I think it is rather more complicated than this. The way I've understood it, RMS doesn't claim the distributions should be called GNU/Linux because of the amount of code the GNU Project has contributed. (In fact, in an article a few days ago, I saw him acknowledge that the GNU project has written maybe 30% of the software in the distros.)
The claim is, IMHO, that GNU set out to do this as early as 1983, and wrote the very basic tools needed for a free Unix (the compiler, libraries and basic tools), and collected other software needed for a system.
For example, GNU has adopted outside free software for its system. X windows and several BSD programs are part of the GNU system.
Basically, my interpretation is that the argument for the "GNU/Linux" name is that so-called Linux distributions are basically built on the pioneer work of the FSF.
I've never liked fvwm. I think the Motif look is disgusting. Hell, I even prefer Windows 95's look.
With `simple, clean looking' I was thinking of Windowmaker, wm2, or icewm. These are window managers I like. Or even olwm, were it not for the weird way its menus work, mouse-button-wise.
I won't discuss whether Linux may or may not have 27 million users by now. The point is that, in the context of such a superficially researched article, I'm about as willing to believe it was a typo, and the author meant 7 million.
I tried E once. After dowloading what seemed like 7 different libraries to get it to run, I fled in horror when I realized it couldn't minimize windows yet.
However, when a.deb comes out, if it does minimize windows, I'm willing to give it another shot. But with a simple, clean looking theme.
I found this article to be terribly researched. The author seems to imply that Linus invented Free Software! Looka at this quote:
"Linux developers have created a model that will tend to reduce legal involvement on the intellectual property level," says Stephen M. Goodman, a partner at New York's Pryor, Cashman, Sherman & Flynn L.L.P.
Hmmm, wasn't the GPL written by the FSF?
Also look at this:
Today, as many as 27 million copies of Linux may be in use, but given Linux's unique distribution pattern, precise numbers are impossible to obtain.
Well, I'm not going to discuss whether this might be close to the truth or not, but, well, the media usually don't go around saying GNU/Linux has 27 million users.
Overall, this article simply was not well researched. The author should look into the history of Free Software and assign credit where it's due.
Unix apps usually install under a path specified when you run the configuration script (or edit the Makefile in some cases). If you specify no path, usually they assume/usr/local. The installation puts files under appropriate subdirectories in the hierarchy you specify, that is, if INSTALL is the install directory, it puts binaries under INSTALL/bin, libraries under INSTALL/lib, and so on.
This means a user can install an app anywhere he has write permission. For example, I install apps all the time in my home directory on machines I don't have root access on.
One might conceivably allow regular users to install apps in system directories by making those directories owned by a group, say the "install" group, giving that group write access to the directory, and adding the users to the group. I don't know if doing such a thing would be a good idea, though.
You must be somewhat new here. Try reading around ESR's home page. He used to have a scandalous picture of Adolf Hitler, with Bill Gates' face stuck on top. Actually, he originally had it on the OSI web site, which cause quite an uprage.
He also once wrote a horrendous little childish play on the Halloween thing, with him as a character, also put up on the OSI site.
Apparently public pressure has made him delete both of these. The only controversial thing left for people to see is only his Gun nut page.
Hehehe. I guess this will start Yet Another Gun Control Flamewar.
All advertising material mentioning features of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of Californa, Berkely and its contributors.
In addition, I've seen similar sites to this in the antispam community, including one rather famous one where there is a list of notorious spammers. Spammers who have otherwise had their accounts removed, network connection cut off, etc. have a picture of a smoking crater next to them. Could this be considered to incite people to detonate nuclear devices at a spammer's premises? With the precedent of this court decision, one could just about argue that it does.
Hell no. Absolutely no way.
First of all, how many stories have you seen in the press about spam fighters targeting spammers and murdering them? Putting up lists of spammers doesn't put their lives in the danger that putting ups lists of abortionists does. This is simply because of the political and social state of the US today.
I don't know much about those lists you mention, but I'll make a couple assumptions here for my second point. If you know any counterexample to them, please point them out, I'd love to know. The seconf point is that spammers give out information about themselves--- an email address, a postal address, a phone number--- for you to conatact them. Making a list of data someone gave to you, without restricting you in any way your right to redistribute it, is OK unless you can give a good reason against it (say, if it could endanger someone's life).
Even more, if many recipients colaborate to use this information to track down the internet site(s) from where this spammer operates, this is public information. If you get a record from the InterNIC database, and list names and addresses people willingly put there, that's alright too.
Basically, I'm making the assumption the spam lists you mention just gather publicly available data on spammers, data said spammers willingly released. I don't think one would see many departures from this pattern in these sites. The one I do remember posted names and addresses of, for example, people from "Get rich quick" emails. If you mail you address to 10,000 people, you can't claim it's private.
When I start seeing anti-spam web pages posting private, undisclosed adresses of spammers, with their wives and kids' names, then that is another thing.
But, there is nothing actually explictly telling someone to go shoot (or otherwise do harm to) an abortionist. I seem to recall a certain famous person saying that someone should shoot Henry Hyde's wife. There wasn't a great outcry about that (except in the far-right press).
Public figures are another issue--- although I think saying in public "someome should shoot X" in earnest is unacceptable (in most situations).
But if a person knows abortionists are being specially targeted for murder, don't you think this person should refrain from posting such data about abortionists? I think not, unless he doesn't mind them dead.
Yes, you don't like anti-abortion people. But let's realize that, like the anti-aborition protesters, we are also a minority here in/.: we don't tend to see eye to eye with the general public on many issues.
Pay no mind to immature adolescent/early-twentysomething self-righteous "atheists". Yeah, the kind that will flame any christian, pulling out a lot of immature arguments which show only their ignorance and inexperience. Feel free to say what you think on slashdot; otherwise, we lose something valuable.
I'm just afraid of the ramifications of this decision, and how it might be broadened in the future to, for instance, shut down anti-Microsoft sites, or anything else controversial.
An anti-MS site, or any simply controversial site, is not necessarily in this category. Just look at that site, for god's sake. The have a list of names of abortionists. You click on a name on the list, and you get in another text box home and office address, phone numbers, name of wife/husband, kids, and so on. It advocates and explicitly asks for harassment against these people--- getting fingerprints, photos/videos of them and their friends. Think about this particular quote: the site asks for "diaries by surveillance workers" .
As I've said above, the people behind this site know full well the information they provide is private, and that recently on the US abortionists have been murdered several times. They are in the position to know that they are putting these doctor's lives at risk.
In contrast, try to show me some anti-MS site who puts people's lives at risk.
Some people don't seem distinguish what something actually says from what they perceive it to say, as you succintly point out in this case.
However. Anyone who is an activist in the pro-life movement (as the people behind this page clearly are) knows that abortionists have several times been specially targeted for murder, and that it is very likely to happen soon. They are in a position to know that if they recollect and post personal information about abortionists, they are immensely facilitating the murder of abortionists.
Calling this akin to a death threat is not correct at all, IMHO. But I don't really think it is any more acceptable. While they may not be actively telling anyone to actually murder these people, they _are_ calling on unknown people, over which they have no control, to harass them.
I used books to remove the emotional element but leave the logic.
/me thinks that when human lives are involved, the emotional element should be taken into account.
That's why I think your analogy with books is not too good. This is an ethical issue; while using extensional logical reasoning might be helpful, such type of argument I don't think is very good here. Protecting human life is a much more of a moral imperative than protecting copies of some book. (well, perhaps most books; ever heard, say, the story where you have to choose whether to save and old lady or the Mona Lisa from a fire in the Louvre?)
In particular, if a person uses this data to murder a doctor, the people who put up the data IMHO share in the responsibility, and even more if said people knew that was a possible consequence of making such data available.
IF this statement were true then one would have to ask "Why give them away at all?" An understanding of emulator technology is not enhanced by giving away the complete source code. Papers on techniques with code snippets, instead of the complete source, is more than adequate to "advance the understanding" if, as some claim, that is all they want to do.
This is just false. If you want to lear how a program actually works, looking at the source code is tough to beat. This is one of the founding principles behind Free Software.
One may also think about Minix, a free OS Andrew Tannenbaum wrote for an introductory book on operating systems (Operating Systems, Design and Implementation). The book explains how OSs work, and gives you in the back the complete source code for an actual OS kernel. If you want to see how a scheduler can be written, read the part of the book on process scheduling, and then read the source code.
The anti-gun comments are absurd and deny reality, and seem to be nothing more than self-righteous, holier-than-thou breast beating. On a national level Chamberlain proved that "reasoning" with thugs like Hitler or Stalin and their ilk is a waste of breath. Six million Jews proved that passivity is guaranteed death. If someone attacks me or my loved ones inorder to acquire property or cash to support their drug habits, in the final result I would rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. The perp better make his first shot count, he'll never get a second.
Gun advocates sadly only rarely go beyond "self-defense", and "the constitution" for their arguments. I am an anti-gun person, yet I can recognize you your right to self defense, so if you stick to that, you aren't going to tell me anything I don't know by now.
But you should really try shifting your point of view from looking merely at guns and think about the international armament industry. Yes, the companies who make weapons for third world dictators to murder anyone they suspect of being dissidents. Looking at it from this point of view, being middle-class and the US and supporting guns (and therefor, financing the armament industry) "for defense against tyranny" seems just plain stupid.
Of course, this didn't address the right to self-defense. But people seem to look over the fact that the while need to defend oneself might be natural, the "need" to defend oneself with a gun and in a modern day US city is as artificial as it gets. More guns is lousy politics; it fails to look at the causes of crime. Stopping all this "war on drugs" nonsense (which really benefits the illegal drug kings, since it drives up the prices) and setting up serious drug rehab programs, and distributing society's wealth fairly (instead of giving 90% to the top 2%, or the likes of that) would go a long way towards diminishing your "need" of self defense and guns.
Finally, if you folks with the pseudonames think your opinion is so important why don't you have the courage to sign your real names. Until you do your opinions aren't worth the electrons they are written with. One wonders how effective the Declaration of Independence would have been if the signatures were "Electric Man", or "WordSmith", etc...
I wouldn't be surpirsed if many of your nation's founding fathers used a pseudonym sometime. Someone with a better knowledge of US history might be able to give examples.
Anyway, as far as I am concerned, I judge postings by content, not name.
And BTW, on a sidenote, I am sick and tired of seeing good posts by ACs being shot down by saying "oh, you're an AC, your opinion doesn't count" or "I'll listen when you are brave enough to put your name on it".
I think you're missing the point here. Whether we may consider Linux to be or not to be cometition for MS, what people here (well, at least the more rational people here) were calling to attention is that MS is pointing out to free software products as competition. The argument would run somewhat like this: "According to MS, its only competitors are free software products. Thus, MS has a (near) monopoly on proprietary software products." BTW I am not necessarily endorsing this argument. I think it's a bit feeble as it stands there (MS also mentions proprieatary products as competition).
Hmm... I'm not a "literate European" (mainly since I'm not European), but I am not a native english speaker, and I do ocassionally write "gonna" on the net. It's called informal or colloquial language. As a linguist, tell me how someone trying to use a non-native language as its natives do is "insulting the language". And for your racism, hell, I'm not even gonna touch it. I think I know what opinion you will have of me if I move to California in September like I plan to do.
You seem to be naive to how an organized repressive force can manipulate a peaceful but unexperienced crowd of protesters and turn it into a violent manifestation.
Tactics: infiltrate a few paid agents to agrede the authorities, and have the cops "defend" themselves: this is, bring in riot division gorillas to beat up the whole crow. You can bring helicopters with sharpshooters and aim at the protesters while you're at it. Drives them nuts. Film the thing and edit it to your convenience.
I don't know about the Canadian protests that are being talked about here, but claiming a group of protesters to be "violent punks" requires documentation.
(P.S.: the above description comes from real life events personal friends of mine have witnessed.)
If you read his plea for help carefully, you'll see he mentioned he _was_ running ppp-2.3.5. RTFQ.
To the original poster: you need to give more info. You say you've managed to ping and nslookup. Did you do that with IP addresses or domain name addresses?
Also, I'll mention a small problem I had when I moved up to ppp-2.3.5. It would dial fine, and connect, but wouldn't let me telnet and lynx anywhere (didn't try ping and/or nslookup). I made a slight change to my ppp-on script to add a defaultroute option to my pppd command line. Now it looks like this:
BTW, do you prefer a desktop environment like KDE, Gnome, UDE, or just a GUI like WindowMaker, IceWm, Enlightenment, Black Box, and why?
With regards to this, I would expect most people to fall on one of these sides:
The traditional Unix mentality. These people will either (a) think X windows sucks because the only use they see for it is a memory expensive xterm farm, or (b) think X windows rules since it allows them to take advantage of their memory to run an xterm farm. These people don't mind too much editing config files and reading man pages, and will usually go for just a window manager.
The GUI user, raised on Windows or Macs. These are not so used to command lines, and prefer to have everything GUI configurable. These people will go for KDE or Gnome.
As for me, I'm pretty much in the first group. In my desktop I run 2 big xterms, 2 netscape windows and a big emacs. I use Window Maker there because of the all the cool dock apps, the clean, elegan look, and a bunch of other nice features. (I could write pages about WM; I won't here.)
In my laptop, which is a 486-50 with 24MB RAM and a 200 MB HDD, I run something lighter-- wm2. I just run an xclock, an xterm, an emacs, and xdvi there. I like that window manager very much-- it is very light on disk space (like 50k), and has a very pretty look.
One thing I like about these window managers, and this is in reply to a comment in this thread, is that they pretty much work out of the box without editing many config files. You can set most Window Maker configuration options from the GUI, and it looks really good in the default config (that's all I run, I mucked around with other presets but they're for the most part ugly). And wm2 has no config files of any sort; if you want to change its configuration, you have to edit the source;-).
I've also tried olvwm and icewm, and find them nice, though not as practical as Window Maker or small as wm2. twm, fvwm, 9wm and E I didn't like at all.
I've tried KDE beta 3, beta 4, 1.0 and pre1.1-alpha1. I find it is too big and slow for what I do. The look didn't bother me at all, unlike many quite vocal people-- it is a very practical look, although not the cleanest or most elegant, compared to my faves.
Proper tools = a 386 with a modem and a terminal program. Never underestimate the power of individual intelligence over the supposed safety of technology.
Very true. But also true, never underestimate the power of governmental propaganda designed to channel more tax dollars into the defense industry.
Slashdot Mirror
The claim is, IMHO, that GNU set out to do this as early as 1983, and wrote the very basic tools needed for a free Unix (the compiler, libraries and basic tools), and collected other software needed for a system.
For example, GNU has adopted outside free software for its system. X windows and several BSD programs are part of the GNU system.
Basically, my interpretation is that the argument for the "GNU/Linux" name is that so-called Linux distributions are basically built on the pioneer work of the FSF.
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And it's not as funny as the "$5,000 dollar computer plays downloaded video real time over the net" article :-)
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With `simple, clean looking' I was thinking of Windowmaker, wm2, or icewm. These are window managers I like. Or even olwm, were it not for the weird way its menus work, mouse-button-wise.
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My desktop is Window Maker, however. The dock apps rule!
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However, when a .deb comes out, if it does minimize windows, I'm willing to give it another shot. But with a simple, clean looking theme.
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Also look at this:
Well, I'm not going to discuss whether this might be close to the truth or not, but, well, the media usually don't go around saying GNU/Linux has 27 million users.Overall, this article simply was not well researched. The author should look into the history of Free Software and assign credit where it's due.
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Unix apps usually install under a path specified when you run the configuration script (or edit the Makefile in some cases). If you specify no path, usually they assume /usr/local. The installation puts files under appropriate subdirectories in the hierarchy you specify, that is, if INSTALL is the install directory, it puts binaries under INSTALL/bin, libraries under INSTALL/lib, and so on.
This means a user can install an app anywhere he has write permission. For example, I install apps all the time in my home directory on machines I don't have root access on.
One might conceivably allow regular users to install apps in system directories by making those directories owned by a group, say the "install" group, giving that group write access to the directory, and adding the users to the group. I don't know if doing such a thing would be a good idea, though.
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He also once wrote a horrendous little childish play on the Halloween thing, with him as a character, also put up on the OSI site.
Apparently public pressure has made him delete both of these. The only controversial thing left for people to see is only his Gun nut page.
Hehehe. I guess this will start Yet Another Gun Control Flamewar.
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So really, the problem is not the credits file.
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Hell no. Absolutely no way.
First of all, how many stories have you seen in the press about spam fighters targeting spammers and murdering them? Putting up lists of spammers doesn't put their lives in the danger that putting ups lists of abortionists does. This is simply because of the political and social state of the US today.
I don't know much about those lists you mention, but I'll make a couple assumptions here for my second point. If you know any counterexample to them, please point them out, I'd love to know. The seconf point is that spammers give out information about themselves--- an email address, a postal address, a phone number--- for you to conatact them. Making a list of data someone gave to you, without restricting you in any way your right to redistribute it, is OK unless you can give a good reason against it (say, if it could endanger someone's life).
Even more, if many recipients colaborate to use this information to track down the internet site(s) from where this spammer operates, this is public information. If you get a record from the InterNIC database, and list names and addresses people willingly put there, that's alright too.
Basically, I'm making the assumption the spam lists you mention just gather publicly available data on spammers, data said spammers willingly released. I don't think one would see many departures from this pattern in these sites. The one I do remember posted names and addresses of, for example, people from "Get rich quick" emails. If you mail you address to 10,000 people, you can't claim it's private.
When I start seeing anti-spam web pages posting private, undisclosed adresses of spammers, with their wives and kids' names, then that is another thing.
But, there is nothing actually explictly telling someone to go shoot (or otherwise do harm to) an abortionist. I seem to recall a certain famous person saying that someone should shoot Henry Hyde's wife. There wasn't a great outcry about that (except in the far-right press).
Public figures are another issue--- although I think saying in public "someome should shoot X" in earnest is unacceptable (in most situations).
But if a person knows abortionists are being specially targeted for murder, don't you think this person should refrain from posting such data about abortionists? I think not, unless he doesn't mind them dead.
Yes, you don't like anti-abortion people. But let's realize that, like the anti-aborition protesters, we are also a minority here in /.: we don't tend to see eye to eye with the general public on many issues.
Pay no mind to immature adolescent/early-twentysomething self-righteous "atheists". Yeah, the kind that will flame any christian, pulling out a lot of immature arguments which show only their ignorance and inexperience. Feel free to say what you think on slashdot; otherwise, we lose something valuable.
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I'm just afraid of the ramifications of this decision, and how it might be broadened in the future to, for instance, shut down anti-Microsoft sites, or anything else controversial.
An anti-MS site, or any simply controversial site, is not necessarily in this category. Just look at that site, for god's sake. The have a list of names of abortionists. You click on a name on the list, and you get in another text box home and office address, phone numbers, name of wife/husband, kids, and so on. It advocates and explicitly asks for harassment against these people--- getting fingerprints, photos/videos of them and their friends. Think about this particular quote: the site asks for "diaries by surveillance workers" .
As I've said above, the people behind this site know full well the information they provide is private, and that recently on the US abortionists have been murdered several times. They are in the position to know that they are putting these doctor's lives at risk.
In contrast, try to show me some anti-MS site who puts people's lives at risk.
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However. Anyone who is an activist in the pro-life movement (as the people behind this page clearly are) knows that abortionists have several times been specially targeted for murder, and that it is very likely to happen soon. They are in a position to know that if they recollect and post personal information about abortionists, they are immensely facilitating the murder of abortionists.
Calling this akin to a death threat is not correct at all, IMHO. But I don't really think it is any more acceptable. While they may not be actively telling anyone to actually murder these people, they _are_ calling on unknown people, over which they have no control, to harass them.
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That's why I think your analogy with books is not too good. This is an ethical issue; while using extensional logical reasoning might be helpful, such type of argument I don't think is very good here. Protecting human life is a much more of a moral imperative than protecting copies of some book. (well, perhaps most books; ever heard, say, the story where you have to choose whether to save and old lady or the Mona Lisa from a fire in the Louvre?)
In particular, if a person uses this data to murder a doctor, the people who put up the data IMHO share in the responsibility, and even more if said people knew that was a possible consequence of making such data available.
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Note I'm not criticising, just pointing it out.
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This is just false. If you want to lear how a program actually works, looking at the source code is tough to beat. This is one of the founding principles behind Free Software.
One may also think about Minix, a free OS Andrew Tannenbaum wrote for an introductory book on operating systems (Operating Systems, Design and Implementation). The book explains how OSs work, and gives you in the back the complete source code for an actual OS kernel. If you want to see how a scheduler can be written, read the part of the book on process scheduling, and then read the source code.
The anti-gun comments are absurd and deny reality, and seem to be nothing more than self-righteous, holier-than-thou breast beating. On a national level Chamberlain proved that "reasoning" with thugs like Hitler or Stalin and their ilk is a waste of breath. Six million Jews proved that passivity is guaranteed death. If someone attacks me or my loved ones inorder to acquire property or cash to support their drug habits, in the final result I would rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. The perp better make his first shot count, he'll never get a second.
Gun advocates sadly only rarely go beyond "self-defense", and "the constitution" for their arguments. I am an anti-gun person, yet I can recognize you your right to self defense, so if you stick to that, you aren't going to tell me anything I don't know by now.
But you should really try shifting your point of view from looking merely at guns and think about the international armament industry. Yes, the companies who make weapons for third world dictators to murder anyone they suspect of being dissidents. Looking at it from this point of view, being middle-class and the US and supporting guns (and therefor, financing the armament industry) "for defense against tyranny" seems just plain stupid.
Of course, this didn't address the right to self-defense. But people seem to look over the fact that the while need to defend oneself might be natural, the "need" to defend oneself with a gun and in a modern day US city is as artificial as it gets. More guns is lousy politics; it fails to look at the causes of crime. Stopping all this "war on drugs" nonsense (which really benefits the illegal drug kings, since it drives up the prices) and setting up serious drug rehab programs, and distributing society's wealth fairly (instead of giving 90% to the top 2%, or the likes of that) would go a long way towards diminishing your "need" of self defense and guns.
Finally, if you folks with the pseudonames think your opinion is so important why don't you have the courage to sign your real names. Until you do your opinions aren't worth the electrons they are written with. One wonders how effective the Declaration of Independence would have been if the signatures were "Electric Man", or "WordSmith", etc...
I wouldn't be surpirsed if many of your nation's founding fathers used a pseudonym sometime. Someone with a better knowledge of US history might be able to give examples.
Anyway, as far as I am concerned, I judge postings by content, not name.
And BTW, on a sidenote, I am sick and tired of seeing good posts by ACs being shot down by saying "oh, you're an AC, your opinion doesn't count" or "I'll listen when you are brave enough to put your name on it".
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The argument would run somewhat like this: "According to MS, its only competitors are free software products. Thus, MS has a (near) monopoly on proprietary software products."
BTW I am not necessarily endorsing this argument. I think it's a bit feeble as it stands there (MS also mentions proprieatary products as competition).
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As a linguist, tell me how someone trying to use a non-native language as its natives do is "insulting the language".
And for your racism, hell, I'm not even gonna touch it. I think I know what opinion you will have of me if I move to California in September like I plan to do.
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Tactics: infiltrate a few paid agents to agrede the authorities, and have the cops "defend" themselves: this is, bring in riot division gorillas to beat up the whole crow. You can bring helicopters with sharpshooters and aim at the protesters while you're at it. Drives them nuts. Film the thing and edit it to your convenience.
I don't know about the Canadian protests that are being talked about here, but claiming a group of protesters to be "violent punks" requires documentation.
(P.S.: the above description comes from real life events personal friends of mine have witnessed.)
---
To the original poster: you need to give more info. You say you've managed to ping and nslookup. Did you do that with IP addresses or domain name addresses?
Also, I'll mention a small problem I had when I moved up to ppp-2.3.5. It would dial fine, and connect, but wouldn't let me telnet and lynx anywhere (didn't try ping and/or nslookup). I made a slight change to my ppp-on script to add a defaultroute option to my pppd command line. Now it looks like this:
exec /usr/sbin/pppd -d /dev/modem 115200 \
defaultroute \
$LOCAL_IP:$REMOTE_IP \
connect $DIALER_SCRIPT
Hope this helps.
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With regards to this, I would expect most people to fall on one of these sides:
As for me, I'm pretty much in the first group. In my desktop I run 2 big xterms, 2 netscape windows and a big emacs. I use Window Maker there because of the all the cool dock apps, the clean, elegan look, and a bunch of other nice features. (I could write pages about WM; I won't here.)
In my laptop, which is a 486-50 with 24MB RAM and a 200 MB HDD, I run something lighter-- wm2. I just run an xclock, an xterm, an emacs, and xdvi there. I like that window manager very much-- it is very light on disk space (like 50k), and has a very pretty look.
One thing I like about these window managers, and this is in reply to a comment in this thread, is that they pretty much work out of the box without editing many config files. You can set most Window Maker configuration options from the GUI, and it looks really good in the default config (that's all I run, I mucked around with other presets but they're for the most part ugly). And wm2 has no config files of any sort; if you want to change its configuration, you have to edit the source ;-).
I've also tried olvwm and icewm, and find them nice, though not as practical as Window Maker or small as wm2. twm, fvwm, 9wm and E I didn't like at all.
I've tried KDE beta 3, beta 4, 1.0 and pre1.1-alpha1. I find it is too big and slow for what I do. The look didn't bother me at all, unlike many quite vocal people-- it is a very practical look, although not the cleanest or most elegant, compared to my faves.
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Very true. But also true, never underestimate the power of governmental propaganda designed to channel more tax dollars into the defense industry.
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