Has the Development of Window Managers Slowed? 437
al3x asks: "When I first got into Linux nearly five years ago, the new releases of competing window managers (like Blackbox, Enlightenment, Sawfish, etc.) were a constant thrill, and great strides were made with every release. I can't count the number of nights spent trying to get that sexy new E build to work, and what fun it was! But these days, window manager development seems to be stagnating. The last stable release of Enlightenment is from last year. Sawfish hasn't done much of anything in months, nor has Blackbox. WindowMaker had a recent update, but not with any exciting new features (it is rock solid, however). Now, verging from the paths of window manager favoritism or "they haven't been updated because they just work," why has development in this arena slowed to a crawl, and what's on the horizon?"
GO KDE! (Score:5, Informative)
e17 (Score:3, Informative)
.technomancer
new ones to try... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GO KDE! (Score:5, Informative)
For a while there was a debate about "the GNOME window manager" and then there was the whole E thing when people were getting frustrated and quitting their jobs. Sawfish came out to fill a void and that's what it has done and now it doesn't seem as important that it get's all the newest wiz-bang gadgetry.
Newer versions of E are sounding more and more like they are trying to build a desktop or new environment than simply a window manager, that's great, more power to them.
But the essential truth is that for the majority of Linux users the window manager concept has come and gone and that desktops are where it is all happening now.
Re:Enough already? - nope, still one to go: ION (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like it's time to check out ion: http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ [students.tut.fi]. It's based on non-overlapping windows, made for easy keyboard navigation. Supports prefix keymaps so you can easily avoid key binding conflicts. Give it a try!
Re:Couple possabilities (Score:3, Informative)
I think the development team should just declare it to be version 1.0. Windowmaker is stable and full-featured enough for it.
Re:GO KDE! (Score:2, Informative)
I've used KDE on pentium I class machines bfore, and it runs quite nicely. However, it's a bit of a memory pig, especially if you want to run (for example) Mozilla, Star Office, and other apps on top of it. To summarize, the desktop environments are memory pigs, but given enough memory, they work nicely.
Re:Configuring Window Managers (Score:2, Informative)
The RH-based distros have kudzu, which detects hardware changes and (theoretically) configures it and loads the proper driver. I've seen it in action on a friends computer running mandrake...if you have a stock kernel with all the modules compiled, it actually does work pretty well with standard hardware. But yeah, if you change your hardware it will come up during the boot process and ask to to configure it.
Of course when it doesn't work you're arguably worse off than doing it manually, because you have to figure out how to undo whatever changes it makes, prevent it from trying to set up the hardware again, and then configure it yourself. Sort of like windows.
Re:Couple possabilities (Score:3, Informative)
And if you're even more of a control freak than that (like i sometimes am), you can use the wdwrite utility to store selected preferences, and then use the WPrefs tool and whatnot to handle the rest.
I think the development team should just declare it to be version 1.0. Windowmaker is stable and full-featured enough for it. :)
Close, but not quite. Alfredo's working on support for the _NET_WM spec (or whatever the devil that Grand Unified Post-ICCCCCM Extension is called nowadays), to support next-generation KDE and GNOME and whatnot. Once that's there, together with up-to-date documentation, then i would agree with the v1.0 thing.
Re:GO KDE! (Score:2, Informative)
Personally, i find all these "desktop environments" are too heavy for older computers...
You said you would prefer a lightweight window manager anyway, a sentiment I think I second, but if anyone reading this thinks "Oh drat, I wanted to run KDE on my slow box," try KDE on top of Blackbox [draknor.net]. Rumor has it performance is faster than with the default kwin on such machines.
Re:Fvwm2 (Score:2, Informative)
It took a little fiddling, but I use Fvwm2 and GNOME together; best of both worlds, because I do actually like the GNOME panel and the like.
And the degree of customization that you can do to the look of Fvwm2 is enough for my simple needs -- I don't need to re-do my theme to make everything look like icicles (yes, I found an E theme that did that!); I'm happy enough to change the colours and the buttons and the menus and perhaps a transparent XPM pic or gradients to make it look pretty.
And I don't have to learn Lisp in order to do it, either!
Re:Fvwm2 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Fvwm2 (Score:2, Informative)
erik
Re:for the last time (Score:2, Informative)
Bah, it blows the crap out of anything available for any other platform.
1 - dock icon areas do not extend to edge of dock.
Yes they do.
2 - dock changes size and icons move as it gets used
Any real OSX user knows this is not the case. Magnification is off, dock hiding is off, and all your common apps are in the dock... hence static... all that changes is the activity triangle underneath running apps.
3 - what if you don't like grey or blue? Maybe OSX.2 will have green and OSX.3 will have purple
Then install one of the 3 current OSX Appearance Managers (they allow you to load custom themes). The very active OS9 theming community is now diverting their energies to bring as good or better theming techniques to MacOS X.
4 - it has vi so when I go to the apple help and type in vi I expect to see at least something.
"man vi"
same place where all the other man pages are... the apple help is for newbie stuff... and application level stuff (ie it has a gui). The terminal is where you run vi, and that's where you do man vi...
This is simple stuff, and is GOOD.
5 - stupid windowesque scroll bars - the scroll-bars were one of the things which NeXT got right for Steve's sake
What the hell are you talking about? Them's MacOSesque scroll bars..
That's the way its done on a MacOS... wouldn't want it any other way.
The menubars are on a different side to NeXT, but they do have the NeXT double arrows.
6 - way too much eye-candy, at least I can not install Enlightenment.
Isn't E about eye candy?
Anywho, I like Aqua... its pleasant... eye candy is good... especially when its functional...
OSX isn't unix wedded with mac, its unix buried under mac. If anything its BaCKstep.
I disagree.
And I've been using OSX since it came out. Its the closest to perfect integration of unix with a gui.
Yes, I know... troll.
I don't know that it's slowing... (Score:2, Informative)
As a professional programmer for the last 22-years, let me state that I don't think most programmers are the extremely industrious kind that want to do things for the sake of doing them unless either they are being paid for it or it's a real fun thing to do or something they really want to do. Thus we can characterize programmers as somewhat "lazy" (in a non-perjorative way) in that they're not going to redo tons of work already done by someone else. (In fact, if done consistently this is a good trait in programmers; it means they tend to use predesigned libraries for various features instead of rewriting code to do the same thing).
Let us also remember, as it has probably been said here (and in other forums) many times, creating a window manager is a big undertaking; it is the sort of thing that is a severe "scratch the itch" development on the level of writing a good-sized language compiler or perhaps developing an operating system. It's a hell of a lot of work, and it gets done because the developer is
- extremely irritated and/or disappointed by what is currently available
- doesn't like any of them currently existing
- does not know of or cannot find any at all that even close to fits their particular need ("none of them can scratch his itch") and
- none of those currently existing can be tweaked into something close to what they want without major rework
and so he (nothing to criticize women, most programmers are still male) decides to create his own in order to "scratch his itch" (or itches), e.g. to give him the features / reduced bloat / increased capability / skinnability / factor 'x' that the current window managers do not provide him.I use Windows 2000 for what I get paid to do. On Linux I have used both KDE and GNOME and I would honestly say that there isn't more than a dime's bit of difference between the three of them as far as a user running applications is concerned. I haven't tried many of the alternative ones but I'm sure they all pretty much do the job of providing a means to log onto the system and start applications to do things on the system. And beyond that it's a matter of extra features which may or may not be important to have in a window manager (applications like Calendar, skinnability, type of activator buttons, means for adding new applications, what icons do etc.) depending on how enthusiastic / spaced out on caffeine / loud the people who program the features into and/or use the particular WM scream / beg / offer bribes for it.
I would say it's pretty hard to find a window manager that won't provide perhaps 80% of what you need and as such for most people it's "good enough" to get by without writing one of your own or of taking one that is "good enough" and doing some tweaks to make it so. Since most window managers are pretty "tweakable" just from the window manager's management console or via configuration files, I believe the need to write code to provide something that isn't there has been substantially reduced from what would otherwise be necessary.
Paul Robinson postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us [mailto]