Window Maker 0.90.0 Released At Long Last

BEI01 writes "From windowmaker.org: After years without a release, we are glad to announce that Window Maker 0.90.0 is out! Highlights are NetWM support (thanks to Peter). This means wmaker should work fine with GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x. UTF-8 support, antialiased text support via Xft2, Xinerama support, enhanced Alt-Tab window switching, Font configuration in WPrefs, and many fixes."

Comments

Re:Linux?

[node 3]

A new release of Window Maker is not exactly linux news.

But it exactly is Linux news. It's news that is related to Linux, and of interest to many Linux users.

That doesn't mean it's not also X11 news, and Mac OS X news, and Cygwin/X news, and AIX news, etc, but they have to pick a category, and "Linux" isn't an illogical category to choose. It's not like they picked YRO, or Games or something.

Window Maker can run on pretty much any platform which runs X.

And Linux is used as a general catch-all category for the Unixey platforms that run X. A bit fuzzy? Sure. Is that too confusing for you?

That's great!

[namekuseijin]

Despite being simplistic by today standards, the NeXTStep graphical environment, which WMaker emulates, still is one of the most productive and unintrusive environments ever. And it can look damn good with some proper themes and fine-tuning.

The Xft2 addition is a particularly very welcome one.

This is great news. I hope the integration with GNUStep is a step further too. :)

Re:That's great!

[ocelotbob]

Agreed. Pretty much the first thing I do in any environment is get it looking as close to NeXTStep as possible. The environment Just Works much better than pretty much anything else out there. I use KDE right now almost entirely because of juk, but my desktop is much more nextish than anything else.

Important to note

[Pan T. Hose]

It's important to note that Window Maker is part of the GNUStep project which is a cross-platform, object-oriented framework for desktop application development, free software implementation of NeXT's OpenStep, which celebrated its 10th birthday on October 19th. For anyone who is interested, there is much more info here.

Does anyone else miss...

[KilobyteKnight]

This is a little off topic I suppose, but it got me thinking about when I first started using Linux. It was hard to choose which desktop I wanted to use every time I logged in. Sure Gnome and KDE have made vast improvements over the years, and both are excellent desktops at this point, but I kinda miss that choice.

Maybe it's just my perception, and not reality, but it seems like all the other desktops have stagnated. I have been excited about the new Enlightenment for a long time, but it still seems to be a long way from completion.

I don't mean to put down any of the desktops or demean any of the developers. I just miss the old days when the desktop wars had at least 1/2 dozen serious contenders.... *sigh*

Kudos

[Khazunga]

Here's my biggest Kudos to the Windowmaker dev team :-) Wmaker has been by window manager of choice for the last four years. While I recognize the advances of the Gnome/KDE projects, I've tried both multiple times and always come back to Wmaker. It just feels right.

My main gripe with other window managers is the inability to set the "Initial Workspace" (virtual desktop) per application. When wmaker starts, all my apps load and pop up in their respective workspaces. If they fire up windows, these get contained in the app's virtual desktop, and do not interrupt my work. Really cool, and unmatched by other WMs (to my knowledge).