The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. “This third ‘rc’ release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release.” Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.
How does tiling tabbed windows have anything to offer for “keyboard users” ? Alt-tab works.
Cheezus, what ppl do with their time.
Tiling and grouping gives you new degrees of logical navigation between windows.
I ask you, what do you do with your time, wasting it while cycling through Alt+Tab until the desired window shows up, and you weren’t too impatient to miss it again…
Tiling and grouping gives you new degrees of logical navigation between windows.
I ask you, what do you do with your time, wasting it while cycling through Alt+Tab until the desired window shows up, and you weren’t too impatient to miss it again…
I use <alt><ctrl> + up-arrow in Compiz to select my window.
Thats what I love about OS X – Command+Tab is application only, while Command-Tilde is windows in an application. Granted I’m not sure how tiling and groupings work in Ion, I just felt like throwing that out there.
Who has suggested that the suitability for keyboard users is *because* it’s a tabbed WM? From the post:
“Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.”
That’s a description of two different attributes – not a suggestion that one attribute (suitability for keyboard users) is due to the other (tabbed windows).
I think tiling would be the best choice for drag and drop. Of course that requires a mouse.
Ion3 is overshadowed by it’s developer. Tuomo Valkonen first thought he would know better than the rest of the world just to sink into grievousness. Now Ion won’t be open any more after the final release preceded by this RC.
It started out with taste, or lack thereof. In any way, you should never argue about taste, but Tuomo decided against. He decided, that anti-aliasing doesn’t improve fonts at all, but only makes them “blurry”. He decided, that every user has to accept this as a fact and therefore should use the old Xlib font system (inferiour in many other aspects, too). It seems he found out too late how fontconfig enables the user to configure this aspect.
Some users thought otherwise, and they knew how to code. So they patched Ion3 to use XFT. It has some other advantages, like correct unicode rendering, but guess what — Tuomo hates Unicode, too. Some of them even loaded a “PKGBUILD” up to Arch Linux’ User Repository (AUR) — a recipe which describes how to download Ion3 and patch it automatically. Tuomo, not familiar with Arch Linux and the AUR, misinterpreted this as a patched binary distribution of Ion3. He found no other way to teach his user of how Ion3 should look, what it should be able to do and what not, than threatening the Arch developers with legal actions. In his belief, the publication infringed his trademark — “Ion3”.
This action led to verbal fights he couldn’t win. In the end, the PKGBUILD in question was abandoned, even without Tuomo really taken serious. It was already too late. Tuomo had a new enemy: the open-source community. A big deal of the OSS world is about “free choice” and one could even assume that the developer of an alternative, niché window manager would think about this the same. Not Tuomo. So while various distros started to kick Ion(3) from their repositories, Tuomo started to attack the OSS world after nobody agreed to his absurd release terms (example: If you want to call your publication “Ion3”, you have to guarantee your version of Ion doesn’t lag behind the upstream version more than a couple of weeks).
The conclusion was predictable: Tuomo now hates OSS, and many people hate (or laugh at) Tuomo, too. Tuomo declared he will develop closed-source in the future. one could argue he should have done this first place, but would he gained the same attention and user base?
The only future Ion3 has is a fork, perhaps under a different name, to avoid legal nonsense..
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Tuomo now hates OSS, and many people hate (or laugh at) Tuomo, too.
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Nice summary.
Your story really should be packaged up into a bedtime story and told to little geeks and geekettes as a lesson in how not to behave when they grow up.
Might not hurt to turn Tuomo into a frog or something at the end, just to emphasize the point. 😉
Edited 2007-07-08 21:09
He decided, that every user has to accept this as a fact
If you’re not ready to accept it, just don’t use Ion.
He is the author and has all rights to do what he want.
Not in the OSS world. GPL developers only have the right to facilitate, not to restrict. That is the nature of software/computing freedom.
“Not in the OSS world.”
Actually, he still has the right to do whatever he wants, no matter how amazingly dumb, since he is still the copyright holder.
He can change the license tomorrow or add any number of crazy clauses and there’s not a thing you can do about it, other than using the code that isn’t under the new/modified license.
Except that at the time, he was using the GPL and as such, was restricted by the terms of the GPL.
Well, this is not entirely correct. The copyright holder himself is not restricted in any ways by the terms of the GPL.
It’s just he can’t forbid others to do thinks like forking, re-releasing, etc.
He himself has the right to release under different licenses than the GPL, as long as there are no other copyright holders or he has their acknowledgement.
I use ion3 as my only wm. The reason for that is that is it (like stated by tuomov) “designed with keyboard users in mind.”. There is no need to use the mouse for anything using the keyboard is very convenient. Furthermore it is very easy to configure.
I actually do not understand the harsh criticism you other guys wrote.
Like tuomov writes on his page, ion3 is not for everyone. But it is (nearly) perfect for me. I actually do not need Xft for this wm, as you do not see much of it. The only thing that I would like to be improved is utf-8 local support with lua. Since all the configuration is done in lua and lua does not fully support the utf-8 locale certain glyphs can not be used…
Edited 2007-07-08 22:28
Quite appalling, I’m no fan of the Gnome/KDE bloat myself, but this is just “fugly“.
And that “Tuomo” guy looks like an idiot.. see the kind of nonsense he posts on his mailing lists? clearly uneducated..
Tuomo knows best about how users should prefer to work and is rejected by the community. Gnome and Apple interface hardliners take note.
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Tuomo knows best about how users should prefer to work and is rejected by the community. Gnome and Apple interface hardliners take note.
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As a Gnome user who happens to like the general philosophy of Gnome, I understand your words of caution to them. The spatial thing left a slightly bad taste in my mouth.
It took them a release or two, but they eventually did come around and provided easy options for turning it off.
So I don’t think that there is all *that* much to worry about.
I won’t comment on Apple because I’m not familiar enough.
Here are the apple issues:
1) Windows only resize from the lower right corner. Why? Apple knows best. Really, they ran it past Fitts law and its been approved.
2) No option to put the file menu in the application window. In KDE you can have an apple style file menu at the top of the screen or a windows style task bar, I believe you can do the same in Gnome. In Apple? No choice. (Windows too on that score).
3) No choice to have a maximize button.
4) Finder is horrid and the interface decisions they made there imponderable. The answer is not to change things, just give users choice. For example, why can’t they have the option to have a text box to enter a file system path? Why can’t it work like a file browser or have a commander style interface if the user (that’s a customer in the case of apple) wants.
I could go on, file selection dialogs, the way the dock works all kinds of things are screwy, in my opinion.
And that’s the point, its my opinion, yours will/should vary. Because our opinions vary about what constitutes a good interface we ought to demand that the people who make the interfaces make them as customizable as possible, especially when we are paying for them.
By the way, I agree Gnome has come around significantly since the late spatial unpleasantness.
The design of the application should remove the need for resizing. However, if you should be given resize handles all around the window or be able to easier press the window buttons without worrying for resize handles can always be discussed into the infinitive. Few applications need resizing, really. Furthermore there is the button that resizes the window to fit it’s current content. (this is usable in browsers since much of the www content has crap layout)
This is for securing the “Apple Experience” they brag about.
A choice wouldn’t hurt, really…
That’s about it with file managers: fix a flaw and another one pops up. You will never please anybody. If you do, you end up with something like Konqueror. Konqueror could please anybody (almost) except those who DO NOT want to configure.
Screwy? Many people have a problem to understand the document based application design. A “dock” is a great way to handle the design. Worked fine with NeXT, works fine with OSX. What do you suggest?
For those not willing to choose, choice is bad.
For those not willing to choose, choice is bad.
That’s me =)
I really, really hate to configure anything, but sometimes default setup is hardly usable, so i have no choice, but configure.
Here’s a quick guide I wrote on using Ion with ROX:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/rox_with_ion
It is a shame that the author seems to disagree with so many things (the nice new font system, GNOME, freedesktop.org system tray icons, distribution packages, etc). But even with these problems, it does seem to be one of the better tiling WMs.
Does any one know How this compares with other similar projects?
especially Xmonad?