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Has the Development of Window Managers Slowed?
al3x asks: "When I first got into Linux nearly five years ago, the new releases of competing window managers (like Blackbox, Enlightenment, Sawfish, etc.) were a constant thrill, and great strides were made with every release. I can't count the number of nights spent trying to get that sexy new E build to work, and what fun it was! But these days, window manager development seems to be stagnating. The last stable release of Enlightenment is from last year. Sawfish hasn't done much of anything in months, nor has Blackbox. WindowMaker had a recent update, but not with any exciting new features (it is rock solid, however). Now, verging from the paths of window manager favoritism or "they haven't been updated because they just work," why has development in this arena slowed to a crawl, and what's on the horizon?"
Becaue everyone is busy watching NASCAR and talking about it at
Desktop environments.
Don't know about you, but I'm still urgently awaiting the release of Enlightenment 0.17, so I can finally use a file manager for Linux that's not a Windows 95 look-alike, but doesn't look like Windows 3.1 either.
Could it be possible that yet-another-window-manager, just isn't a particularly interesting project to work on any more?
We've had the pre-cambrian explosion, time for the mass extinction.
One of the promising window managers that's (IMHO) up and coming is Golem, being developed by a friend of mine. It's very simple but all of its features are provided by fast plugins. This is kinda like Sawfish, but without the overhead of a Lisp interpreter. Anyone looking for a new WindowManager to try out (and develop on) ought to check it out!
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
I can't speak for all fo them, but AfterStep is undergoing a pretty big change, and as far as I know Enlightenment is getting a total rewrite. That'll slow down developement something fierce. Then ya look at some of the minimal ones, notably Blackbox and Sawfish, they both do what they were intended to do. new features aren't in the focus of some of the more minimalistic projects, so anything at this point is bug fixes. I don't know much about WindowMaker, but they could be working on a very new release, which could be in pre alpha states right now. Check the CVS of your favorites out and take a look, some of the code in the afterstep 1.9 is just great, but last time I checked, I still couldn't get it to compile completely.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
KDE today is as good as window manager as MS windows or Apple finder, Gnome is getting closer, WindowMaker is rock solid and is small and fast, as Kojima dreamt years ago.
Until someone comes with a unbelievable great idea, things will go slow for a while.
And since the window managers "market" (don't know if this word can be applied to open source) are stable now, only the best and most used WM (gnome, WindowMaker, KDE) sees any development.
What ? Me, worry ?
FIRST POST!!!
I think that this is primarily because desktop environments have taken over. The KDE folks must be hooked-up to caffeine IVs based on how fast they release updates and totally new applications. Ximian GNOME is also quite nice, and has a large following. Basically, "window managers" as we know them have been replaced by these more full-featured environments that are helping to bring Linux to the desktop.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I bet it's because of Rick Harney.. just a guess though.
Im not sure what you mean by lack of development of window managers, but have you looked at KDE
and how it is advancing much faster than anything else out there?
thanks for reading
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Perhaps because the economy sucks right now? I imagine more people are worried about their jobs and paying rent then developing a window manager that they aren't making any money off of (or very little)...
Either that or they are really busy watching pr0n...
.technomancer
.technomancer
The answer is obvious though - virtually all former window manager developers have given up XWindows to use Windows 2000. Or, have a job now and can't justify wasting time over an open source project.
It'll happen to you once you leave college and enter the real world.
I've been lurking on their devel mailing list (check out their project page) and E's progress has slowed because of the recent downturn the tech industry. Open source programmers need jobs too....
I've been following IceWM rather closely for the past year, and it's at 1.0.9 - released a week or so ago, IIRC.
Really, though, what features are there to add to window managers? If you add too many features, then you end up like Enlightenment, which IMO is more like a desktop environment than a window manager.
I was going for "First Plug" with this link but you beat me to it with your so-called "friend's" project. :(
the worst terrorist attack in history occured last month, and WW3 is starting today, and people in Afganistan are getting killed...and you're talking about the development of window managers!?! i'm sure the people who were crushed under 100 stories of steel would be very interested in window managers. or the people who are getting bombed now too.
my god,get your priorities straight!
I don't know what the problem is. I am still pretty satisfied with fvwm2. And some features you don't get in. e.g. KDE. Like the virtual desktop (FvwmPager) with the individual desktops actually being next to each other. Great for very large windows! And the switching mechanism (hit the border with the mouse) rocks!
I don't need all these graphical, slow and unintuitive menues. I am completely satisfied if I can add the shortcuts I need in 5 minutes to the pop up menues and have all the desktop space for my own use.
And I don't want to redo customization all the time. Basically I have had the same Fvwm2 configuration for years, with only small modifications. That means I can find everything very fast, because I know where things are!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
XFce.org -- mostly incremental improvements, as you'd expect from an aim of small and fast, but recently anti-aliased display is supported and a migration to the ROX filer is about to be completed.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
i agree that the big names have slowed =[ , but if you get a thrill from trying out new fun widgets (as I do as well) there have been some good ones suggested and I'll ad flwm(http://flwm.sourceforge.net/) to the list -fastest one I've ever seen. Also has a super-keen set of buttons to size windows and the title bars are sideways!
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Watch Fox News Channel.
Linda Vester is a hottie!
CNN suxx0rz
Here's why the mainstays for Linux development have ground to a halt:
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
2) Nobody is willing to think about doing anything different, more useful, or more ergonomic right now. The main driving force driving Linux UI development is "lets make it look like Windows!" which is a horrendously bad move. Instead of giving Linux its own face, its own appeal, and its own distinct look, we're playing Poor-Man's Explorer with X11. Instead of putting our own talents to work, making something useful for us, we're playing second fiddle to a third rate design by copying it.
Now, rather than purely bitching, here's what you can do about it:
Start at the ground up. Get ahold of the source of a weak windowmanager like fvwm, that has all the basic guts you need to work from. Ask yourself what makes sense to you as a user, NOT what makes sense because you've seen the same thing in Windows. Give Linux its own look. Try to avoid imitating other platforms. Build it because it makes sense to build, not because "Windows has it". The sheer number of things that Windows has wrong with its UI would require a completely separate article to discuss them in detail. Think about how to represent things differently. Is there a better way to represent the same information? Do you really want an OS that resembles a browser? Think, ask, and move. Learn, modify, and repeat.
Cheers, (and yes, Propaganda is still running..)
Bowie J. Poag
I think window manager developement has slowed because all of the newbies are finally starting to realize that nothing will ever touch the speed, effeciency, and flexability of fvwm2.
Hopefully.. there's only so much you can do with a window manager, and 50 different should be enough for everybody, so people can now work on improving desktop environments or applications.
I mean, really. WWIII is on the doorstep, and we're wanking about windows managers? Jaysus, people, getta grip on what's important!
[this message (C)2001 by KarmaWhore Unlimited.]
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
"I can't count the number of nights spent trying to get that sexy new E build to work, and what fun it was!"
And people wonder why Linux is (still) only for geeks!
This is such a ludicrous statement. I, like a lot of people, use my computer to do *stuff*, not just messing around trying to get it to work at all.
Development on window managers has slowed because: Despite all the gripes etc about Microsoft, their "window manager", while crude in some aspects, works. It just works when you install it. You don't have to mess around with editing config files and libs and all that. So why create new ones?
I recall installing drivers for my ati rage 128 a few months back:
Windows 98: 10 minutes
Xfree86: 4 full evenings
Linux will never be accepted by the mainstream until its developers realize that, to normal people, CONFIGURING YOUR WINDOW MANAGER is NOT FUN. It's infuriating. Most users just want to get on with whatever task they want to do.
Thank you.
...KDE & Gnome aren't window managers but desktop environnements.
And the finder is yet something else (I'll leave to
Mac users to explain exactly what that thing is). I
know this rebuttal is annoying but hey, can't compare
apple to orange as they say !
fvwm weak? It's the best window manager out there for speed, effeciency, and customizability. It's not a "desktop environement" if that's what you mean, but some of us don't want sluggish desktop environments taking up our screen real estate.
fvwm has one of the most mature code bases of any window manager around.
Know what you're talking about before you start pissing and moaning.
To anyone taking this guy seriously: don't waste your time responding. Instead, grab a brewsky, kick back, turn on the tube, and watch the unfolding progression of America's shiny brand new war!
Well what is happening is we are apon a kind of mental block, with window maker being stable and easy to manipulate, E being sleek and neat, kde and gnome being kind of a standerd and each having there own area of speciality. Afterstep being so configureable. We really have window managers for almost every type of hacker/computer user. Basically What more could you want?
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Would you prefer that we talked about terrorists, all the time, to the exclusion of all other subjects? Oh, wait... when I say it that way, the inherent silliness of the idea is a little too clear, isn't it? Sorry.
Sounds like it's time to check out ion: http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/. It's based on non-overlapping windows, made for easy keyboard navigation. Supports prefix keymaps so you can easily avoid key binding conflicts. Give it a try!
Does that include distros? Wouldn't the Linux community be so so tiny without them that no one would start such big projects in the first place?
I get the idea about not working on something when someone else is being paid mucho cash, but would you still bother if were asked to write a windowmanager for some other OS? One nowhere near as popular as Linux?
no text lameness filter blah blah
Go ahead, nail me as flamebait, but it is true.
The honeymoon with Linux is over. It hasn't changed the computing world. It hasn't made it to the desktop, nor has it changed the datacenter in any real way.
Windows XP has had more planning and forethought to it's User Interface than all Open Source windowmanagers COMBINED.
Most WMs suck.
If I want fast, TVWM
If I want stable, fvwm
If I want pretty, e
sawbox, alterstep, blackfish, kde, whatever has no use. If I want a desktop OS, I use windows. If I want a server, I use a real UNIX. Real UNIX already come with their own Desktop Environments. They work.
The reasons, I think, are twofold:
1) It's been done. You can find a window manager out there now that can do just about anything. There's not a lot of "Interesting" problem domain left.
2) There is no itch. My current window manager suits me fine. It does everything I want it to do. I don't really see the point of starting from scratch to code a new one. If I were going to fork a window manager, I'd start with the one that was closest to doing what I needed done.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Perhaps it's because, in the last several years, unix went from having a few small window managers, to having many... many wrote wm's just for fun...
Then.. things stabilized.... I mean, if you wanted to make a new wm. how do you compete with E? nothing is that sexy looking (or that bloated.. of course).
There are basically enough window managers already... there's nothing else you need.
You want a new release of E? Why? is it a car, where the manufacturer has to release a new model every year? Come on.. they only do that to try to make you think your car is 'old'.
Well from what I can understand Enlightenment is becoming a desktop shell, I really look forward to that. E17 will be the most eye-candy anyone can expect within the next year or so. But then we have to look towards the next step and that is 3d window managers and the 3d hardware market finally getting something else besides 1st person perspective games.
Who wouldn't want to wear 3d glasses and some virtual gloves and be in an interface similar to the covert government chem lab programs. Imagine just picking up your hand with a glove on, and seeing your hand in a 3d world, taking the window and moving it with your hand, then looking down and typing into a floating keyboard or perhaps a standard keyboard which you can also see in this virtual world. I remember seeing something on the Discovery Channel about the chem labs in some secret place and all the VR they deal with. When those systems become mainstream we will all be blown away, I was blown away by seeing these chemists twisting around chemical structures in a virtual world and using the computer to figure out the effect of those certain chemicals on the brain, cells etc.. This stuff is mainly used for chemical projects and some of those "cool" black projects. Very sweet.
I think this is a troll, but I think I should at least be a voice of dissent...
Lots of people, including me, work on software or do research for free, and don't mind when companies profit from our code or ideas. Mainly, this is because we believe that there is a great deal more work necessary to turn code or research into a product, and that work is primarily very tedious. I like the idea of a company using my code (I don't know of any who do, but I would) because they do work that otherwise wouldn't get done.
Second, I actually think the Windows UI is pretty good. More importantly, it is standard, which means that I can use KDE without reading any documentation. Regardless of how it might revolutionize the world (I don't think it would; the UI is pretty superficial and pretty subjective), new users are not going to switch to linux if they have to learn a lot just to use the UI.
So, I'm not saying that your opinion is wrong, but that asserting it as an "obvious" truth is.
and why the hell not?
you say that like there's something wrong with a browser.
Blech.
Are you asking for new features for the sake of having new features or for something in particular that you think you can't find from the current offerings? As you mentioned many of the window managers are very solid. There are many to choose from as well.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
ive been usin afterstep for a few years, :) i heard from a friend that
and i gotta say i got a whiff of 1.8 for
just a few minutes and i went right back
and compiled 1.6 again and started using it
again. the window management was horrid
compared to 1.6, or at least the defaults
were and i couldn't figure out how to change
them. i hate windows that snap to the desktop
edges, i require the ability to drag apps
with the mouse between desktops(my desktop
at work is 15 x 2). anyways, im sure it
coulda been fixed, but why bother when
1.6 does everything i want. ive never had
it crash. its stable, its mature, and i don't
see reason to use anything else even a newer
version of the same product. i just hope
that 1.6 compiles cleanly on debian long into
the future
windowmaker's defaults were like afterstep
1.8's and he was a long time windowmaker fan,
now hes using sawfish i think.
Play with new versions of window managers that are in development. If they die on you you have nothing to lose but a single line in .xinitrc.
But beware - it is a good idea to start *nix up in text mode if you're going to use a window manager in development (or especially a video driver in development).
So ? Are you suggeting to use another license ?
If you use BSD license instead GPL, the "parasitic company" can take control of your work without even publishing source code.
And if you are thinking on a propietary license, then you are preaching in the wrong place.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Anyone have an ETA for Ximian GNOME on Mandrake 8.1?
A browser is good for viewing documents.
It is a tool designed for a specific purpose.
A browser is a poor tool to use to launch/run/encompass programs. Any chimpanzee can drive nails with a socket wrench. It takes a human to use the right tool for the right task.
Bowie J. Poag
I'm not trying to disagree with you or berate you or flame you or anything. I'm honestly curious -- what's FVWM2 missing? What's wrong with it? What would you do to it?
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Perhaps the development cycle has slowed down because most of the nicer and more mature window managers have become quite stable and there are becoming less and less bugs to fix. Isn't that the eventual goal of OSS, to become as stable and usable as possible. So there must be some saturation point when as we approach that peak.
If you think about other pieces of OSS software, there is nearly no development. Utilities such as GNU text-utils or even emacs don't get updated more than once a year or two.
I want my wm to be able to do everything that my current wm (==sawfish) can do. In fact, I don't miss any feature in any of the commonly used wm's, because all of them already manage windows. That's it. What else could they implement?
3dwm
In the early 90's, there were many window managers, lots of hacking and configuring them, and at least I got bored with that and settled with one that did most of job right out of the box (mwm if anyone is interested--not free, but it worked). I liked gwm very much, but who wants to keep hacking a window manager with lisp--at least for me, emacs is enough.
Time passed by, and then there were lots of linux generation window managers. Sexier, very graphical, themable, what else. Again, boredom hit me and I settled with the one that did the job needed out of the box (kde if anyone is interested, and with the default theme when themes came out). But this time, it took far less my time than during the first iteration, remembering the pain and ultimate result, and knowing what I want from a window manager.
It least for me, window managers main function is to manage windows, and do it with resonable speed and predictability. No fancy graphics or animations, and not lots of customizations if I have to setup a new environment from scratch, thank you.
I presume that my attitude will continue and I am not even interested about new development unless someone can show some real innovation in this area. I don't care if it looks like Windows--I have never used it, so I have no feelings in this area. The idea is simple, to manage windows, and at least currently no one has figured out how to do it differently.
I agree that window management has slowed. I also believe this is an area where the linux desktop environment could really shine.
Come on people! Why are we still using 80's window management ideas... (ie completely user driven)
Should we not be trying to reduce the burden of window management (eg resize, move operations) from the user and onto the system?
Granted, we have made some immense productively gains from windowing systems but we're equally losing massive productivity by forcing the user to have to deal with window placement and control...
the way i see it, there are two options people have, either a fast "window manager" that doesnt have many features, but also doesnt take up gobs of memory, and slow "desktop managers" which take up more memory, but have a lot more features. (or the console, but that isnt what this is about).
if more features are added to the window managers at this point, they become desktop mangers, which would defeat the pupose of using them (ie, to save memory and cpu cycles for more important things). a lot of the newer, feature ridden window managers seem to me to be practically desktop managers (but not quite).
so basically, if you want to work on a window manager (and have it still be a window manager), you are going to have to write a new one (and with all the options available, i guess nobody thinks they should spend their time doing that...).
anyway, just my 2 cents
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
(I don't know much about WM development, but...)
Honestly, the only two window managers that I ever felt comfortable with are fvwm (v2 if you like) and twm (didn't find a really good link, but it's standard on NetBSD systems, so you all know what I'm talking about right?). All other managers are just visual fluff that eats memory, occupies the palette, and slows the computer down.
There has been some other really great ideas during the last few years, like the pwm and wm2 (and its sibling, wmx) window managers. They simple, easy to configure, and does NOT rely on tons of extra libraries.
Someone else here was talking about environments, but I just can't see why you would want an extra "environment" on top of the perfectly usable standard Unix environment that's already there... Also, some of them comes packed with applications tailored especially for use within that particular window manager, which in reality turns each "environment" into its own, well, distribution. One can devote a separate CD for GNOME or KDE applications and support libraries, many of which just duplicates the function of already existing Unix commands. Sometimes I think someone ought start a KDE/Linux distribution just to spare everyone else from having to download that extra CD ISO.
Then again, we might be talking about different audiences here. The teenagers might need cool "environments" to get lured into using GNU/Linux, and that might have a positive effect in 5 to 10 years. But I wouldn't be very surprised if the adoption of GNU/Linux (or any other of the free Unices for that matter) by desktop users would be slowed down by offering a vast amount of conflicting graphical environments.
I think it would be a good idea to correct the bugs and stabilise the already existing window manages, maybe even to unify some of the more similar ones. You can make most of the more configurable managers look like each other anyway.
All that you need is some xterm windows.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
The gimp toolkit (gtk) has of course improved enormourly since then and is now cross platform. Athough, if something like thai language support in pango is broken, then it won't compile. It was an intersting exercise finding that I couldn't configure pango to leave it out and couldn't have gtk without pango.
The bit about Raster getting frustrated with his job was between him and an unprofessional middle manager at RedHat (who probably didn't last long) that hadn't quite worked out how to use email. It became very public because the guy didn't know how to use email.
Bowie J. Poag, you're a whining fuckwit. You make a huge deal about shutting down slashdot, thinking that your rant was worth of being a slashdot story. Well if you want to make that big a deal, then either keep it dead, or get a story posted saying 'bowie j poag was a fuckwit, and he apologizes for wasting your time with his pointless rants.'
Well, I feel like a heel for even bringing this up, now that I've seen all the responses. It is a pretty banal question, yes. A WM should just WORK, obviously. And this isn't the most important thing going on in the world, but neither is sitting in front of CNN and chewing your fingernails. I only really asked to see if there was something new out there, but what I got was a faceful of harsh comments. This should be a place where you can say, "hey, what's up in this field?" without being shot by drive-by critics. So excuse me for being interested in something.
I'm working on a project I plan to release under GPL when it's ready. The more people who want to help out after that, the better, and whether they get paid for it or not makes no difference to me. As long as they release their work as required under the license, the more the merrier.
We have moved beyond that. A browser is a tool for viewing (and handling) OBJECTS!.
Objects, not documents, while a document can be an object as a file can be.
What does the word "Browser" mean? An interesting question. Basically to browse something. Usually HTML texts. But these can link to PDFs, have some sort of videos embedded in them or other multmedia objects, and we all have become used to a browser being able to do almost anything.
Since we (mainly programmers) think that almost anything can be represented as an object and a browser is an object browser - why not base the whole GUI on a browser for objects if almost anything can be perceived as an object. OK, a browser come beyond browsing and have turned into "Object Managers".
I am thinking especially of the wonderful Konquerer which windows basically copied the functionality of in IE4 and upwards.
Or is it that you don't write any code at all? Why don't you stop bitching, and start pitching in to help?
Another OSS parasite.
What do you mean no innovations in the last year? Have you completely missed Aqua on Mac OS X? Granted it's not availible for any OS other then Darwin-ppc, but I'd say it's some significant development.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
I am sorry, but your point of view does not make sense to me. I can't see how it is possible for a company to parasitise the work that you do under GPL. I have read your earlier posts about companies hiring people to work on your code, and change it etc, but I mean, what is wrong with this? Surely you write GPLed code for the love of your project. If there is someone being paid to work on this project, there are going to be 2 outcomes, either they improve your project, and you incorporate their changes into it (you win), or the project gets forked, and you still have your project, and they have another (who cares).
What is your problem with this? The GPL explicitly states that anyone can do this if they want. If you have a problem with this, you shouldn't be writing GPL code. I think that you may not be farmiliar with the spirit of GPL. You put the code out there for users to use. You don't get to decide how they use it. That is a big part of it. If you want to control how people use your code then the GPL is not for you, and you should never have started a GPLed project.
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
Asking if the development of Window Managers has slowed is like asking if the development of television remote controls has slowed down.
Window Managers have faded into the background as it is the tools and information inside the windows that (rightfully) recieves the focus. Since the advent of the Mac, the incredible uniqueness of windowing and the desktop metaphor in general has meant that we've spent an exorbinant amount of time focused on the UI itself instead of the tools contained by the UI.
To put it another way... imagine I was a caveman transported to today and placed inside of a room with a window. First, I would marvel at the incredible transparent substance that formed a barrier between me and the outside world, but after a while, I would take it for granted and simply use the window to see outside.
I have no pants and I must scream
blackbox is also getting a complete rewrite, and the codebase is not really usable (so says jeff raven anyhow, and i'll belive him).
but, there are cool features being added, like keyboard access to the menus. somthing i've been wanting on my laptops for a couple years now...
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
What I would like to see are more window managers that use pie menus. Piewm is ancient. Pie menus for gtk seems dead.
With the collapse of Eazel, and a new pessimism about linux for the desktop, I think linux UI doesn't neccesarily have a clear concept of where it wants to go from here. Gnome, KDE, a bunch of windows managers, they all work. There are incremental bug fixes, small changes, and important feature additions (anti-aliased text), but a whole new class of ui development probably requires a clear concept of what kind of user the software is targetting.
MacOS looks fucking cool, and they have a clear design concept. They're selling a consumer products computer, not a computer computer. It looks sweet, it goes fast, and ANYONE can use it. The quick start guide for an ibook is 4 color pictures.
The big change they made with OS X is that they made lots of really cool eye candy and put the whole gui on top of an industrial strength bsd unix base. They've succeeded in having a consumer products computer that is CAPABLE of supporting super user expert use.
The linux user is a completely different kind of user. Linux is used in a server market, specialized research computing, and super user geekware. Linux users need/want a functional, nice looking UI, and indeed I think linux UI surpasses windows handilly.
Open source distributed development has its advantages (lots of customizabiliy and options) but it makes a centralized design methadology hard. Things come together, but an organized UI development which links applications, windows manager, OS together etc.... appear hard.
There are tradeoffs in UI design. Powerful expert usage vs. easy for average user. Customizability vs. doing one thing well. The linux console is fantastically powerful, but incomprehensible for the average joe schmo computer user. Can linux really move out of the super user dept? Can it do so more than incrementally? I don't see Linux becoming an average desktop environment anytime in the near future (eg. I don't see linux having enough organization to do something at all like os x), but is it moving there? Does gui only need to be strong enough for server/workstation? The requirements for all these apps are different. Ok, I'll stop rambling.
Looks like a blackbox/E/sawfish workalike.
Most of the posts I've read here are touting one against the other...which honestly will be what kills the FSF movement and dooms it to the same route as M$oft and any of the other countless corporations that are doomed to die at some point or another. Yes M$oft will die, just as Apple should have died and IBM will die again...computers and the software that runs on them should be a tool not a life. Unfortunatly, they've become a life for all too many. The open/free/software movement has lost it's vision and goal. Just as all the others have as well...feel free to spam me @ sardusmonkeylove@hotmail.com...but if you have anything intelligable to say send it to griffon@charter.net
Just as the builders of the pyramids died so will we.
A window manager is a very specific piece of software that takes care of the little tasks we often take for granted. It draws the frames on windows, lets us move the windows around, change their sizes, etc. It decides what should happen when we tell a window to maximize or minimize, or what not. It provides support changing between virtual desktops, theming window title-bars, and lots of other little things.
A desktop environment, on the other hand, is a group of applications (the term is used loosely here) that are designed to work together, presumably written around a single set of widgets and libraries. A desktop environment may or may not include a window manager. KDE includes KWM, and Gnome favors Sawfish, but works very well with several other window managers, such as IceWM and Windowmaker.
Cheers,
Ben Keil (.sig not yet publically released)
Cheers,
Benjamin Keil(.sig not yet released to the public)
Out of pure curiosity, I would like to how many people actually stick with one WM? Right now I am using BlackBox, earlier today it was all WindowMaker and later tonight it could be IceWM or Gnome with Sawfish. Usually it is Blackbox or WindowMaker with several virtual desktops and a lot of wterms open all over the place. Most of my application use still consists of console tools running in a wterm or eterm, the few graphical apps that I use with regularity tend to be web tools like browsers or messenger clients. My file manager is usually a Bash prompt, I am looking for a better lynx than lynx and if I find it Mozilla will see a lot less screentime than it does now. Sometimes the only reason I startx is because I like a lot of terminals open at once. So how do you use your window manager of choice? I am almost willing to bet that the average usage of a window manager is not what the developers expected at all in a lot of cases. Then again I could be very wrong and there may be people who really do want a graphical tool replacement for every text based tool out there. Graphical clients for Ping and Telnet come to mind...
Wanna get high?
Whereas objects are a convenient way for programmers to organize things, they are not a natural abstraction for an end user. Creating a UI model that matches the implementation model is almost always a mistake.
If a user wants to create a document, they should be able to "create a document", not "create an object which has document-specific properties".
A good example of a UI model that matches an implementation model is the UI for file systems. Lots of users that I know throw everything on their desktop because they can't handle understanding a file system. Furthermore, who's to say they're wrong or "messy" for doing it? Current day UIs for file systems suck because they directly reflect the implementation model instead of a model that users are more natural with (such as a document stack interface).
This was one of my gripes with Marko of IceWM fame - he had a really cool editor called FTE that had console and x11 versions, did syntax highlighting, folding, was pretty fast and easy to use. Then he gave up working on that to work on IceWM instead, which was/is a lame Win9x UI ripoff.
Matt
Then another 90 minutes trying to get your modem going again, oh, and then discover that you've tromped a vital DLL, only you're not sure which one... )-:
BTW, you're not using Mandrake, are you? (-:
City of Largo's experience is that users switched across from Windows tweak for a day or few after the switch. This would imply that it has at least some appeal.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
for the human impaired
Say it straight! We're talking aliens here, right?
In response to a few of the comments in this thread, I'd like to point out that Window Maker concentrates more on functionality than on "features". Every window manager has its own niche and is trying to appeal to a particular crowd. We try to appeal to those users that want a consistent, usable desktop that sits somewhere in between the minimal ones like Blackbox, and the eyecandy ones like E. See our comparison chart.
What's on the horizon? The developers recently reworked the code that generates and maintains files which help make up the UI (menus, states, etc.). To the end user, this means there is one less library dependency to worry about, providing they're the ones compiling the code. But the focus of this question was on "features". Window Maker won't be producing breakthroughs like what the Berlin project is doing, for instance. I get the impression this is what the questionaire was driving at. In our case, we're trying to improve compatibility with existing desktop environments (GNOME, GNUSTEP, and KDE) so that Window Maker is more useful in that regard. The big one right now is better support for KDE2, and will probably be there with the next minor rev release.
My personal feeling on this subject is that while new features and new breakthroughs are great, a large majority of existing users barely make use of what's there now. This is probably because a lot of projects focus on "features" rather than on what they were originally meant to do, and most users will pick whatever their buddy is using at the time. Whether or not future technologies allow better interaction as a human<->computer interface will depend soley upon how they're implemented, and in the case of a window manager, I think most people would agree that our current idea of a window manager isn't it. Some developers will continue to concentrate on fixing the now, while others will worry about the future. Both groups are needed.
-phillip
One of the most promising new enhancments that I've seen are the Xinerama patches for WindowMaker. These allow for intelligent placement and management of windows on a dual headed setup. A Xinerama aware window manager will not pop up dialogs that cross between two monitors and will try to keep dialogs on the same screen as their parent.
I'm not sure if any of the other managers are working on this but it should be really cool when it is released.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
fvwm is still in very active development. www.fvwm.org
Xfree86 is limited in its power in terms of the ability to render interfaces.
It cant even do alpha channel, hardware scaling, rotation, and polygons in the interface.
Until Xfree86 allows you to use all your video cards special effects on the interface, then theres not many ambitious projects you can do because everything that can be done is already being done in terms of making an interface better than Windows98, its done, KDE is on XPs level right now.
In terms of making something compareable to OSX that hasnt been done, E17 will try to do it, but E17 is using software tricks because Xfree86 is so weak.
Perhaps by promoting berlin you'd get more people to develop window managers.
If berlin were supported, Then i have some ideas, but we need a better backend which allows hardware specific effects while also we need to add stuff such as voice recognition, video recognition(to replace passwords) and so on.
Perhaps anyone reading my Msg will start a project and do just that.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Look at what this guy looks like! http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/html/images/topi cs/bowie1.jpg!!!!! Looks like the Michelin man!
A 2d OS with 3d effects is the way to go.
Like windows you can litterally flip and file them into a folder all animated and then file through them again and this folder being multiple desktops.
Just do what OSX did Just better
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
They were tweaking their wallpaper and stuff! Configuring windows managers is the biggest pain in the ass. I don't even bother, I just use windows. I've been using x11 in some form for about 5 years at work, and I never use it personally because I have stuff to do besides try to remember whether its .Xsession .Xshrttyt .Xwhatever that I use to make my background a usable color.
E17 is limited by X, Improve X, and E17 will improve GUI.
E17 should be compareable to OSX in terms of its easy of use and its flashyness
but just like OSX it will be doing most of it in software so it will be somewhat slow, We need hardware specific effects which use say Gforce3.
They have some hardware effects like alpha channel and i think they are working on scalaing, but the more effects, the better it will look
maybe motion blur, shadows, bump mapping etc would look nice
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
A bit late to the party, but these comments have 'gotten my goat' so to speak.
The majority of comments I hear from opensource/Linux people is 'choice is good', 'no choice is bad', 'I choose to do things in manner X', etc. However, having those choices in WM front ends apparently is NOT a good thing. Apparently we need just 'one' way of doing something (actually, I'm not all that opposed, if everyone would just write to that standard instead of bitching about it).
But... here we have an OS which is accused of being monolithic (Windows) yet it's also being criticized because there's more than one way to launch a program? So - if they lock you in to one method - it's bad. If you have choice - it's bad. Is this only because it's MS?
creation science book
Think about it, most open source programmers arent getting paid and do this in their free time.
Sooo, with no job they have more free time !
Think about what you said
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
One interesting development, I just saw this come over Debian the other day, 3dwm-server among other packages.
:)
Appears to be a complete replacement for X, along with a window manager that is 3d. It appears to be more of a testbed project than anything however,
Their page is here
Personally, I use IceWM at home, Windowmaker and Blackbox for my vnc sessions.
The glorified stature of the window manager is an odd architectural quirk of X-Windows. X-Windows is fundamentally concerned about, well, windows, so the window manager was pretty much *the* only application that every X system was running. Consquently if you wanted to add some feature (say a virtual desktop pager), you tried to get it into the Window Manager, because the window manager was already always running.
This "window manager is everything" view is actually sort of primitive. Most advanced operating systems have turned the window manager into a really mundane implementational detail that even programmers hardly care about. BeOS, Windows, MacOS, etc.
I hope this trend continues to GNOME & KDE...and we see the disappearance of those insanely bloated window manager preference dialogues and see the window manager behaving like the submissive quiet little technical detail it should be (at least from a user's perspective). Check out Havoc's latest project "Metacity" for an example of a well behaved CrackFree(TM) window manager.
-Seth (gnome usability project lead)
sounds like a windows user to me, its exactly the sort of things they say, "linux will be dead when winXP comes out" morons!, they cannot see past the almighty dollar, they cannot work out why anyone would use linux because you don't pay money for it.
go back under your bridge, TROLL!
Believe me, that's what Microsoft and Apple have been after for years (now decades...)
... who cares about users anyway? Certainly not linux entouthiasts ... The submitter of this "ask slashdot" article obviously has more fun compiling his windo manager than using it...
And Sun's too, for Gnome, not too long ago, there was an article on slashdot about that. Sun's release the paper about the experiment, and that is a VERY insterresting paper, not because of the result, but because of the process it takes to understand what users want, and how difficult it is.
But wait,
Nobody cares about users who don't pay... Consummers are kings but Freeloaders Users? Go to hell...
'nuf'said
IMNSHO, one of the major contributors of the slowdown is the fact that many open source developers are no longer sitting at high-paying "day jobs" developing window managers instead of just sitting on their hands like their co-workers.
I don't edit text files to configure my X. Perhaps I should? In any of KDE, Gnome or WindowMaker (and others, I'm sure), it's only a click or two to set background colour, image, series of images, application, whatever.
Have you tried CygWin? It makes life under Windows more bearable. There's also an X server for it. And if you need an instant X server anywhere, try WeirdX.
Sad.
Did you know that you can configure Windows in just the same way? I.e., with regedit and/or at the cmd prompt? If you use point-and-click for Windows, why not for X?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
hehe...he is a pretentious arrogant little prick isn't he?
owns joo....blah blah..lameness filter sux
Actually, to clarify, KDE does not include KWM. KWM has been dead for over a year now (last was in KDE 1.x). The modern KDE window manager is called kwin.
Also, KDE 2.x and GNOME 1.4 use a unfied system of window manager hints called _NET_WM. kwin supports, this, and as does sawfish. I think the other major window manager that also supports this is Blackbox. So, KDE also works very well with other window managers, but favors (and includes kwin). One could use sawfish with KDE, or kwin with GNOME 1.4, for example.
load up /. and try to read the Usenix story comments. See which one works, and which one craps out on ya
why does w3m not load the usenix story comments on /. ? links did it fine.
well, blackbox used to be my WM of choice, but there hasn't been a new version in over a year. the author of blackbox, Brad Hughes, was hired by Trolltech (makers of Qt), so he devotes his time in working on the upcoming Qt3 release instead of Blackbox :-)
That doesn't mean blackbox is completely dead however.. the blackbox community makes styles all the time (wish themes.org were back up fully).
I know, I've been through it. Creativity and the desire to work on open source software is what comes from having a boring and/or restrictive full time job. All day long you do work for someone else, and meanwhile can't wait to go home and do work on something you really want to do.
But when you loss the foundation of stable but boring work you also loose that energy and drive that was put into an open source project.
When you don't have a regular routine, and a stable lifestyle, coding stuff for free just isn't a priority anymore.
Dedicated dictators are a must. Check out a guy named Linus.
Miguel de Iguana is too much of a schizophrenic dictator. Otherwise, why isn't Gnumeric so much more developed today? Why not concentrate on that, like the Abiword guys?
"There are too many visionaries out there."
L. Torvalds
OSX is not a good gui.
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
3 - what if you don't like grey or blue? Maybe OSX.2 will have green and OSX.3 will have purple
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake
6 - way too much eye-candy, at least I can not install Enlightenment.
OSX isn't unix wedded with mac, its unix buried under mac. If anything its BaCKstep.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
Oh, no, someone had the guts to note that many programmers who want to donate their time and effort to a project get very, very, VERY angry when it's suddenly usurped by a corporation who turns a profit on it. Be that corporation Microsoft, or some Linux corporation, it still makes people annoyed.
Second, dead freaking on. Linux X developers are too Windows-happy. It amuses me, really, the amount of developers who complain about how bad Windows is.. And yet, their programs end up as Microsoft clones. I won't use KDE, simply because KDE makes my desktop into Windows. Not that I hate that because "It's Microsoft", I hate it because I find the interface to be absolutely horrendous.
"We need to make it look like Windows for users to be able to convert to Linux easier." Wake up, and ask a friend to smack you. Linux != Jihad against Microsoft.
We have no one we 'need' to convert. Therefore, we should have no need of shoddy desktops.
Thank the Gods for Blackbox. It took me a total of fifteen minutes to set up (I spent ten of those playing with the colors; I hear someone's working on a theming utility though.). It's fast, it's slim, and it doesn't have a start button (Android Dungeon Guy's voice: Worst idea ever.).
Unable to come up with an intelligent objection to his comments, you decide to attack his appearance ...
Well, good on you! Does that make you feel proud, huh?
Why does slashdot.org have to be degraded by this kind of thing. I can't believe the insulting remarks that get written here from people who really should know better.
Haven't we learnt to grow up yet, kids??
Many years ago someone decided that a monitor should conform to the "golden rectangle" ratio (approximately 4:3) as rectangles of this shape are pleasing to the eye.
4:3 is not the golden ratio. 8:5 (more precisely, (sqrt(5)+1)/2 ) is the golden ratio, as if you cut the largest square out of it, you get another golden rectangle. 4:3 is actually the "Academy" ratio, in which all movies were filmed before 1.85:1 widescreen became common; TV copied the Academy ratio because early shows were shown off film.
Will I retire or break 10K?
i have become interested in plwm, which is
a WM written in python!
there is some truly magical code in plwm
in particular the python-xlib core.
Anyway im interested, cause i love python,
and i believe in power to the user.
This question also relates to shell programing;
in the beginning it was expected that people
would write their own shells...
well, how 'bout it?
Whereas in windows i can change 3/4ths of my hardware and reboot and everything will work.
If you change 7 out of 10 key items in your new Windows computer, it'll boot all right, but only to the "Activate this product" menu; you'll have to call Microsoft (giving your caller id away) to be able to run anything.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I would also think with the way the economy has been most authors are scrambling to feed themselves, so their projects are a little on the side. How has Rasterman and Mandrake been with E since VA started getting hit? I remember the fast updates of E as well, but those are the good ol' days. If you tossed a chunk of cash at them I bet you they'd respond. :)
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Or use LarsWM, which, if from judging from my 3 second look at this Ion thing is correct, does more or less the same thing. I use it right now, it's great!
wrt. 1: What's a windowmanager do, really? Manages windows. Only so much you can do with that to make someone's life easier, in my opinion.
wrt. 2: My biggest gripes with WinXX are that modal and system modal dialogs are ever used. These two UI components need to simply go away. Also, the fact that the program manages its frame controls means that if that program hangs and stops processing, you can't minimize it. No matter how much your Window manager looks like WinXX, if it doesn't have these features, it's infinitely better. Also, since a window manager simply manages windows, there's not a lot beyond frame look and feel that you're going to get with any Window manager.
Of course, I prefer a clean environment; No icons on my desktop please! I never liked the idea of having to move an application to find the icon to launch another application. Gnome's mini button holder that you can put on the panel is acceptable though. That is mostly not obnoxious.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So if I understand the argument properly, the Open Source community is full of sour grapes?
I fail to see what someone's income (and where that income is derived) has to do with it. How does a coder being paid to contribute to a project take away from that project?
Of course - I could understand other issues. If those coders were taking the project in a direction that the origional author(s) disagreed with. If there was a feeling that a company with deep pockets was somehow hijacking the code base. And then, of course, there's the possibility that a company one resents is making use of one's work.
You've got all kinds of axes to grind with VA Linux, don't you Bowie?
Sometimes I wonder if the biggest test of the GPL would be if Microsoft embraced it (as unlikely to happen as that is). Would those who flock to Linux and GPL projects abandon them because they're seen as tainted? Or would things go along as normal - maybe a bit faster with some of Microsoft's resources going towards contributing code?
I'd like to think that GPL developers aren't so shallow as to allow Microsoft's presence to derail their work. Whether they like their new contributers or not.
Maybe those 'windowmanager-wars' have calmed down because every release had to be 'bigger and thus better'. Sounds farmilliar, doesn't it ?!
Hey.. Now a whole new group of windowmanagers is needed for all those devices running linux. Mandrake co-author of recent versions of Enlightenment was running Blackbox on his IPaq but has coded a handheld-specific windowmanager he's calling ePaq (http://www.handhelds.org/z/wiki/ePAQ)
The Gnrfan
Last night I plugged in a nice shiny new Logitech USB Wheel Mouse. With Red Hat 7.1, it was detected during boot, installed properly, and everything worked (including the wheel). If it wasn't because my computer was turned off at the time I plugged it in, it would require no boots.
Time: 40 seconds.
Then, a few nights later, I booted Windows 2000. It was properly detected, only for it to require that I download some drivers from Logitech. Exactly what I wanted to do with my time. After installing the bloody drivers, I needed a reboot.
Time: 7 minutes (and only because I have ADSL).
I use Windowmaker and the Gnome panel. It looks gorgious and is a fast and stable environment to work in. Screenshot at http://130.235.187.218/~ciryon/screenshots
But I still want the same technological eye candy as in Mac OS X or even in Win XP. I love the anti aliasing and alpha blending. I heard somewhere that the entire OpenGL desktop is OpenGL accelerated. That seems cool as well.
I put my hope to Enlightenment 17 whenever it's more stable.
Ciryon
I think the reason for the stagnating window manager development is that you don't want to reinvent the wheel over and over again: for every need there is a fitting window manager out there already. You can choose between a dozen or more, AFAIK. So why should any one want to write Yet Another Window-Manager ? Well, besides the fact that it's fun to write one on your own ;-)
Any wm does it ?
Personaly, I don't really care if there are updates on small window managers. They are most of the time build for fun and don't get to such a big group of people, unlike Windowmaker, KDE and Gnome.
;)
Out of those three I think KDE has the biggest future, since the Nostradamus in me predicted the fall of evil (M$) within a decade (more like with the spreading of wintendo XP) and more people will have to turn to better and more stable platforms.
Although I use Window Maker, I think KDE is easier to use if you just switched from wintendo to linux.
Also, keep in mind that KDE en Ximian Gnome have a bigger group of people working on them than a wm like XFCE (a very very nice wm for people that want a CDE like look on their linux).
But I understand when you say you miss the times of compiling and installing new upgrades of window managers... I miss them too
42 + 1 = 42
You call Enlightenment "stable"? Bwahahahaha.
Uhm.
Sorry.
It's just that stability is not (and has never been) Enlightenment's forte. Now fvwm or (to go further down that path) wm2, those are stable. Yes, they don't have all the blinkenlights and thingamajigs that Enlightenment has, but they are usable and, what's more important, stable.
The concept of `I eschew a desktop environment for a window manager' is false. All window managers are a desktop environment of some kind and contain a window manager along with other features. Got a way of bringing up an app menu? That's not part of window management, so you're also a user environment.
Whether this is a list box or an icon is irrelevant and is certainly not the difference between a desktop env and a wm. Does GNOME stop being a desktop when everybody who runs it turns of Nautilus so that their system works properly, and runs their desktop without icons?
Blackbox/IceWM/Sawfish is a desktop environment. Its just a less bloated / full featured as KDE or GNOME.
That said, I have a cool idea I would like to suggest and work on with other people. The problem is : what place can I go to to talk with *all* of the window manager crowd ? There doesn't seem to be a single gathering point where window manager issues (ideas, comparisons, ...) are discussed.
Now on to my idea : for a project I'm working on I'd like to discuss the possibility of integrating support for joysticks/joypads/remote controls into the window manager, and making sure the window manager works well on a TV screen. This is a wholly different approach from the standard PC desktop window manager needs.
I am not talking about the physical side, I know you can fake your mouse using any of these devices.I am talking about using large fonts, doing more full-screen stuff, starting/stopping applications, and so on. I have worked out a sample user interface using Perl on top of Gnome for my project, but I think that it would be better served using a dedicated window manager.
Anyone wanting to discuss this further can mail me at thomas@apestaart.org
I'm currently working on non-GGI OpenGL for Berlin.
Some time in the future, I'll be showing Berlin to non-technical people, while trying to explain to them, what it is.
Do you have any suggestions for what Berlin's UI should look like? What it could do? I'm going to be hacking in that area and working this out was on the horizon for me. Any ideas? It needs to look really, really cool, but never at the expense of real use.
XP is the future! Get used to it. Linux hasn't even been able to come close to Windows95 in the UI.
Microsoft funds alot of UI research and it shows. A bunch of hacks have tried to create the Linux UIs and it shows. At best, the Linux UIs are cheap imitations of Windows. You will never see anything innovative here.
...because their desktop is better - even if the OS behind it... shall we say... lacks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
A window manager is just a layer on top of X Windows. Sure, it is nicer to have WMs that are a bit more usable and aesthetic than the default. Blackbox does this nicely. Some fluff, like application docks, can be handy as well.
But going beyond this doesn't give much benefit, as a WM is still just a launching point for generic X Windows applications. To integrate further, you have to start dictating standards for applications, and providing service libraries for applications. And then, of course, no one wants to support your particular WM, so there's no point in going down that road.
The bottom line is that WMs are misleading. People see them and all the pretty graphics and think "All it takes is a good WM to replicate the Windows UI experience!" This is not true. A WM is frustratingly contained in a limited environment, and there's no easy way to reach out and develop a cohesive desktop using a WM as a starting point. As such, WMs are no longer seen as "the way."
At least according to the interest in handhelds calenders have much greater value than windowmanagers. Sort of funny how Raster called the VA I.O.U. layoffs "redundancies" the same term most women in the world described themselves with after Sep 11.
At some point, the cost of fiddling with something exceeds the benefit of further fiddling. The whole point of most projects is to reach a state in which no further change is very desirable, so that the product becomes usable without daily re-learning.
Maybe window managers have just gone as far as they can go until someone comes up with a really new idea (that is actually useful).
But I'm still using fvwm2, so what do I know?
I wonder when we will have a desktop environment form www.goatse.cx
Sawfish does what it needs to do. Anything more would be bloat. Who wants bloat?
Yes, believe it or not, some software (if its goals are well defined) actually gets finished.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What are the Computer Interaction habits of successful hackers and programmers?
[I am thinking habbits and techniques that work on any platform/environment, maybe including a few simple tools]
I suppose there could be something down the Human Computer Interation line, but that seems mostly about writing more useable programs not making use of good enough environments and simple prebuilt tools (editors) alongside integrated programming environments.
Is there some information on how people usually cope with the usual mix of tasks and interruptions of everyday programming life?
My 2 cents are below,
Turloch
My 2 cents/operating mode:
I put almost all information through a single text file and use a editor which can edit lots of files at once and contain a few shells (emacs) this may be because I am a bit nervous of the os I currently use at work (windows nt), but using text files, emacs I can work on most platforms. [The number of windows still stacks up though.]
Other people work differently with lots of paper folders, print outs, post it notes, and bookmarks.
Other people go for the minimalist approach and assume everything of use is indexed on google.
Other people go to the max and write little html guides for themselves and everyone else to use.
[There are lots of management type techniques on top of this, to do lists, one touch (Do it, Disgard it or Delagate it) etc.]
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
mIRC doesn't have anything on x-chat, which IMHO is hands-down the best graphical irc client available for any platform. But if you really like mIRC (I find certain things about it very annoying myself), run it under wine...last time I checked it ran perfectly...
Celebrate the finer things in life
I can't count the number of nights spent trying to get that sexy new E build to work, and what fun it was!
I was just getting into Linux about the same time..but I wasn't spending my evenings with my Linux box...*shudder*
Women can get almost as hot as an overclocked processor, and the fringe benefits of them burning up FAR outweight that of an overclocked CPU! As for 'sexy'...well hrm...new E build or a woman...gosh...I'm think'n Woman on this one...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Check out 3dwm.org
a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Some of the screenshots are amazing, I highly recomend looking at it.
Also, it seems to me, that the current "model" of wm's IS pretty much done. I mean, how many ways are you going to move these boxes around?
I think what's needed are new and different ways of displaying window information. I have no idea what that can be, but that's what we pay you guys for.
I don't think 3d is the only way to go. I remember the guys at NYU were working on something called pad, altho it wasn't a wm, (more like a file browser thing, it was still the sort of unusual inovation that is needed in the wm field)
Anyway, that's just some thoughts...
-ron
I just installed 256 MB of ram in my linux box. It cost me $36 -- delivered to my door -- including shipping.
I suppose I could hear users from the 80's say that Linux is a memory pig. It takes megabytes of ram!
As you say, KDE runs very nicely with plenty of ram. And the goal of having a computer is to make ME productive -- not some esoteric concern about the efficiency of the computer.
Of course, some people enjoy tinkering and fiddling with their computer -- just as some people do with their cars. I use a car as transportation -- not a toy to fiddle with. And there is nothing wrong with people who do the latter. It's just not most people's game.
My point is that to make me productive I don't care how much memory or megahertz it needs -- as long as it runs on reasonable hardware. (Yes, a vague term, I know.) Which I'll psuedo-define as a computer I can get for $500, w/o monitor. In a few years this $500 computer will come with 4 GB of RAM standard, and people on Slashdot will complain because some super productive tool uses up over 1 GB of RAM!, and therefore should not be used.
I don't think that's what you're saying (i.e. the parent post), this is just a general funny observation on the state of some faction of slashdot.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
FTE's still alive and well:
http://fte.sourceforge.net/shots.html
> Sawfish hasn't done much of anything in months,
> nor has Blackbox.
And that's how it should be. I spent enough time in the lab in college futzing with this stuff...now I just want it to work! I've only had a couple weird things happen with BlackBox - that's tons less than the accelerated eye candy IRC/IM environment that is KDE/Gnome/E.
Actually, Raster worked for Red Hat. His co-developer on E is Mandrake. Not Mandrake Linux, the Linux distribution, but a guy named Mandrake. I can see where that can cause some confusion.
Seems to me that after all of the desired features have been added to a program that it is time to go in and reduce the programs size and apply any other acceptable optimizations.
Why wish for new features, why not instead wish for current features to be done better?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Have ANY of you people used blackbox?
I've been using it for about 4 years I think.
It's fast, it's lean, it's finished !!!Why mess with a winning team?
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
What about a window manager that starts off as a 'twm' clone with a plug-in architecture? Plug-ins could include support for all the "neat stuff" that the performance computing geeks don't want: 1. Fullscreen MPEG screensavers 2. Resized MPEG desktop object animation... (You close a window and it turns into grains of sand being blown off the dekstop, or it folds into an envlope and zips off the screen with motion lines behind it.) 3. Desktop wallpaper that is pulled from an FTP site on a scheduled basis. 4. Non-rectangular window objects. (How about a circular window?) 5. Zoom in/out desktop objects. (Instead of minimizing to a task bar, you literally minimize to a miniturized version of your app in the background. Possibly make it translucent as well.) We need to make use of the Z-axis. Remember, Mac users never thought we needed more than one mouse button... 6. What about multiple desktops on a grid that are hosted on other machines using X's network transparence? Just slide to the next X desktop. 7. Maybe a built-in GUI based X desktop browser. Just search your local net for an X desktop to connect to by looking at thumbnails of all the X desktops on your net. 8. How about a network "Stick" for a window. You select, "Stick - terminator:1" and your app's display is routed to the host "Terminator" as a sticky window. If you unstick it on terminator, it closes on the original host and continues to run on Terminator. 9. What about a session recorder? Record all mouse movements and object displays to an MPEG for later viewing. It would be a great way to train people or spy on someone. 10. Even something as simple as the ability to use custom designed mouse pointer would be nice. The basic "X" or arrow are a little long in the tooth even though they are perfectly functional. Wouldn't it be great if you could design your own mouse points to go with your desktop environment? 11. Gestures could be added as well for those who like that kind of thing. I know that there are lots of you out there that will say, "why" or bring up a host of "security" issues. But, my argument is why not? If we have most of the other stuff working well, why shouldn't we add the bells and whistles? I know I want them. And there sure are others who do. If I could program, I would try to do it myself. However, programmers tend to not be interested in these kinds of projects. (I've had ideas like this turned down before) Just think about how much cooler our window managers and desktop envirnements could be if we had even a few of these features. That's how you get users to come to your side, give them cool stuff.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
There is still nothing on the market, PC-wise or PDA-wise, to compete with what the EMate and the Newton 2x00 series accomplished in terms of usability, intuitiveness and productivity. Too bad Apple killed them.
For a while, someone was working on a Linux-based replacement but it doesn't look like that project is going anywhere at the moment...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I agree with above statements that window managers are actually a symptom of the backwordness of X and the linux GUI in general. Instead of trying to replicate the windows/Mac way of doing things, we should take a look at what future technologies and start them now.
On of the boldest yet underdeveloped technologies is OpenDoc, an idea where instead of having one application for each file type, you have one application that simply needs a plugin to handle a different file type.
For example, right now you on Windows porfessionals usually have Illustrator for vector graphics, Photoshop for rasters, Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets, WinAmp for MP3s, and other software for sound editing, email, instant messaging, IRC, unzipping files, et.etc. etc.
OPenDoc is a more "unix" way of doing a GUI. Essentially, all you have is are tools that can manipulate a document or communication or whatever. So, if you are working on a piece of sound in a doc, then you would have appropriate sound editing toolbars (or whatever you need). If writing text, you would use the "text editor" feautres, and the same goes for any other type of document.
Of course you can view this data in several ways: for instance, there may be "creating a docuemnt" and "viewing incoming documents" (i.e email, icq, chat, and maybe even FTP, etc.)... but ultimately anything that touches your computer is in the same GUI world that any other document is in and is able to be manipulated in teh same way.
Installing a program shouldn't add icons to your taskbar or something, it should add a plugin to the structure, kinda like how in BASH, adding a command simply now allow you to use that tool in the same environment... now just carry that to the GUI.
The real problem with the linux desktop is that we have gotten so carried away with looking like other environments that we have forgotten the UNIX philosophy... carried over to the OpenDoc philosophy.
This design would allow for an EASY and simple and integrated experience but still allow for extensibility of power users.... AppleScript on the Mac is a step in the right direction with this because applications can be scripted, even to the point of talking with XML-RPC or SOAP over a network!! Think of this as a BASH script for the GUI and suddenly this is an incredibly exciting idea.
Also, this would all very possible with *gasp* open standards like XML, XML-RPC, and other formats. Also, because open source doesn't have to worry about 3rd party contracts or whatever, then anything that can be integrated into the framework WOULD be integrated. Also, while the default tools in a distro should work, a user could exchange out plugins if they wanted (say, if a commercial plugin were petter than a non-commercial, etc., or if someone comes out with a better plugin).
Once this is in place, then all the user would need is a good way to display information on the screen. This is a far different scenario than having to launch and manage applications. When all that matters is having info on the screen, a lot of the BS of current winodwmanagers would go away.
A case in point: Every WM I can remember seeing handles menus the same way. Microsoft came up with the idea that the menu bar should be beneath and ajacent to the title bar, and everyone has followed down that road. Better designs put the menu at the top of the screen but the design of both X11 toolkits and the sundry WMs makes it all but impossible to do this. Menus need to be properties attached to the window, which the WM can then display where it chooses, not the app.
Ditto for scroll bars. Right now, if you use apps designed for different WMs, you get multiple types of scroll bars, posibly in different sizes and locations. Instead, fix X11 to understand the difference between windows and viewports, and let the WM draw the scroll bars, just as it draws the title bar.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
am i still the only one using olvwm? i know development in that area has slowed down, but it's a great wm that i think alot of people overlook.
Ever try the Workplace Shell? You actually had a template library from which you would drag an icon to the desktop (or a folder) to instantiate a new file / program icon / folder of type X.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
You have obviously never heard of Oroborus. Also, ratpoison, wm2/wmx, etc.
There are window managers that do NOTHING but draw window borders, moving all of the other functionality into userspace.
Daniel
About three months ago I got sick of all other window managers, so I wrote my own. Writing a window manager was the most fulfilling software project I've ever undertaken.
My window manager now does all the things I want it to do, none of things I don't want it to do, and I'm running it full-time. Running your own software full-time is an experience every programmer should have - you learn to write solid code, as it would really suck if my window manager crashed while I was writing this into Netscape.
I won't go into a diatribe about why I wrote it, but needless to say, it does a number things that all the other window managers I've tried get completely wrong (and yes, I've tried a lot of window managers, including the "configurable" ones like sawfish and scwm).
At some point, I might release my code, but that would probably require putting in hooks for a configuration file (since it's MY window manager, all the configuration I need to do is 'vi main.c'). If there's enough interest, I can go into details about what it does differently and at some point, I might even release some code. I really couldn't care less if anyone else uses this, however. This is MY window manager, and it does everything I want (this is why you should write your own, saying that feels really good).
Anyway, if you know any C, you should try writing your own window manager (think about it - what would be more satisfying, writing another GNOME/KDE applet, or writing software that you'll be using 100% of the time?). Here are the resources you'll need:
You'll need to know Xlib. You can get the xlib manual in troff from XFree86 CVS, or you can read it online at the link above. I found the greppable, linked html much nicer than a big PostScript file.
You'll need to follow the ICCCM recomendations if you want your window manager to play nice with other apps.
The KDE and GNOME people say this is the standard for their desktops. Most of the stuff here is pretty simple, but you should look it over first, as it assumes quite a bit about how you implement your window manager (so you should implement it a certain way in order to support the KDE/GNOME stuff).
For reference, it took me about three weeks and 6000 lines of code to get something I could use full-time. You might also want to look at other window managers' code: there's a window manager called '9wm' that's very small and whose code is extremely legible. Trying to read code from Enlightenment or WindowMaker is not the best way to go as these are very large codebases and use multiple levels of indirection (which makes understanding how some detail is implemented very difficult).
I can supply more information for the potential DIY-er if needed.
While we're on the subject, does anyone know of a reference for Motif hints? I would rather not use someone else's code (licensing restrictions, etc), and would like the definitive reference, if such a thing exists.
As a professional programmer for the last 22-years, let me state that I don't think most programmers are the extremely industrious kind that want to do things for the sake of doing them unless either they are being paid for it or it's a real fun thing to do or something they really want to do. Thus we can characterize programmers as somewhat "lazy" (in a non-perjorative way) in that they're not going to redo tons of work already done by someone else. (In fact, if done consistently this is a good trait in programmers; it means they tend to use predesigned libraries for various features instead of rewriting code to do the same thing).
Let us also remember, as it has probably been said here (and in other forums) many times, creating a window manager is a big undertaking; it is the sort of thing that is a severe "scratch the itch" development on the level of writing a good-sized language compiler or perhaps developing an operating system. It's a hell of a lot of work, and it gets done because the developer is
- extremely irritated and/or disappointed by what is currently available
- doesn't like any of them currently existing
- does not know of or cannot find any at all that even close to fits their particular need ("none of them can scratch his itch") and
- none of those currently existing can be tweaked into something close to what they want without major rework
and so he (nothing to criticize women, most programmers are still male) decides to create his own in order to "scratch his itch" (or itches), e.g. to give him the features / reduced bloat / increased capability / skinnability / factor 'x' that the current window managers do not provide him.I use Windows 2000 for what I get paid to do. On Linux I have used both KDE and GNOME and I would honestly say that there isn't more than a dime's bit of difference between the three of them as far as a user running applications is concerned. I haven't tried many of the alternative ones but I'm sure they all pretty much do the job of providing a means to log onto the system and start applications to do things on the system. And beyond that it's a matter of extra features which may or may not be important to have in a window manager (applications like Calendar, skinnability, type of activator buttons, means for adding new applications, what icons do etc.) depending on how enthusiastic / spaced out on caffeine / loud the people who program the features into and/or use the particular WM scream / beg / offer bribes for it.
I would say it's pretty hard to find a window manager that won't provide perhaps 80% of what you need and as such for most people it's "good enough" to get by without writing one of your own or of taking one that is "good enough" and doing some tweaks to make it so. Since most window managers are pretty "tweakable" just from the window manager's management console or via configuration files, I believe the need to write code to provide something that isn't there has been substantially reduced from what would otherwise be necessary.
Paul Robinson postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
congratulations, Quarters. you have demonstrated your proficiency at constructing a straw man argument.
your list (Text boxes, Combo boxes, Drop Down menus, etc.) doesn't describe "a few basic tennants[sic] of a GUI". that describes a few basic elements of a WINDOWS-LIKE (or technically, Macintosh-like) GUI.
as long as you begin with the assumption (that makes an ass out of you and mption) that all GUIs must be Windows-like, that's all you're going to end up with. you called for some other GUI concepts. how about these:
1. The "flying" GUI. The user looks down onto a filesystem, with whichever files are at the same level in the foreground, and subdirectories appearing as paths leading away towards the horizon. to select a file, move the mouse right and left until the desired file is under the cursor, then click. to descend subdirectories, move the mouse side to side until the desired subdirectory branch is under the cursor, then move the mouse forward. to ascend, pull the mouse backwards. functionality elements (i.e. applications, scripts, other executables) appear as icons along the top of the screen. in order to run a particular app, click on the icon (whereupon your mouse pointer changes to reflect that you have a certain app "loaded") and then click on blank space. to open a particular file with an app, click on the app, then click on the file. filesystem operations (file move/copy/delete, directory delete/create) are handled by functionality elements. so are system operations (shutdown, sleep).
2. the "spindle and bucket" GUI. the filesystem is represented by a spindle-like structure in the center of the screen, on which a number of disk-like structures are spinning. each disk represents a directory on the filesystem (deep filesystem hierarchies do not represent well in this GUI). the user spins each disk left or right at varying speeds by dragging the mouse. clicking on files temporarily pops them off the disk and into a holding area. dragging them off the holding area and onto another spindle moves them; dragging them off the holding area and into empty space returns them to their original position. functionality elements are represented by "buckets" placed around the periphery of the screen. to open/execute a file using a particular interactivity unit, drag the file from the holding area (or straight from the spindle) into the bucket. system functions are performed by a little animated mandrill who runs across the screen, screams, and waves his arse at you if you give him a commmand he doesn't like. also he shits in a random bucket.
ok, those are two ideas i made up in the space of ten minutes. yes, i know they probably suck. i'd actually like to try using the flying GUI, especially on a fast system (i'd use a wireframe theme, on a black background, but that's just me).
and i haven't had any training in GUI design, nor even thought too hard about the issue. i'm sure someone else can come up with something much better.
-vecna_99
p.s. if anyone cares, i think the Aqua interface rules, but if i'm on anything other than a Mac, i'm dyed-in-the-wool Blackbox all the way. it's the only X Windows wm that doesn't get all up in my face all the time.
--- "We also were guided by the unlikelihood that anyone would face supernatural evil armed only with technology."
Mainly cos the MS Windows / MacOS "window manager" does few, while X wm can do some interesting things that if removed, would make them crappy. For example, smart positioning to keep workarea tidy, or keyboard movement to move hands less to mouse or better control in laptops (all that can be called "keyboard navigation" if you want). So while adding lot of modules, foobars and other candy to wm is too much, doing helpful wms, instead of just "a decor and some buttons", is not. Keep that in sight, make wm help users more than so called wm in other OSs do. And make all the extras be interchangable as they should have been since day one (pager for X, not for wm Foo).
Now if you're talking about capturing the screen as it is being drawn that would take a lot of computing power because of saving the screen image on every change - and trying to only capture the part that changes might be a problem due to the comparisons - but there's probably a way to do it if someone thinks about how screens are drawn.
Since Windows already has it, and I think has had it since 3.0, this should already have been implemented in X by now. I'm surprised it hasn't. I agree. Some of these suggestions may be very difficult but many of them are or have already been accomplished in one form or another. Often if a change looks too hard it will be rejected because there are other things which appear to be more fun and less drudgery than some suggestions. Since the people doing the changes are all (unpaid) volunteers, it's kinda hard to get them to do something which might not be much fun to accomplish. And if you really want to do something to make X-based systems a desirable choice over Windows those who can develop things for it should start thinking about these and other ideas because we have the technology available to us, because the sources are open; something that can't be said about Windows.Paul Robinson Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
twm, xterm, and xclock.
What more do you need?
-- Criggie
You certainly don't use xfwm (the window manager included in xfce). Not only does it have great support for new stuff like the xinerama extensions to xfree4.x, but it is constantly being improved. Eventhough it is already top notch, xfwm improves so quickly that it is quite difficult to keep up to date, especially if you look keep track of the CVS updates.
The window manager is the interface.
X has been able to handle hardware accelerated OpenGL for some enormous length of time. I don't know when SGI were doing OpenGL on X, but I do know that it predated the game DOOM.
It's up to those who write the window managers to use the hardware via X drivers for their interfaces. That is how the 3D & accelerated games and apps do it. Projects such as "evas" provide a library to simplify this. "SDL" also does this.
For years it's been possible to have things like animated icons by continually animating the root window, and have your window manager put a transparent (empty) icon on top of the same size - but that is a nasty hack. you might want the root window (or the CPU for that matter) to do other stuff.
Berlin uses a different model - I don't know if it will even allow a choice of window managers. It's also more of a single user with no network access solution. It's to get around the "bloat" in X due to networking and security.I used Fvwm2 for a few years, starting when it was at V2.0.34 (it stayed there for a long time), and ending somewhere around its 2.4.0 release. I even wrote a theme engine for it. It's probably the most functionally powerful window manager around. It lets you do things that nothing else can. I especially miss it's well-done SmartPlacement feature. Nothing else has been as "smart".
:)
But, that said, I use E today. It's far, far prettier and implements 95% of Fvwm2's features. And it's far easier to configure. It supports all the features you mentioned. It even has a few things fvwm doesn't. It makes window borders completely optional; you can do everything without them. I leave them off for several programs. But I take a very minimalistic approach to my desktop now; the only widget I keep around is the pager. There's a syslog and a clock too, but they're drawn on the wallpaper so they don't count.
At first, I used Fvwm2 with lots of extras turned on. When GNOME came about, I replaced most of my extra widgets with the gnome panel. I set it to autohide to 1 pixel deep, and discovered I didn't really want it any more. Eventually I switched to E and turned off even more "desktop environment" features. Now I've got an almost completely clean, empty workspace. And that's how I like it. There are plenty of controls, but they're all hidden. I hardly even use the mouse any more.
Your mileage may vary. But when I switched to E, I never regretted it. It's flexible, powerful, and pretty.
... almost nothing.
I used it for years and it's the most powerful and flexible window manager I've seen. It's basically lacking three things: ease of configuration, aesthetic appeal, and "cool factor".
After writing something like 200k of configuration files for it, I got a bit sick of it. Granted, most of that was an attempt to make a decent theme engine for it. Much of the rest was an engine to make it individually customizable by the newbie users on the systems I was running.
The "cool factor" is unimportant. But the aesthetic appeal really matters to some people (like me), and an easy configuration method is important. Those seem like two potential areas of expansion.
I switched to E a couple years ago, and have never regretted it. There are only two things I miss about FVWM: SmarterPlacement, and EdgeFlip only when dragging a window. It's because I've been too lazy to add those to E.
I think the real window-manager work needed right now is building a decent interface for PDAs. We've got the desktop pretty much covered for now.
twm is standard with XFree86, actually. So, any *nix which uses/includes XFree86 will have it. (Hence, Net/Free/OpenBSD and most distros of Linux)
One of the reasons why there was such an abundance of windows managers a few years ago was that what they were doing were pushing boundries. Now that KDE/KWM has come out (& become standardised), it is so far ahead of what one or two programmers can do in a part-time project, that programmers simply aren't bothering. There is no reward for working on a new window manager because:
1) Hardly anybody nowadays is going to use it relative to the total Linux user-base anyway.
2) You think of it, it has been done already.
3) Even if you work a whole year full-time on it, KWM is still going to be better.
4) Interest in window managers has declined because pratically everyone with a WM is using either KWM or Sawfish.
5) Mac OSX & Windows guis are now much better than the plain Win95, & clunky old Mac guis. It makes any new WM seem not-as-good, and therefore more trivial.
6) With so many ppl running KDE, they're defaulted to KWM. Although KDE can be used with other window managers, KWM is tied in with KDE to the point that it is a big hassle to use anything else instead.
The idea that WM's have stalled is slightly off base. It's true that basic window managers have not advanced that much in a while but desktop environments have been movingf at a furious pace. Everyone knows about GNOME and KDE but there's lot's more out there than just those two. If you want to see the state-of-the-art in desktop environments you should go check XFce out <http://www.xfce.org>. If you've looked at it before you need to look again. It's got many more capabilities than GNOME or KDE and it's so much faster it's not even funny.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.