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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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Maybe it's just me, and if so I apologize, but I have yet to see anything all that new from windowmaker.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
..I for one love the simplicity of WindowMaker - it was my WM of choice up until a year or so ago.. plus it always seemed to look really funky and unique when you got it skinned, and chucked in a few dockapps :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
if this was a 1.0 release then for sure i'd probably be .80, with not THAT many improvements+features.
great to put the headline on the front page, but it's only
at
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
why? why should linux take over? it does what it needs to do for A LOT of people already
as a server+desktop+whatever already. the only thing that should have been standardized was the gui toolkit since it's a waste of memory to load both gtk and qt (i usually have konqueror and Evolution open all the time)
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Or, you could accept that it's never going to happen and that it could really be better this way. All we really need is some standard way of setting icons and menus, and doing drag/drop.
The OS with the best grammer and spelling checker.
-- mikeDOTd
That's nice to say, but all current window managers currently suck in some way, and I don't ever see that changing. All we need is a more specific standard for talking between apps and deciding on icons, menus, drag/drop, copy/paste, etc (and some good docs for writing window managers using ICCCM, since I'm quite confused).
Now that I've put all the flamebait in the title...
i cky. Widgets that just don't fit right if you resize or change your fonts (I blame this on bad coding - both in Windows Apps and in KDE Apps). A help system that looks nice, but pops up half off the screen if you're on an 800x600 laptop.
I'm quite impressed with KDE for general use, but damn is it slow to start and a little clunky to use. Even on a PIII/866 (current home box) with 512Mb memory, it's really not quick. There's also heaps of background tasks running providing 'services' to all those windows.
The end result is a slick user experience (once you're logged in), but also a more Windows feel - cutesy icons everywhere, preferences almost-all-in-one-place-but-don't-try-anything-tr
Enough about the off-topic stuff though, to Windowmaker.
I started using Windowmaker all of a couple of years ago (boo, hiss - before that amiwm a lot (reminded me of the Amiga, and was good over networked X sessions because it's so light weight - looked good on grey dumb-terminals too) - also twm and fvwm on VNC sessions, and on my Sony NWS-3410 which sort of worked, just, as an X terminal on good days.
Anyway, I've always been impressed with the simplicity of Windowmaker - dock apps have enough room to really show useful information (two wmbiff docks gives the 10 most commonly used mailboxes, mix in some fetchmail or isync and custom mutt command lines for each, and it's a one click mail solution). Back when I was using Linux as my primary desktop on the laptop, and Windows was just a VMware that got booted up for the occasional Word.doc, Windowmaker was a massive productivity boost over the others.
I still think that if I was using a Linux desktop for work rather than experimentation and games (ksame here I come!), Windowmaker would plain let me get more work done - KDE has too much kruft. With a desktop menu with 3 options:
rxvt
* exit
* save
- yep, that's it, and a docked netscape (now Opera or Mozilla) launcher, what more does one need? Not much for programming, mail (the wmbiffs above) and web. Any other tools can be launched from a handy shell quicker than navigating those menus. Sure it costs in time to learn, but it pays off bigtime in productivity, and the speed and simplicity of the WM means it's never in your way.
The improvement in Windowmaker I've enjoyed recently is that windows now automatically appear over blank bits of screen rather than over other windows. I really like that.
P.S - my config has everything in the top right corner, docks going down, minimised icons going across - 4 virtual screens (Main,Work,Net(Web),Personal) - Netscape/Opera auto-launches on Screen3, Email on Screen2 or Screen4 depending on Mailbox, rxvt's on current screen. All is happy.
I would suggest that this, at least, is already happening.
However standardizaion needs to occur and one window manager needs development to the point of having all the niceties that microsoft but without the bugs and secutriy holes.
This is certainly a recurring argument. But we don't seem to have a solution so far. Since no one desktop seems to clearly be best-of-breed for this particular market, perhaps the big distros ought to agree on one, say KDE (toss a coin !), and put their weight behind it.
Clearly one desktop environment isn't going to suit everyone, but there should at least be some sort of common standardised default choice for new users. More experienced users are free to change this as they wish.
Zeshan
Sigh. The best thing about Linux is CHOICES! I agree having a standard window manager may be seen as something that's needed, but I don't really think it is. I have yet to see a window manager that doesn't act similarly to another window manager. GNOME is similar to KDE(Ok I know they aren't window managers but to newbies they seem like it....so think sawfish to kwin) in the way it works and Window Maker is similar to Afterstep and so on and so on. Nothing is so different from one window manager to another that makes them totaly unusable. The only exception to this may be twm (who want's to use THAT ugly thing?). So, since they are all pretty similar one can deduce that a standard is not needed. So what if it takes a user 3 weeks to learn how to change the background? As long as they can use it to do real work, I have yet to see a window manager that would totally baffle a windows user to the point that they can't do work.
Gorkman
>Which one will take over?
>The OS with the best grammer and spelling checker.
Obviously you weren't using one with either.
You obviously are a little confused. All of the improvements you mention relate to desktop environments rather than window managers. IMO there are a number of perfectly capable Linux window managers - Sawfish, kwin, and Enlightenment, among others. The desktop environments are a whole other thing, though and I think your comments in that direction are good ones.
Who cares what the version number is? Window Maker has been perfectly stable and usable for years.
It's only good that they don't add too much bloat + unnecessary features. I like it the way it is - simple, fast, light-weight, and really good-looking if you select a nice theme.
Nowadays I prefer the latest KDE on my main machine, but with older computers (say 500MHz or so...) wmaker really kicks ass.
There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes
Actually, that's GNUS. After all, we mustn't ignore the 15 years of hard work by the GNU Project, which has made all existence possible.
What's this major obsession over 1.0 releases?
I would hardly call WindowMaker "feature-depleted". You know, before I used WM, I used fvwm2. Yes, FVWM 2.x. And much to my surprise, this 0.5x (which it was at the time) was much cooler and better window manager than FVWM2. (No uebercustomizable outlook, but it was simple, just as fast, and at least the configuration was about million times easier, plus theme support was *much* more mature...)
I don't care about the program's version number, as long as it works. =)
and you're married you can call it widow-maker as well.
I'm glad Linux gives people choices. There's nothing less user friendly than an operating system whose choices have all been made for you - and against what you would have chosen.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
why? why should linux take over?
I agree with you, but I would still like to see linux gain around 10% in the desktop arena. From a web developers perspective I'd see this as about the only way the web will stay 'free'. Just so that people (other web developers) begin to realize that there are more browsers than MSIE. And so that web pages stop using proprietary fonts and such.
I did. Freaked the crap out of me until I realised what was going on... (Why Christmas Eve though? Or does it start even earlier?)
(This was in 0.65, as compiled by those nice people at Slackware, but I assume it'll be in the default version of WindowMaker shipped with other distributions)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
wmflame, the system load monitor.
Well I'd venture to say that the desktop doesn't need to be standardised at all. I mean we're talking *nix here: do it your own way. If I want my windows to hop around on fire, then that's for me. No one forcing each other to do it the "right way".
On the other hand there really does need to be some standardization in the guts of the desktop enviornment. Looking at what all these WMs and you see that about the only thing they have in common is X (which to me seems like a pile of crap, but works extremely well). In my opinion, the thing that needs to happen is that X needs to have more extended, standardized functionality. It would probably require a re-write, but I think X could use a re-write anyway to dump a lot of legacy code for those 15 people who might still be using some of that extremely obscure hardware. The core needs to be the same, but what the desktop enviornment does with it at the end should be up to the enviornment. Of course as long as I can use Gnome apps on KDE and the other way around, I really can't complain too much.
With all the talk lately about how cryptic and information-less the Linux kernel changelogs are, I just now noticed how refreshingly descriptive the WM changelogs are (and have always been).
I agree. I use Gnome on my main desktop, but my poor little P133 laptop is feeling a lot better with something lighter. I'm continuously waffling between WindowMaker and XFce on that machine, and I don't really see me decide for one over the other in the near future, but we'll see how this new release stands up.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Linux" won't ever standardize on anything (sorry to say). Hopefully a majority of the community WILL standardize on one basic version of a desktop environment, and office suite, etc. If there's a 'defacto' standard, more people will use it. Sorry, but I don't WANT people to have to learn lots of stuff *before* using a system just to be able to make a choice.
No one is saying to take away choices - you can go keep running sawfish all you want. But having a pronounced 'standard' will help encourage people to learn and support that standard more. The more users, the more demand for my services. If Linux, which I've invested a lot of time in learning, always remains a 'niche' player, future job prospects will be less than optimal. Let all the newbies in - that's more work for us later. Look at how many 'newbie' type Windows users there are that know just enough about a system to screw it up, then call for help. Who do they call? People that know and support Windows, not Linux. If more people are encouraged to try Linux on the desktop (because of a default - and usable - 'standard') then the more secure the job market will be for people with solid Linux skills.
creation science book
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.
GNUStep, all nice and shiny, but one most missing feature fron {Open|Next}Step is the terminal with the search capability! When are we going to get it?
All of these slim WMs are good for 486s, but on a 1ghz CPU, or even my 400mhz cpu, speed really isnt the issue because its fast enough. Then it comes down to which interface has the most features, and is the easiest to use.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
What I don't get is the obsession with 1.0 release numbers. Is it a bad thing that a project has matured and can definately be considered more than a 1.0 release?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE isnt all that quick thats why i dont use it.
But enlightenment, has tons of good features, Its very fast, its very stable, Its my favorite.
WMaker has nice features too, but when it comes to usability thats a completely diffrent story. Dont forget the ability to totally customize your interface, nothing compares to E. E even supports the latest features of Xrender, really I think E is cool.
KDE is ok but its too much like Windows.
Gnome is another Windows clone, just not as fancy as KDE.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Do we still need wsetfont, a small utility to configure fonts for various languages?
Since font specification of Window Maker is based on Latin-1 and not internationalized, non-Latin-1 people need to invoke wsetfont to display our native language on the window titles.
I tried to write a patch, like I wrote a patch for TWM, Sawfish, IceWM, and so on. (Thus, all we need to do is to set locale [i.e., LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL variable] for these window managers to handle i18n characters.) However, it was difficult to write a patch because Window Maker is made from two parts of core and widgets. I had no idea how to communicate the mode (XFontStruct mode or XFontSet mode) between the core and widgets. Are there anyone who are willing to try this problem?
(I wonder how many non-Latin-1 people live in the Slashdot community.)
There are already debian packages in .. sweeet.
unstable
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
It HAS a standard WM. KDE.If people want to use Gnome, as long as its enough like Windows, its standard. Windows is standard, copy Windows and you have a standard WM. If you want a standard WM, use Gnome or KDE. There you go.
Theres no reason why there can only be ONE standard WM. 2 is better because they compete. 2 is not going to confuse people, because people once had the choice to pick from IE or Netscape.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
GNUStep is the future, forget KDE and GNOME, they are doomed by their implementation languages, not suitable for real OO programing, and the making of real components (KOM like COM is a hack). We already have an standard to follow (OpenStep), and the OSX applications can be backported. Once the GNUStep folks reach completion, then a real UNIX'y desktop will appear, and not another Windows-wannabe.
No, if anything, Linux could use a centralized standard for window manager assets, and Linux could use a portable mechanism for extensions like docked applets, etc.
Most distributions have their own system for generating menus for Window managers that support application launching menus, their own location for shared icons, etc. Normalizing this would help make the multitude of window managers more usable. It's silly that so much work is being repeated from one Linux distribution to the next, and that the smaller ones go without.
As an example of portable extensions, many window managers support little plugins, either as docked applications, or extensions to their tool/launcher bars. There should be a standard library interface which let you use your talky fish hack as a docked WM applet, a KDE tool tray item, or a Gnome launcher bar applet with just one set of code. This would keep the choice of nifty hacks and such from funneling people into just a few choices, and would leverage the kind of modularity that makes unices so damned useful in the first place. Any other extensions should be like this. If there's not a damned good reason to make something KDE-centric, GNOME-centric, WMaker-centric, etc - then don't!
I still have not figured out how to get rid of these silly app icons that pop up for every program you open. The only way I figured out how is to right click the apps title bar, click attributes, click the menu for Application Specific and put a check in No Application Icon.
This has bugged me for years.
thanks a lot folks for the effort!
after using kde eversince, i shifted to windowmaker about an year ago! and it has grown on me. the shift was particularly because of the speed of kde, and me getting more comfortable with the bash prompt. and i havn't regretted the move at all.
what i like in wm is 1. speed, 2. use of very minimum resources 3. minimalistic approach. you get just as much as you would require in a normal session. nothing more nothing less!
Though I didn't really notice any big differences in WM 0.80.0, it's still good to see that development on this project is still going on. I've tried KDE and Gnome, and kinda liked them both, except for two things: speed and lightness. I'm now all the way back to WindowMaker, and runs brilliantly on my AMD380. My PC know feels faster than ever. For example, if a friend of mine tries to surf the net, rip a CD to mp3 s and plays music with Winamp on his 1GHz WinME machine, the responsiveness of the computer drops dramatically. On my machine, I can do the same things without a hassle, music never skips, etc.
The only thing I miss when running WM, is a decent filemanager. For diskoperations, etc. I'm happily running MC in a terminal, but when I want to browse through a CD and open up photo's or mp3's "on the fly" I'm rather stuck. Konqueror and Nautilus are too heavy for me. Has anyone got a lighter alternative?
ROX is a fantastically great, small, and fast filemanager, http://rox.sourceforge.net/
Very cool, has most of the features I liked of Nautilus/Konqueror, but makes my AMDK6-2 400 work *so* much faster..... Give it a try, really great project.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That would be linux or other unixish OSs. Most people (myself included for this message) don't bother using them though.
Remeber, the original usage (aside from playing games) for Unix was as an industrial strength word processor for AT&T's legal department.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
...was the day i managed to actually crash it, while doing slightly dumb things with preferences. Up popped a dialog box informing me that Windowmaker had suffered a segmentation fault, and asking me if i would like it to restart itself. (and that is the ONLY time i ever managed to crash it, unlike, say, Enlightenment or Sawfish)
That is the most graceful crash handling i have ever encountered. Beautiful! I've been a loyal user ever since.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
How many CPU's do you have? I'm using Wmmon+SMP on my Dual-CPU machine.
Slagborr
My Linux desktop experience dates back to RedHat 5.1, when Windowmaker and Afterstep were both part of the default install. While I always admired the NeXT (the cube is the coolest machine ever), I never had the chance to spend any time using one. I would like to know which WM is a closer approximation of Nextstep's GUI.
For maximum compatability with current software, I have been using Gnome, Enlightenment with an OpenStep Theme, and a GTK OpenStep theme. All of that bloat really eats the resources. It would be nice to run a lighter WM and only call Gnome and KDE into memory as needed.
I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based software?
'cos I can't get blackbox to play nice when I'm running it remotely. Same w/ IceWM, Gnome, and KDE.
I'll admit to being a newbie to WMs. Most of my Linux work has been shell access only. But I'm trying to put together a experimental desktop system out of some spare parts and would like to have more than a single console available.
I'd like to find a feature comparison of various popular WMs. I want to find which is the best WM for me. Does anyone know where I could find such a thing?
I don't want to start a flamewar. This is an honest question. "Best" is a highly subjective term. But I'd like to find one that's best for me, because that's what matters.
Some will probably answer with the question "Well what are you looking for in a WM?" so that they can make a recommendation. I don't know. That's why I'd like to find a good comparison. I might see a feature listed that I hadn't thought of. There are just too many WMs out there to do all the research myself. If push comes to shove I'll probably just pick one, install it, and use it. I'd prefer to make an informed decision.
Constitutionally Correct
amen!!!
*schnarf*
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
You don't get it, do you? :)
News related to the window manager favored by slashdot crew stand above everything else, and deserve special attention of working masses
Just try searching news archive and you'll see
that E and WM received order of magnitude more news items than any other wm.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
If you run X on a machine with 32 megs of ram and a small processor (P75+), you don't *NEED* to run TWM or Blackbox. Windowmaker runs quite nicely on a config that small, and has more features than both combined.
Besides the small memory footprint Windowmaker also features icon sized programs that sit at the bottom of your screen, called "docapps" which are usually monitoring programs. They take up very little space, and can provide tons of operational information at a glance. If you run windowmaker check out WMMon, WMCalClock, WMNet and WMApm (if you have a laptop).
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
if you have microsoft windows, gnome or kde, go read and enjoy your new workstation...
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
windowmaker banners nice workstation
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
And for today (27/12/2001), clicking the icon in the info panel gives you a short but cheerful message.
You forgot to mention that fvwm2 (at least, in all the incarnations I've seen) is rather ugly, whereas WM has a kind of elegance to it. It looks nice, and doesn't clutter things up.
It's nice. I alternate between KDE, BlackBox, and WM, depending on mood and the phase of moon.
No they're not, at least not all of them. A reasonably obeyed DnD standard is as relevant to WM as it is to KDE or GNOME.
Infact, WM was able to do useful things with DnD when GNOME and KDE were both still in their infancy.
WM is an application like any other. It benefits from being able to "play well with others" as much as a word processor or spreadsheet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I moved from sawfish/GNOME to KDE to WindowMaker over the course of this year.
It makes you realise what a pig KDE is in terms of resources. GNOME is faster than KDE but isn't anywhere near to KDE as far as 'Desktop Environment' functionality goes.
WindowMaker needs a fair bit of work put in before all the icons/miniwindows for your apps behave as you want them .
It is not immediately clear how to suppress multiple application icons for apps like xmms, or to override application icons supplied by the apps themselves like NEdit. Nor is it obvious how to actually dock an app like WMClock
Once you figure this out (and i think 0.8 has some extra features in this department), i find WindowMaker to be the most useful desktop environment available on Linux.
Currently, i use OS X primarily, and Window Maker absolutely blitzes it for speed, even on a lower-specced machine (P3-500 vs. G4-550) I also run Window Maker on XDarwin for X apps on the Powerbook.
I don't quite know why a minor upgrade to this package warrants a Slashdot story, but i might as well take this opportunity to thank the WindowMaker team for making my computing life easier.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I have been an faithful WM follower since around 0.20. I still use it on all the slower machines. But I switched to Enlightenment (higly tuned to have the feel of WM) because of the missing support for Xinerama in WM.
... Don't get me wrong - I love WM but after the 100th window that popped up half in a monitor half in the other and the 100th maximized window that took both display - I gave up.
:( )
Today, most of the videocards come with dual monitor support. It's easy to put the old 14-15" next to the shiny new 17-19" one. But using WM in this setup is a pain
I want my Xinerama (and I don't have enough coding capabilities to add it myself and contribute the patch
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Does anyone care to share their experiences using KDE as the desktop environment and WindowMaker as the window manager? For example, how is it done and what visual elements of each show up on the screen? Does one still get to enjoy KDE's antialiasing of fonts under this method? Thanks :-)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Try FileRunner (yes thats one word) simple MC clone written in TCL/TK with a built in FTP client thats rather powerful. Has quick links to useful operations like uncompressing TGZ volumes and MKDIR etc. I beleive you can configure file assoications for automatic aplication launching. The best thing about FileRunner for me is as long as I have been using Linux (about 3 years) it has gone up only 0.01 in version numbers, that kind of stability is nice for me.
What? Too bent on being a karma whore to lose a few points on a malformed flame, AC? You do realize that GNU's Not Unix, right?
This thing is -just- a window manager. Which is to say that its primary purpose in life is just managing windows.
It is absurd that the above statement is not obvious to some. Those who would spend nearly half a decade adding complexity to such a simple application really need to stop, think about what they're doing, fix whatever bugs remain, and release it as 1.0.
I used Window Maker for a year or two, before I got sick of choosing between persistant bugs in older versions, or senseless bloat and new bugs in newer versions.
-
Kid-proof tablet..
It would be nice, if for things that require a filename (ie, appicon), the configuration boxes would be xdnd enabled. Put this in throughout the wm, and then I would have a truly integrated environment between a filemanager (ROX is the one I use) and windowmaker. X direct save would be an added bonus.
Rox
well, Ion and 3dwm might come pretty close.
Erik Dalén
Emelfm. I love this filemanager. Search for it on freshmeat.
I used to use this filemanager. I switched to emelfm for some reason or another, but I can't really remember why. Hmmm. I'm going to have to install this again and check it out.
WindowMaker has really been demoted to the 3rd choice desktop interface by many distrobutions and developers.
Distros largely say something like "choose kde, gnome/sawfish or windowmaker" - when did you last see windowmaker mentioned first in that line-up when installing??
It is a pity that the distrobutions that push the "taskbar" approach (and default themes! as previous posts have said that other distro's do not have to display a Windows style theme).
Unfortunatly such moves to keep pushing the "taskbar" style interface to newbies are trying to emulate rather than inovate far too much. Is the Windows style inferface really that good? Do we need to give newbies a homogenised and familiar windowsy approach?
If linux is being marketed as an alternative why are such interfaces being pushed as the defaults?
Are we conceding that we have no better ways than to emulate? I dont mean to provoke anybody saying that one way is better than another but i'm sure you all agree that they are interesting questions.
Anyway take another approach - is faster necessarily better? Would some people not prefer an interface that is slower loading but more graphically intense with animations and such?
The media sometimes protrays linux as being faster in every way which is not always true depending on how it is set up and indeed not always the best option for certain specific implementations (as there are many other criteria to address). For some people a slow to load KDE is ok bacause it fulfills their needs. The solution is probably to give many choices.
I started with choices of WindowMaker and fvwm and a few other more spartan interfaces like twm etc.
I really wonder would I ever have the same opinion of Linux if I had been given a default of KDE or GNOME/Sawfish etc. Another interesting question to ponder on....
I don't see how Linux could take away choices. It's GPL'd. Let's say Linus becomes convinced by this dubious "one window manager" argument. Linus wants to make you use KDE. What could he do to enforce this? I guess come up with a patched X server that is hardwired to launch KDE, then patch the kernel to checksum any program trying to access video hardware. If it isn't the special restricted X, refuse to run it. The scheme is obviously porous, since you have the ability and the right to undo these changes, and to distribute your fix to others.
This whole idea of "Linux should standardize..." is silly. Linux is not a corporation. It is a technology. So apply this silliness to other technologies: "Plastics should standardize. They shouldn't let themselves be molded and extruded and pressed and fabricated into so many monitor housings, motorcycle fairings, forks, wire insulation and garbage bags! It's too confusing for the consumer! How will the consumer decide which piece of plastic to buy when they're all different?"
Well, Linux is just as malleable as plastic. Suitable for everything from PDA's (barely) to compute clusters. I think the "standardizers" see Linux as solely a replacement for Windows. That is silly. If a true replacement for Windows arises, it may or may not use a Linux kernel. Either way, the kernel will not be the hard part.
IMHO there were some pretty nice themes in themes.org before it was fucked up... (Not sure if they are available at wm.classic.themes.org)
Just take a theme with nice colors, fonts etc., change the background picture to something from digitalblasphemy.com and you're all set.
And its not like ram and cpu cycles are something we ever fully tap out anymore, any extra ram or resources is sitting not being used by anything most likely.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Well, maybe I'd help if people could find an introduction to writing window managers. Any time I ask people, all they tell me is "have a look at such-and-such window manager's source code," which is fine, but I haven't had the time to spend weeding through the code to figure out the big picture. (If you'd like to give me an idea of the big picture, or refer me to some documentation that does, I'd be grateful.)