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fvwm Turns Ten
Some Old Dude writes "fvwm, F* Virtual Window Manager, is celebrating its 10th birthday in a few days. This is the window manager I used when cutting my Linux teeth back in the last millennium, and the one I still use today (after trying many newer ones). If it's been a while since you've seen what fvwm can do, check out its features and screenshots."
Here's some food for ya !
How to explain FVWM to a troll ?
In the good old days, when THE distribution was something you downloaded as floppy images, when a 386 DX with 16 megs was considered a nice machine (with your file server being a 486/33), when you had a Minix FS and hex-edited your boot device on your boot floppy, in those old days you did not want a *huge* window manager.
But after downloading the slackware X series of floppy disks, you wanted SOME kind of WM.
And yes, it was cosidered a bonus to open an xterm without the system starting to swap.
Can your stomach take more, little troll ?
Scenario: Company is considering switching to Linux desktops, to save money on new installations. This costs money on existing installations, due to re-installing and re-training.
Although all windowing environments bear some similarities, the closer to Windows one is, the less retraining is required, and the cheaper it is.
You may be able to pick up any interface, but consider people you've helped. How many of them have written every step down?
Use whatever desktop you want. Don't worry too much if somebody prefers something else.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Twm probably has some nostalgia value amongst people who rolled their own X11 back in the day, but fvwm used to be the default for most Linux systems, so it's got plenty of nostalgia value of its own. Plus, it's still going strong; twm is all-but-dead, while fvwm still has a large community of enthusiastic users and developers. Including me. I keep trying out all these newer WMs, and they always seem to be missing some essential feature that I've come to depend on over the years, and/or they're massive, bloated monstrosities that don't do noticably more than my old workhorse.
(rant)
Why on earth did RedHat take FVWM out of its distrubution? Like many long time Linux users, FVWM has been my window manager for years. It's small, fast, flexible, and infinitely configurable - with three CDs of space for RedHat 9, you'd think they'd be able to find a couple of megs for FVWM. Even their "switchdesk" utility still wants FVWM as an option.
Taking FVWM out of the standard distribution is just plain dumb, not to mention insulting to many Linux users. How many years was FVWM the default window manager for RedHat? I've been using FVWM for years on RedHat, but now I have to change to a more "modern" window manager because they can't spare 3 megs on their distribution CDs? Grrr.
(/rant)
"Good people drink good beer"
Well, I use FVWM. It is my WM of choice, and I like it a lot. It is small, it is (very) fast, it is scriptable, it does not look nor act like a Windows knock-off (though you can probably make it, both, of course). And I use it on fast machines, mind you, it's not that I couln't use KDE. It's just that I like plain X + FVWM better.
And it does have some cute features. I have impressed a couple of friends with FVWM's "stroke" thing, starting apps and controlling audio volume and stuff, by drawing shapes on the screen with the mouse---though I must say that I don't really have much use for that, save for showing off.
I wonder why is that so many of you regard mass adoption as something so desirable that justifies turning a first-class Unix system (oops, hope no SCO spies are reading this) into a bad Windows clone. Or even a good one. I just can't see the point: if a user needs something Windows-like, well, there is Windows already.
If I were to say what to do, I'd have people stop wasting time cloning Windows, and use it to make Linux a better Unix. And as for GUIs, I'd like to see a good GUI in the Unix style. Like, say, apps with hybrid command line/graphic interfaces. Graphic pipelines, perhaps? Or if you have to copy it, something in the NextStep/OSX style (last time I checked, GNUStep was nowhere near usable). I don't know.
But then again, neither me nor you nor anyone can make Linux developers do this or that; everybody is free to choose what to do with our Linux-hacking time. Fortunately.
I have, more than once, been incredibly relieved to find twm installed as a part of X on machines (not OS 10). Because when the install fails without getting all 90 billion parts of gnome or kde installed correctly, or using an old machine that can't handle the latest and greatest, I can use twm as a marginally useful window manager to start getting things done.
And when this happens, the one of the first things I do is download and install fvwm. Woohoo!
Well, you got me there, but still, just because many X11 WMs are poster children for bad taste and color blindness, doesn't mean fvwm should be kept on life support. Pull the plug already and let this brain damaged embarrassment to the *nix community die.
Because people want it to.
Either you are a really good troll or you truely believe what you just said. Perhaps you don't realize the elitism and self induced masochism behind your words.. perhaps you do. Either way, I feel compelled to make a counter, and I intend it to be as vague and pointless as your perspective.
A lot of folks seem to think that Windows represents the pinnacle of GUI aesthetics, and that everything else (except Apple) should try to copy it. These folks look down on fvwm as "not even as good as Windows 3.1".
First, I do not see how believing fvwm lags behind Windows 3.1 in technology as saying the same thing as Windows is the pinnacle of GUI aesthetics. Please do not put words into peoples mouths to suit your needs. Most people mean exactly what they say. When I say product A is not as good as product B I do not hide any subtext claiming product B is the best. Just that it's better. (For the record, I do NOT think windows 3.1 is better than fvwm, not by a long shot.)
I don't agree. I like the Unix desktop at its most Unixy - clean, efficient andminimal. No need to waste pixels catering for an idiot when this desktop is the interface for a computer professional. But if I wanted to waste some pixels, and I have in the past, I'd waste them on stuff that looks cool to my aesthetic, not what looks reassuring to some marketer trying to soothe the average user.
This may be a given, but minimal does not imply efficien tor clean, efficient does not imply minimal or clean, and clean does not imply efficient or minimal. These are all seperate and non-related attributes. As a computer professional who stares at a monitor all damn day, I prefer to look at something pretty. Also, because my desktop is pretty does not mean I am a "clueless idiot newb" nor does it imply I do not know what I am doing. MY desktop is also pretty according to my tastes, and not the tastes of a marketing rep. See, most of us don't configure our computers to be what other people think they should be, and the fact that you would presume we do is flat out insulting.
They aren't trying to be "as good as Windows 3.1". They're in a totally different space. Just because they run on PC hardware now doesn't mean they partake of the PC mentality. These WM's can be configured from minimal to maximal, but at maximal they express a strong aesthetic that's quite different from consumer OS's.
As ambiguous as this is I will attempt to make sense of this. I do not know exactly what you mean by "PC Mentality" as I do not see how the goals of PC users are any different from any computer user. Most of us just want to use our PC's to do what we do, and to be able to do that in a manner that we enjoy. MOST of us don't think we should make our computing experience feel like hard work. This is, however, not the typical attitude of the elitist.
I am, as you may have guessed, a KDE user. Seeing as the whole of KDE is an environment and not a simple window manager most comparisons are immediately invalid or rediculous. I will try to make one though. I can configure KDE to present me with nothing but a background color and a mouse cursor. I can have it present a simple hard to read application menu when I click on this solid colored desktop. I can even have the window frame only be 1 pixel largeon the sides and bottom and 5 pixels large on the top. I can configure it to switch desktops with the mouse wheel or simply by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen and "push" into the next one. I can make it act like any minimal window manager you use, or I could have icons littering my desktop, a full size kicker bar, huge animated mouse cursors, and a liud and obnoxious sound for every little action that can be performed. So.. does that make my wm configurable enough for your stringent standards?
Forget about "user friendliness". Real WM's are delicately balanced between aesthetics and efficiency, leaving little room for user-friendliness, which means accomodation to beginners.
You seem to have a hard time understanding the difference between a window manager (fvwm) and a desktop environment (gnome).
I think you're missing the point.
fvwm and friends are not designed for or typically used by lusers. They are intended for and used by people who are in control of their machines and know how to manage them. If we don't like the icons or the window decorations, we'll just change them. My personal favourite, wm2 , does not provide any icons at all, and the only way to configure it is to hack the source and recompile. But it's elegant and it doesn't get in my way.
Yes, so it wouldn't suit everybody. Who cares? I am not everybody, and one size does not fit all.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
How? and Why? The command line is there for a reason. It's easier to construct arbitrary commands and handle a lot of options with a command line. Say you're using something like cdrecord. Do you really need a GUI? type $cdrecord image.iso and let 'er fly. If you need a special option, is it easier to page through a bunch of tabs and checkboxes, or / through a man page? I'd say it's easier to / through a man page, plus once you know what you're gonna use, a simple wrapper script will do it every time.
And when you hide the CLI, how are you going to implement piping? How can you use conditionals and variables? You can't do this simply in a GUI, and that's why the CLI is so powerful. Do a little bash scripting, and you'll soon be using for loops and &&, and $() on the command line. If you think the CLI is just "left over", you don't really know how to use it.
Someone on slashdot said, "The difference between windows and linux is not that linux lacks a decent GUI, but windows lacks a decent CLI." I totally agree. I don't know how windows users get by without bash. With tab completion, history, wildcards, grep, sed and dozens of other command line tools, I can move, view, and convert my data faster than a windows user could traverse a graphical directory tree to find the same files. Think about it, with a CLI you press the buttons and it happens. There's no looking for anything. It may be a bit confusing at first, but it's faster in the long run, and you can do things the interface designer never intended or imagined.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!