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Blackbox (Finally) Updated
mpeg4codec writes "OSNews reported earlier this month that the lightweight Blackbox window manager has been updated to 0.70. Among the new features are EWMH compliance, anti-aliased fonts, unicode support, and backwards compatibility with previous versions' styles. Of course, it brings you all these new features (well, some are optional) while retaining its small binary size, small memory footprint, and short list of dependencies. I for one think it's about time."
Blackbox has been working great on my machines for 4+ years. This new version looks kind of neat but I'm in no rush to upgrade just for AA fonts. EWMH complance doesn't mean anything to me.
Who trusts something that moves so slow? I mean unless it's perfect or have the means to fix it yourself... unless it already does 100% of what you you 100% well.
If I report an annoying bug when will it get fixed? If I request a feature when will I get a response?
While KDE may not be perfect my bugreports get responded too fairly quickly and it's getting better all the time.
Perhaps, there is something that Fluxbox or Openbox (which appears dead..) can use I don't see this benefiting anyone but a few users and thus not really news worthey. Perhaps for embedded kiosk or something...
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Looking at their homepage (assuming you still can, as this is an early post), it looks as if nothing's been updated since November of 2004. The new version is available on the download page, though you'd think they'd post something to the effect of ".70 is now up" right on the front page.
I can only assume these cats are looking to keep a low profile, or to keep a static homepage that they never have to touch.
Nuances of their site design and motives aside, I'm enticed to try this out.
Ignore the rantings above. Poster is an idiot.
Call me silly, but the WM & Desktop Environment should have a matching theme.
I know it's a matter of taste, but I can't stand it when I have one theme for my Window Manager, and a second theme for all those applications which run within the windows... it's ugly, less functional, and way, way outdated.
I suppose that BlackBox & IceWM might be faster then the default KDE or Gnome WM's, but performance isn't usually a big issue for me.
Although, I can see the benefit when I need to run a remote X application on a remote server, and I don't want a full fledged Gnome or KDE environment... just X, a lightweight WM over a SSH connection.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
It's about time it came out with EWMH .. I've already switched to fluxbox (yeah, and fluxgen is a very helpful guy on irc).
You might want to say that Forking is bad for the health of any project - but sometimes such branching off can keep a project alive. If there hadn't been a fluxbox - I'd have dumped blackbox for good.
Is there any reason for blackbox anymore ?. (well, other than the "choice" factor).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
While I don't think that a new version of Blackbox is, by any means, a bad thing (well, there's more choice for the users, anyway), I feel almost completely satisfied with fluxbox's behaviour.
There are many nice things regarding fluxbox and the fact that it is steadily evolving (instead of the pause that seemed to happen with blackbox) is a means to let the users know that the software that they are using is cared for.
I personally use fluxbox with the minimal profile/style and it works quite well in my underpowered boxes (well, it is hard to get the latest and greatest in hardware here in Brazil).
Well, anyway, a nice release, but I am already quite satisfied with fluxbox (I didn't know about openbox).
There is one thing, though, that I don't like about blackbox and it is the way that keybindings are treated: an extra daemon is necessary, while, with fluxbox, everything is handled in the window manager itself.
It saves some precious RAM, especially when you're dealing with older hardware (like what I have at my disposal).
I prefer the likes of BadWM. Sadly, though, it is in dire need of an update. People are working on it, sorta :/ BadWM is what a minimalistic WM should be (IMHO) - no window decorations except for a border around the window, quick keyboard commands, and it handles virtual desktops. I really don't like having a titlebar on my windows.
:P
I've been using Ion2 recently, and it isn't too bad either.. it's fast, although switching from BadWM to a tiling WM is a bit difficult
As far as those saying WMs shouldn't have to worry about memory footprints.. I have 768 megs of RAM, and I still don't like a WM that hogs RAM. I do memory-intensive work, and I don't want my WM taking up all my RAM just so it can look pretty. Even if I had 2 gigs of RAM, I'd still prefer BadWM or Ion2.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
My question is why would you want to run anything besides Blackbox/Fluxbox/Openbox/ or some other small WM? It launches programs, that's all you need. I find desktop enviroments a waste of computing resources. The mindset of "use it if you got it" is the reason why software is so bloated.
Who cares how much RAM you have and how much other programs are using? Regardless of the power of my computer, I would always choose Fluxbox over KDE or Gnome.
xfwm4 kicks ass. I was trying out xfce today but I miss my usb and cdrw drives popping up on my desktop when I put them in. I realized the only thing I really wanted was a faster full-featured gtk2 terminal and xfwm4 (metacity sux). It's fast, light, and has builtin support for x compositing!, So now I'm using xfterm4 on gnome with xfwm4 with a customized 0 pixel border theme. Who needs window borders when you have dropshadows to distinguish the window edge?
- It seemed to take much longer to start (with my FC3 setup on a Thinkpad T21)
- Not all of the old themes looked as nice as they used to (buttons looked somewhat weird, etc.)
- The bulky, *nice*, new anti-aliased fonts bugged me. If I wanted to have the same look as GNOME and KDE, I wouldn't have been using blackbox.
So overall, I much prefer 0.65... But for the built-in features + look that I use, Fluxbox is a better choice for me.This is important to me as I'm running linux on a playstation 2. I use mwm which I've always liked since I first used it quite some time ago. The binary clocks in at 1985399 bytes. In my research I've compiled and tried many different wms, one being blackbox which clocked in at 7965606 bytes, about 4x the size of mwm. Maybe I didn't compile it with some minimalist options turned on? Don't get me wrong I feel blackbox is a great product, but so far mwm is the best fit for my sit.
oh, and I forgot to add...
On the flipside of xOr is nyz (Brad Hughes, original Blackbox developer), one of the nicest guys I've met. So, you don't have to be a complete ass to make good software (the anti-DBJ).
why didn't they call it Blackbox 1.0? :)
Actually, with bb0.70 it is not possible to popup the root menu via bbkeys. This only works with bbkeys and Openbox or Fluxbox and its builtin hotkey support.
Anyone with advice is free to tell me how to do it. Until then I will stick to LarsWM.