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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?"
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 ?
</joke, not flamebait>
Keeping
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
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
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 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
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
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.
...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 !
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?
There's a good reason you don't want to refer to the next version of Enlightenment as E17 (at least if you were cringing at the music charts in the UK 6-7 years ago).
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
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'.
I recall my recent attempts to install my new Nvidia Gforce MX 200
Linux: No reboots. The new card (the old one was a Voodoo 3) was detected during the boot sequence after adding the card. I configured the card for my setup and it started X using the new card without missing a beat. Time taken: 30 seconds (literally)
Windows: 4 reboots, two failed shut downs, a trip into Linux to download drivers because the ones on the disk didn't work, and finally it worked. Time taken, about an hour (including download time)
Granted, I then had to install the Nvidia version of the liunux drivers to get full value from the card, but that was relatively simple and didn't involve a reboot of the system to achieve, and took less than 30 minutes including downloading the drivers. This process wouldn't even be an issue if Nvidia would GPL their drivers so they could be included in the kernel and X. Yes, that's right, the only hick-up I had with installing a new graphics card under linux was problems caused by non-GPL software.
Here's another example
A recent change of network card on:
Linux: restarted computer, the change of network cards was detected during boot, the current network config was migrated to the new card (after asking me if I wanted too) and the connection to the network was made without a reboot. Time taken: 10 seconds
Windows 98: The new card was detected, a driver was requested (it was on a floppy) and the machine finished it's boot process. No network connection. I open the network config tools to find that a secondl network card config has been loaded (which doesn't work). I have to remove the original setup, config the new setup and reboot. Time taken: 10 minutes.
Still not convinced? Try it with a sound card.
Sadly, I think Linux gets a hard rap when it comes to hardware. Changing and installing hardware in Linux is exceptionally easy, and limited only by a lack of support by hardware manufacturers. Given support by manufacturers linux ability to hand new hardware or hardware changes leaves Windows for dead. I can even change my processor and motherboard anmd linux will get everything sorted out during the restart without having to reboot once. Try that in Windows!
Oh and before you start telling me that Linux doesn't support as much hardware as Windows, try installing windows on a Macintosh, or a mainframe, or a wristwatch. Many operating system companies won't even move to a new platform for fear of what new hard might do to their stability. Apple's reliability on Macintosh is often cited as a result of a limited hardware base (an that reliability isn't that good. Microsoft originally started NT on an Alpha and said they wanted a kernel that would be easy to port to different processors. They don't even support the Alpha chipset anymore and are having troubles getting Windows to run on x86.
We've got Linux running on three different platforms here at work (x86, PowerPC, M68K) and running well.
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.
until one body can take the linux kernel, the GNU tools, all the GPL'd libraries, xfree86, the apps you use, (/)etc and put them together in a way much more like MS does with the layers of windows and much unlike a modern distro, this is going to happen. nobody wants this though, sorry. geeks only for now.
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
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...
I'm suggesting the GPL only works in environments where there is no parasitism.
The GPL works when no one is trying to capitalize and exploit it. In instances like those, the GPL is pointless, and GPL'ing your code is akin to hanging a sign on your ass saying "screw me over". The GPL is basically unprepared to remain sturdy and secure in environments like these. It was written under the assumption that we all give and take equally. Thats not the case anymore, because there is no way to ensure your work won't be co-opted by an individual or organization with less than purely altruistic intent.
Bowie J. Poag
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.
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 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.
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
The GPL works when no one is trying to capitalize and exploit it. In instances like those, the GPL is pointless, and GPL'ing your code is akin to hanging a sign on your ass saying "screw me over".
Most of the code I've released for free is microcontroller firmware, and I just put it into the public domain so it can get combined with proprietary code without any strings attached.
The result has been that my little 8051 microcontroller web page has grown in popularity over the years and regularily swaps with a page at Reynold's as the #1 or #2 search result at google (for the query "8051"). A few years ago we started selling circuit boards and pre-programmed chips.
Long ago the site was hosted at a university (for free), and they refusted to continue hosting it. That was about the same time the boards started selling. In the last year, the web site has actually been able to pay for it's (rather spendy) hosting and other expenses, and soon the site will pay me back for all the electronic parts and other expenses over the last couple years.
I won't be rich from this, and in fact I probably won't ever be able to quit my day job and do it full time... but seeing it stand on its own financially is a long way from "screw me over", and it's almost all due to giving away source code, schematics, and know-how for free (public domain, not even GPL'd) and somewhere along the way enough people wanted to buy the circuit board. I never intended to sell anything when I stated the site in 1995, but after getting message after message asking for a source for the special parts or if I would make just one board for them, I had to do something. It's all worked out quite well.. and while it can be a lot of work at times, it's something I started simply to share my own projects and ideas with others for free.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The RH-based distros have kudzu, which detects hardware changes and (theoretically) configures it and loads the proper driver. I've seen it in action on a friends computer running mandrake...if you have a stock kernel with all the modules compiled, it actually does work pretty well with standard hardware. But yeah, if you change your hardware it will come up during the boot process and ask to to configure it.
Of course when it doesn't work you're arguably worse off than doing it manually, because you have to figure out how to undo whatever changes it makes, prevent it from trying to set up the hardware again, and then configure it yourself. Sort of like windows.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
What I would like to see are more window managers that use pie menus. Piewm is ancient. Pie menus for gtk seems dead.
Try ROX-Filer:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/
and some apps I've written to work with it:
http://freefall.homeip.net/code/
This is a very nice filer, and it uses the filesystem for everything, as opposed to trying to come up with some weird-assed scheme. For example, applications are simply directories with certain files within them. What could be simpler?
Light, fast, elegant, and it makes sense.
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.
The workplace shell, and all of my apps speaking to each other and the shell itself (ie, drag a color, font, image to a piece of the app, like its menu, and *poof* new look happens) the way they did in that environment.
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).
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
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
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
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)
With Windows, I can't even begin to recount my experiences. In a nutshell, when I rebooted, Windows would detect "my new" network card and add another NIC in the list, but refuse to let me remove the original, "shadow" NIC. Because it wouldn't let me remove the original configuration, I couldn't set the IP in the new device. I refused to spend more than 30 minutes on this problem because my time and sanity is worth much more, so in the end I just wound up giving the device a different IP. (Fortunately I had that option available to me.) My father had a very similar experience when moving his NIC to a different slot.
Of course, in Linux it simply wasn't an issue. Linux doesn't care what slot the card is in. It just works.
And then there's the time I tried to install a serial mouse on an NT4 system that originally had a PS/2 mouse. I spent an entire day trying to make that work until finally I just reinstalled NT. (Before you ask, I have years of experience supporting and maintaining NT in a large organization, so I figure I should know how to switch a mouse.)
Jason.
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
There's two major problems here:
;)
1) It's fine to say "use a GeForce3" if you have one. However, the majority of us do NOT have a GeForce3. For some of us (like everybody who's not on an Intel-based system), a GeForce3 may not even be on option. Enlightenment 0.16.5 works fine on my AIX box - it even runs fine on my old home AIX box (a model 350 - a whole whopping 66mz Power chipset). Remember that Sun and SGI are both shipping Enlightenment now, and even in the Intel-based Linux world, I don't think it's safe to assume any more capability than 24-bit color. E17 shouldn't be assuming effects - it should be saying "use options if the X server (which may not be XFree86) says they are available". Last I checked, even XFree86 didn't have XRender extension support for all drivers yet.
2) There's a major distinction to be made between "looks nice" and "is productively useful". Yes, it's good if your window manager looks pretty (I'd like to thank Christian Kreibich for his Ganymede theme) but at least in *my* case, I get paid to get things done on the computer. As a result, I *want* my window manager to look pretty, but I *need* it to help me get things done quickly.
Now, some features are pretty easy to demonstrate why they'd be useful - for instance, it *would* be nice to have sane support for drop shadows. However, the reason for drop shadows isn't "because it's cool" - it's because it's additional visual information that helps you identify the edges of windows and the actual stacking order.
Now maybe there's a good HCI (human computer interaction) reason for supporting motion blur and bump mapping for the window manager. And if there is, I'll be happy to listen. But keep in mind that you're talking about *window manager* controlled screen real estate, not application windows. There seems to be a backlash by at least some users who feel window managers take too much screen space away (I'm one of these - my current theme has only 5 pixels on sides and bottom, and 25 or so in the titlebar). Not much you can *DO* with bump mapping or motion blur in a strip 5 pixels wide
Just keep in mind that "eye candy" and "usability" are not always synonymous....
Nah. I'm just better looking than you.
Bowie J. Poag
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...'
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
I'll second that. KDE is a nice general environment, but I use BlackBox exclusively at home when I'm doing software development. I'm amazed at how fast it pops up after logging in through XDM; it's usually ready to go by the time my hand has reached the mouse.
Great. So we are stuck with the the wrong sized screens because that is what they used in movies?
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.
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).
If you want fun, own a laptop and change network cards and networks regularly.
/etc/resolv.con etc. Compile a kernel with all the known network drivers. Then, plug in PCMCIA network card and execute netchange [network] and you're away.
I pass through three logical networks each with wireless and non wireless access points. Any set of IP settings and network card may be in use at any time.
Linux : Take 10 minutes to write and app that changes symlinks for
Note, that you can change network card without dropping tcp connections [e.g. move from non wireless to wireless mid download without it failing]
Windows [98] : Inset new make of network card. Discover you have no drivers. Find another machine with an internet link to download the drivers. Install the drivers. Discover you now have to copy stuff over from the Windows CD. Find copy of Correct Windows CD & CDROM drive. Install stuff. Reboot machine. Change IP settings. Reboot Machine. Reapply service packs & patches. Reboot Machine many times. Plug into network.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
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
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.
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 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!
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
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.
because their desktop is better - even if the OS behind it... shall we say... lacks.
>>>>>
I get sick of hearing this all the time. Would you please care to point out exactly what is lacking? Try reading a book about the designs of both Linux and WinNT and compare the two. For where I'm sitting, WinNT has a couple of advantages. First, the VM works pretty nicely, and wasn't just rewritten a few weeks ago (although I must admit, the 2.4.10 VM has been working great so far). The sheduler seems to be better for desktop usage, as it takes into account the GUI when making sheduling decisions (which makes for a more responsive GUI). The central paradigm of an object oriented OS is light-years ahead of the antiquated UNIX "everything is a file" model. Take, for example, the ugly hack that is ioctl(). The Windows object model recognizes that everything is not a file, and makes everything an object that supports a particular interface. On the other hand, Linux has much better integration with the command line, a superior set of filesystems, and arguably better security (it is less advanced, but also less full of holes!). Thus, each OS has its advantages and disadvantages. It is a much more level playing field than it used to be. Windows != DOS anymore...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's exactly what E17 is trying to do. They're even making a widget set that takes advantage of EVAS (the HW accelerated canvas). I just hope a large base of native E apps builds up.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ensuring compatible hardware from the onset makes life not only easier but possible. Then, 10 minute installs are the norm. .so, nothing more. I put the file in a directory, and it should work automagically. It should require me to recompile my kernel, the driver, or both. It should not be dependant on a particular patch-release of a kernel (binary drivers on Linux break monthly, while on BeOS they only broke during big transitions).
>>>>>
Not really. It took me days to install the NVIDIA drivers. First, the standard RPMS didn't have support for Mandrake 8.1, so I had to try and compile it for source. Then there were problems compiling, then there were problems with unresolved kernel symbols and whatnot. Ugh. One thing that really struck me as brain dead was putting drivers in the main source tree. Linux does it, XFree86 does it. Every other OS lets you just download a driver package (maybe including source) and install it using either a script or a GUI installer. In Linux, it seems as if developers try as hard as they can to get you to either upgrade your kernel or your version of X. Unless you stick to the kernel version that comes with your distro (which is usually a bloated POS), every driver upgrade is almost certainly accompanied by a recompile of something or the other. A driver is just a single
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Also, without modifying X11 at all, a program could put a menu bar at the top of the screen. There is no reason for all the menu bars to be the *same* window, see. As long as the programs cooperate in only showing their menu bar when they have focus.
Having anything other than the application update the scrollbars is impossible. This would require communication about the current document size and position to the windowing system, this sort of interface will easily exceed in complexity and bugs the interface needed for an application to draw a scrollbar (which is to draw some rectangles and triangles and detect mouse clicks). It would also prevent the use of the scrollbars for anything other than fixed 2-d scrolling. Check Win32 which has such scrollbars and see how many programs really use them (win32 also provides a scrollbar "widget" where the program sets everything, don't count that, only count the "scroll windows").
What X11 needs is to get some of the crap out of the window manager and to vastly simplify the interface. I would like a "the user clicked on the title bar" event, so the application can decide whether to raise the window and what other windows to raise. I would like a "the user tried to resize the window to this size" event so the application can have it's own rules about what sizes are legal. Both of these would eliminate a lot of horrible X11 window manager interface where the application has to teach the window manager how to perform.
The biggest trick is that in each of the bit flags, one of the bits indicates that whether you are turning things on from zero, or toggling them from the default.
In my work on window managers I have found it vital to pay attention to the Motif hints to turn off resize buttons, some programs assumme this will make it impossible to resize their windows. Most of the rest of the stuff can be ignored.