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Window Maker 0.80 Released
An anonymous submitter points out that Window Maker, the window manager behind GNUStep, is now up to version 0.80. There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes, as well as a Changelog.
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Window Maker is a window manager - it draws pretty borders around windows and lets you move them. KDE and GNOME are "desktop environments" -- an interapplication communication protocols and a collection of applications. Entirely different beasts.
In a way, I wish I had never discovered Windowmaker. I've been spoiled by it too much. I'm too used to 0% cpu and 0% mem usage (as measured by a whole slew of cpu and mem meters) from my window manager. Every time I try out a new build of KDE or Gnome, I get to impatient and irritated and go right back to Windowmaker and DFM.
;)
Damn you, Alfredo Kojima! Damn you to hell!
I've just upgraded to Linux From Scratch 3.1 (which I can highly recommend by the way) and I was not looking forward to compiling and installing all of Gnome and/or KDE from scratch. I even got halfway through compiling Gnome 1.4 before I tripped over the fact that a key system library needs the new Gtk+ which doesn't want to run with many other Gtk+ apps I have. Anyway, out of curiosity I grabbed WindowMaker because it was a) small and b) needed very few dependencies - the basic image libraries I think was all and since I had those I needed nothing more.
I'm not going elsewhere anytime soon. WM is fast, easily configurable and almost as pretty as E without chewing half the CPU. And to echo the sentiments of Bronster, it doesn't get in your way.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Well, I just run KDE 2 with its Windomaker/Step-style theme, and turn off a lot of the crap. ;-)
(That's something that some people fail to grasp about KDE - it just defaults to looking vaguely ms-windows-like)
Regarding the fonts, my fonts look lovely with KDE once I switched to using the antialiased ones - Qt and KDE can use the new XRENDER/Xft font subsystem of XFree86 these days.
Another problem a lot of people have is that they are running their X Server at 75dpi, when in fact many modern displays are closer to 100-120dpi (mine's 120dpi...) - I've yet to see a distro configure this properly (for a quick fix, start X with the command line -dpi option set to something approximating your display, or configure it in your XF86Config file). Since correct font rendering depends on knowing the physical size of your display, most people end up with really tiny looking fonts, since their X server thinks the display has a lower DPI than it really has.
Regarding the load time of KDE - one major problem has been traced to the inefficient way the standard dynamic linker loads C++ shared library files - a new release of the linker will fix that, and produces a huge improvement in C++-on-linux application startup times in general (this is not just a KDE problem). Coupled with the slowly-stabilising-to-de-facto-standard C++ ABI given to use by gcc 3.x, this should make linux C++ development easier and much less painful than it has been historically.
Personally, I'm not all that fond of C++, but lots of people are, and lots of commercial/niche applications on Win32 and commercial proprietary unix are in C++, so making C++ on linux work better is definitely worthwhile.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
There's a nice surprise in WindowMaker, but you can only see it on the Christmas eve. Take your system date back to December 24, then run wmaker, right click on the desktop then pick "Info Panel" from the "Info" menu to see the egg.
I only tested this with version 0.70 but I think it works with 0.80 too.
Petru
I haven't used AfterStep in a while, but if it's still more or less similar to the 1.0-era AfterStep, then it's not really all that similar to NextStep.
AfterStep began as a hack to FVWM 1.0 (originally, the dotfile format was almost identical) and thus is much more similar in terms of the way it behaves for the user to any other of the "old-school" window managers, with a dotfile to control behavior and little in the way of dynamic configuration or application management once you're in.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW