looks similar (screenshot with weird theme here... some programs I use run both an xterm and a separate GUI, so I can use the feature to keep the two windows together.

Yeah, it's nice. I've been doing it so long in flux that I forgot that more commonplace window managers don't have it, and that it might be considered an interesting idea worthy of a front-page Slashdot article. Well, we don't really have to wonder about the usefulness of such a feature since it's been available so long: it is useful. I don't think it's "the next big thing" since I doubt casual computer users would take advantage of it, but it's a godsend for power users who never restart their machines and always have a gazillion windows open. After workspaces, it's the most important feature for effective window management IMO--even better than Expose-style task-switching.

Fluxbox lets you do something that looks similar (screenshot with weird theme here... some programs I use run both an xterm and a separate GUI, so I can use the feature to keep the two windows together.

Are you a KDE or Gnome user? For me it's Xfce or fluxbox, less is more .. :)

I have a laptop I bought in April, 4GB RAM, and Vista (preinstalled) has always just been obscenely slow when doing anything like logging in, switching users, etc. Absolutely ridiculous.

No, you bought 1 GB RAM but paid for 4. Windows can only use 3 GB and Windows Vista wastes more than 2 GB by itself. That leaves you with 1 GB. Why not use all 4 GB RAM or get turbo speed by swapping DEs.

* It's fast. Very fast.
* It feels clean and simple.
* Looks very good.
* Very customisable.
* Keyboard shortcuts for just about anything!
* Just about everything can be controlled or configured from the command prompt.

Apart from that last point, the same could be said about fluxbox.

I myself migrated from E to fluxbox a few months ago, and found it to have that same no-frills attitude. (Or rather, just-the-frills-you-want-and-nothing-else.) From what I gather, Blackbox and its offspring appear to have filled the void left by E16 rotting away and E17 never releasing.

On Linux, fluxbox supports tabs and is nice and fast.

On Windows, I am not too sure about shell replacements that support multi-tabs. The only one i know is litestep and i don't think it has tab support unfortunately. Let me know if you find anything...

Well I can't imagine it would be screaming fast, though there is little technical information on the Sugar GUI. It would really be good to see even a simple comparison vs fluxbox or something similar. Fluxbox ran nicely on a 333 MHz PII w/128MB of RAM that I used to have. However, we had in the early 80's reasonably fast, if simple, GUIs that ran in <32 KB of RAM on 8-bit 1 MHz CPUs, so even smaller is possible.

The lightweight fvwm and other window managers are definitely simple enough, the question remains can the be made all simple, candy-looking. Again, though, what are the requirements for Sugar and how does it compare?

Bah. Real men use Fluxbox.

I don't get it. Mostly. I do get the one Font manager I'm seeing on one screenshot. Looks like it's using some *Step/*Maker/*Box WM toolkit. Anyone with more details on that? If this is their baby, then they desever big kudos for that alone. Font management still is underrepresented in the Linux world.

However the rest just looks like an inconsistent WMaker/*Step theme with an XFCE bar at the left. Or is there more to it than meets the eye? Some underlying feature laden super framework that will make this WM the new fluxbox? The last WM hype I remember was fluxbox - it introduced some cool new features and effectively displayed that there is room for improvement in the WM space (and that WM project websites needn't look like a pile of shit). Thus Fluxbox is my prime choice for small-footprint WMs.

What's with this one that could make it the new fluxbox? Maybe someone with the project could provide some insight on it?

I recently had an experience on how certain aspects of opensource software development work, and work together incredibly well.

I have been running Gentoo Linux as my sole operating system for over a year, I do not even own a copy of Windows. The system is used for development and general desktop computing stuff. Over time I have developed my own customisations and configurations that suit my way of working. Specifically I have a fluxbox setup with Xorg to run on a dual head display thanks to xinerama and nvidia TwinView. This has been working like a dream for me.

Recently however I realised that I wanted a specific user interface optimisation. I like to make use of having 2 monitors the screen real estate, so I have a web browser open and maximised on one monitor and my editor where I code, maximised on the other, along with an xterm running my test harness. Recently though, I realised that I spent far too long cycling (alt-tabbing) through windows on the other monitor, when I knew that the window I wanted was on my current monitor, it just didn't have focus.

So I logged into the #fluxbox irc channel, and I asked if it was possible to create a keypress (e.g. CTRL-TAB) to restrict window cycling to the monitor with the active window on it. Within 5 minutes, of my asking one of the fluxbox developers (_markt?) had prepared me a patch. All I needed to do, was to copy a different ebuild for fluxbox into my portage overlay and add a single line to patch the source. This ebuild was then set to download the fluxbox source straight from the current development branch apply the patch and install it onto my system. This included adding in an option to my display managers configuration which would allow me to select between my modified fluxbox, (normal) fluxbox, kde, gnome etc...

In short the gentoo portage system is tailor made for opensource, and it makes it incredibly easy for users and developers to support. This coupled with Internet Relay Chat allowing users and developers to easily request and test new features make for a powerful system. Not to mention the use of traditional unix patch tools, version control (svn/cvs) and a bit of webspace to facilitate file transfer.

You can have a desktop linux NOW. Fetch a modern commercial distro (http://www.ubuntu.com/>Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc) or any of the free ones and you'll have an excellent desktop with little issues, if any.

    The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
    You have a wide choice of desktops and window and managers, and there's a lot of excellent software for them. A linux desktop is useable today, and by anyone - i had Ubuntu on a desktop for a while and my mother, who's 'computer-imparied' had zero issues using it. Besides being unable to find the blue E icon ;)

I did the same thing as you, but replace gnome with Fluxbox ;-).

It's the same deal.. less clutter, less eye candy, more productivity, just to an even greater extent.

It used to be that KDE was horribly bloated, but GNOME is no longer a lightweight alternative. Of course there are less resource-intensive desktops {my favourite, which I will be using in my own distro, is WindowMaker}...

Fluxbox is pretty slick too. That's what I use on my older machines with fewer resources. It's lightweight, like blackbox, but a bit shinier and just as tweakable.

I've been thinking about this for over 2 years.
But I've never publicized or implemented it though :(

(It would be based on FluxBox .. so all the DHTML would be there, oh and it would work on Konqueror/Opera/Firefox/IE)

The desktop menu would be translucent (perhaps use an IFrame for IE but PNG for the rest).

And you would get all the little things like calendar, notes, email, and sessions would be saved on a cookie.

When I realized the utter complexity (and in a way futility) of the task .. I just kept procrastinating.

Stuff like that is good to do if you have a LOT of free time in your hands (or people don't keep giving you deadlines).

Oh and then there was GrannyOS (another vapourware) that I sometimes dream about doing.

IF you don't act on an idea soon, the Unconscious will tip someone else.

PS: If anyone wants to have a go at the Javascript Desktop OS - contact me, 2 people are easier. I got a fake "boot-up" script working
(Detecting this .... [ok], Detecting that ... [ok] like PLD-Linux booting up)

A UI without drop shadows? It's incredibly fast and efficient? That sounds to me an awful lot like Window Maker, Openbox, Fluxbox, BlackBox, aewm, flwm, and about 1/2 million other window managers already available for Linux.

Fluxbox is great! Configuring can be done by editing text files! How lovely...

Check it out:
Fluxbox.org

There are plenty of usable window managers/desktop environments for UNIX.

A lite weight window manager that doesn't use GTK/KDE? you might want to try Flux Box.

The only real dependency it has is, as you said, GTK+. As for DEs not requiring a toolkit i'm not aware of any - there's a lot of assorted WMs though. You could try IceWM or Fluxbox, both very lightweight but excellent, well-featured window managers.

As for light DEs, look no further: XFCE is the best. And by far. Give it a shoot, it runs very well on an old PII of mine.

...it's the shit :)

Seriously, give it a whirl, specially if you're unenchanted with KDE/GNOME's last offerings or have older hardware and want to run something better looking than Fluxbox. XFCE has got an increased number of users since version 4, and with good reason. It's great.

The 4.2 version fixes a number of issues with the previous 4.x ones - namely, session management, better configuration options and interface polish, specially in stuff like the taskbar and the panel. The only thing i imagine lacking from XFCE are desktop icons, and they're scheduled for a future version.

I was using fluxbox until gnome-2.6 hit debian unstable couple of monts ago. I was curios how it would suit my tastes, it was perfect (I even use epiphany-browser now instead of firefox). The best part is that my girlfriend liked it more than her old windows so she also using linux/gnome now :)

I concurr. Sound worked correctly out of the box (the volume levels were zeroed, but that's nothing that aumix can't fix). X started up with my window manager of choice no problem at all. Happened in slack 9 on my laptop, happened with slack 10 on the desktop.

Verdict: Article is a troll. =)

No pesky taskbars, no desktop space used with icons, just pure, blazing fast hot keys and root menus. I love it simply because it's a window manager, and that's what it does, manage windows.

Nice response, applause!

I can pick it apart for days, but like you, I don't have that time ;-)
As you also mentioned, most of the points are ripped right from Apple. Apple are the ones that should get most of the desktop credit, for everything. Trashcan, taskbar, (do they have a start like button?), Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons (often in the same places to keep them standard.)

I agree KDE and GNOME are awful and do not innovate much at all and slow things down a lot.
I use Fluxbox which only uses the taskbar by default (a very bare one might I add). There are no 'start like buttons', a menu is brought up with a right click anywhere. It is very lean and very fast. and highly configurable. The only real downside is that configuring is not user friendly at all, this is being improved on as it is a very young project still.

Windows can not take any credit at all for the desktop environment as that strongly belongs to Apple. The best anyone can do is improve on it.

Mono was create to keep interoperability between operating systems, not to copy and be a 'me too'.
The Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons have been around forever in any windowed desktop and are not always in the same order. In TWM default you have close on the top left, minimize on the far right with no maximize. This style was around before Windows 3.1, saying anyone copied this from Windows is wrong.

Looking around at other peoples desktop screenshots, I see that most people are imitating OSX on the desktop and keeping away from looking anything like Windows. Even the use of desktop icons are diminishing and becoming less common.

Maybe not out-of-the box but you have two choices that I know of right now:

fbpager and fluxter.

But which efficient environments do modern distributions have? On Fedora Core 1 I see four options GNOME, KDE, TWM, and Failsafe Terminal. That is two times bloatware, and two times too primitive for the average user. Where is the nice stable configurable KDE or GNOME like environment, that will not use a lot of RAM and CPU power?

["KDE Sucks! GNOME rules!" (reverse, repeat)] (reverse, repeat)

Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.

Ha!

Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.

However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).

Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds ;)

timothy

Hush Technologies Epia M 10000 Mini ITX System
Flashy silver TFT Display with Sound (Sony or Samsung)
Classic Cherry Keyboard (no Multimedia Crapkeys!)
Logitech Dual Optical Mouse
Linux (Debian Woody R1)
Fluxbox with well configured, crap free right-click menu and 4 to 6 desktops
Kwrite (latest)
KMail (latest + maybe a deluxe Backend: well configured Exim with spamfilter gets mail for all users)
well configured Thunderbird with good theme, radial menu, tab extras + Flash MX Plugin
well configured OpenOffice 1.1 (+ Fonts)
Gimp 1.3
Turboprint (www.turboprint.de)
Gabber
X-Chat
Realplayer
O gle DVD Player
XMMS
Oggripper (www.thekompany.com)
Konsole or well configured Eterm
well configured GKrellm
Kohan:IS (www.transgaming.com)
Frozenbubble
Armagetron or GLTron
Heroes of Might and Magic III or Sid Meyers Alpha Centauri for the hardcore long-night gamers
Accounts for all users with access to the system in each ones favourite style-flavour and 4-6 virtual desktops. Plus half an hour of show and tell for each.
The system also should have ssh2 running for your quick remote help in emergencies.

Note that a proper professional configuration and instruction is worth a hundred times more to a normal user than the latest gadget in soft or hardware!
If your people really mean something to you give them a well configured system!!! And can't stress this enough. This of course is easiyer achieved on a Linux system. Check out the stuff, fiddle with it yourself and when you feel safe do a nice setup for your folks. Tell, show and prove them that they've got the latest and greatest what softwaretechnology has to offer, with reference grade quality usability. Don't forget: Configuration and Setup is King!
The system I buillt kicks any standard WinXP system up and down the street in speed, accessability, safety and ease of use! And exept for Turboprint Deluxe, Heroes and Alpha Centauri all the software is free!

I have tried out 17 window managers before settling on one that i liked (Fluxbox). If you standardize the wm, the next big thing will be hacks to over ride the default wm , and a windows like situation will ensue.

Yes, dropping alot of the baggage from X would be nice, but i dont thing that Y is the right idea.

1.4 will the last version of Mozilla released as a suite, after that the switch to separate browser, e-mail etc. applications will take place.

Oh, thank goodness! I've got a rather humble box right now, and for the most part, I'm fine, because I run minimalist software like Fluxbox. But Mozilla is a hog. I tried Phoenix, and it's nice... but it doesn't have all the fine-grained "power user" features of Mozilla that hardcore webheads like myself and many people on this site appreciate. (I know, it's designed this way.)

So a separate Mozilla browser, Mozilla mail client, etc., would be fantastic. Breaking out the IRC client would be nice too, as it's pretty kludgy. I think what we're seeing here is Mozilla getting back to the roots of the UNIX philosophy (one job, one tool), and away from the "suite" mentality from the days when Netscape was competing heavily with MS... and adding "integrated" bloat every step of the way.

Hmmm... I may have to give this a try. I've been using Fluxbox for awhile, but I like some of the features I see in the screenshots for Openbox.

You don't like tabs at the app level? How about at the window manager level?

...that Mr. Dvorak used a stock install of Red Hat 8, fiddled about with GNOME2, and drew his conclusions from there. If the guy had played with Window Maker or Fluxbox or Ion or my girlfriend's arse he wouldn't be so fucking biased.