Slashdot Mirror

Openbox can "roll up" a window, a feature I don't want, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to remove it.

Wow. Really? Really?

http://openbox.org/wiki/Configuration#Theme

Yeah... having to read documentation and edit a plain text file. You'd have to be a genius to manage that.

I have yet to find a Linux desktop environment that doesn't have issues.

You know what the common link is between all of your experiences with different DEs?

You.

UNITY, the great DIVIDER :)

Anyway, Real Men use Xmonad, dwm or Ratpoison. Me? I'm a bit of a wimp, so I use Openbox.

Also, Compiz by itself is a surprisingly capable window manager, for all of you who like your jiggly windows and desktop cubes.

i'm a gnome user (in that i use the gnome panel[1] and most of the GUI apps i use are gnome) but i switched to the openbox window manager several years ago because the "standard" gnome window managers metacity and mutter absolutely suck. even worse than the software is the attitude ("design philosophy" if you want to be fancy) behind them - that taking away features is a Good Thing because users are too stupid to understand them and easily confused by choices.

this latest idiocy is just an extension of the initial practical reason i started using openbox - middle-click and right-click on the maximise button for vertical-only and horizontal-only maximise of a window. IIRC, after some argument a few years ago, the metacity devs agreed to add (or keep, i can't remember) the vert-max and horiz-max features, but refused to enable them via middle- or right- click on the max button....the ONLY way to access them is to manually configure the keyboard bindings to assign a key to them.

the gnome terminal, actually vte, also has an annoying broken-by-design bug of sending eight up/down arrow keys to the application running in the terminal when the scroll wheel is moved. the devs flat out refuse to acknowledge that this causes problems for programs like mutt and vi, and refuse to fix, and messes up middle-button pasting (because the scroll wheel is usually also the middle button, and it's almost impossible to click it without scrolling it a little at first) - even though several patches have been submitted over the years that the bug has been in the gnome bugzilla. because of this, i use mrxvt rather than gnome terminal - which, of course, has its own bugs but at least the dev doesn't suffer from the Gnome Developer Attitude Problem.

gnome has a lot of good software, but it also has a lot of rage-inducing idiocy like the above.

[1] the gnome panel annoys me too - buggy bloated crap. i've looked around for something to replace it with but haven't found one yet.

since a few years ago

http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page

You can basically copy your rc.xml. Which, on the topic of title bar buttons, has a "titleLayout" field which let's you define in what order the buttons and the title are in the title bar.

All these functions are already at your fingertips. ..At the keyboard. The mouse is the most overused peripheral of today's computing - a lot of Bad&Evil originates from windoze users too damn lazy to learn to type.

In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to use the mouse except for CAD work, text selection, perhaps choosing a specific widget from a messy form, and that's it. But in this world, keyboard functionality is being removed and castrated (ever seen those new 'ergonomic' (ie. unusable) keyboards with the insert/delete keys merged into one big delete key? damn it, i'm left-handed and thusly i use ctrl+ins/shift+ins for copy/paste (only in windows, that is, otherwise i prefer select/middleclick)).

With a well-configured window manager, you can move and resize and rearrange windows, using only the keyboard, in any way you want. (Openbox can do this.) Inherently, the keyboard is an immensely faster input device than the mouse - of course only for those who bothered to learn it. (In general, dumbing down computer interfaces for the computer illiterate seems to be a general and very sad trend, but let's not get into that.)

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.

Too bad that Openbox has already killed Fluxbox off, then.

Hey, I use ROX with openbox3. It does pretty much what you are requesting *shrug*

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.

Try Openbox3. It's blackbox on steroids.

what on earth are you talking about??? how in any way shape or form is shlashdot the biggest advocate of linux? how is linux window's main competition? for one thing, linux still has a smaller desktop usage percentage than apple. secondly, in the server market -- doesn't BSD have the upperhand? and third of all, slashdot has microsoft advertisements in their pages. this is not he future of my desktop. this is nopt he future of ANY desktop. thsi is the furture of crappy proprietary software that it mostly used for controlling the user's experience. if i want a different/better desktop i already got mine