IceWM, the venerable window manager we’ve all used at some point in our lives, has released a new version, 3.5.0. It’s a relatively minor release, so you’ve got things like a new install option which will install an extra theme, a fix for porting to NetBSD 10, translation updates, and more such small improvements. The AddressBar, a command line in the taskbar that can be summoned with ctrl+alt+space, also got some love, with file argument completion and support for the cd and pwd commands.
You can compile IceWM yourself, of course, but it’ll most likely find its way into your distribution’s repository quickly enough.
I`ve always liked IceWM on old machines. EeePC distro was based on Xandros with it.
I used IceWM like 25 years ago on a 486.
It was super important back then because there weren’t a lot of window managers following the Windows 95 paradigm. Maybe IceWM, qvwm, and fvwm95 and that’s it.
IceWM had the easiest config file out of them all and was very friendly to custom pixmap eye candy aka themes. Everybody had their own desktop back then, even in the office people would choose different colors. I swear XP’s Luna theme was a ripoff of an older IceWM theme from 1998. I made a few as well.
XP embraced, extended, and then extinguished custom user themes.
Too bad IceWM developer doesn’t support Wayland. I would love it to be ported to Wayland.
Considering Wayland is forward-thinking and meant for modern machines, and IceWM is geared towards older, less capable hardware, I don’t see how most IceWM users would benefit from Wayland support. It’s a ton of extra baggage and a constantly moving target. It’s not worth the added work as far as I can see.
IceWM is not only about “older, less capable hardware”, it’s also about being self-contained with as few dependencies as possible. It’s almost a desktop environment despite being extremely slim.
It’s more than appropriate for Wayland considering that Wayland has turned WMs into full display servers.
I’d love you to stick to your unwavering Wayland love and realize that this blocker issue means IceWM is never getting Wayland support. And if someone decides to do that, that will not be IceWM, that will be a wholly different product.