A window manager in GNU/Linux is a piece of software which controls placement and appearance of windows in a graphical user interface in X. All the WMs listed here can easily be obtained through your distribution’s respective repositories.
A window manager in GNU/Linux is a piece of software which controls placement and appearance of windows in a graphical user interface in X. All the WMs listed here can easily be obtained through your distribution’s respective repositories.
i’m a gnome user but i started using awesome specifically because of it’s name.
as the article says a bit of time is needed to get used to it but i love it. when you don’t need any fancy crap just a simple WM it’s awesome.
Both Fluxbox and jwm are great. Good to see distros like SliTaz showing what’s possible with jwm.
This is a big guide? Save yourself the time and just go straight to xwinman.org
That’s what I was thinking too. xwinman.org has probably been around 8-9 years. I used to go there when it was plig.org/xwinman. That was when I was playing around with getting NetBSD on the PPC to work.
Anyway, nothing will ever be better than 4Dwm, NOTHING!
/me hisses and my eyes glow as I run back into the shadows.
Absolutely love fluxbox for its simplicity. If you like eye candy then you should seriously consider fluxbox and xcompmgr for the true transparency and subtle fade effects.
If only fluxbox would work with compiz-fusion ….
What?
Isn’t Fluxbox’ appeal that it’s minimalistic, elegant and relatively light?
Fancy effects witch compiz-delivers kinda goes against all that.
Fancy effects don’t always have to eat up your system. For most systems now (at least mid-range and up) the graphic card for non-gamers is underutilized. Things like transparency 3d rotations etc. Actually touch the CPU less and less and the work is done by the video card. I found that Ubuntu runs slower when I turned effects to basic vs. advanced with the wobbly windows and spinning cubes. Because the effects it does do semi-transparency fading… Is done via the CPU rendering not the GPU.
What is minimalistic in any of those boxes; functionality maybe? Take a look at a tiling WM like DWM and you can call any of your boxes a hog.
I have found the fancy effects to be both elegant and relatively light on resources – albeit unstable at times depending on the video card in use, but IMHO this wouldn’t go against the Fluxbox appeal.
Anyway as both are window managers I doubt it will ever be possible.
I’m using GNOME with Sawfish at the moment and I’m very happy with it.
But one add to the list: amiwm
Unfortunately amiwm hasn’t been updated for years. One reason might be that the source is not really free. Too bad.
Ion is a very nice tiling window manager and has far greater usability than one might expect from screenshots or past experiences with other tiling window managers.
Perhaps its biggest flaw is the militant character of its creator, who often comes of as a jerk by calling Xinerama “unecological penis enlargement” and says most FOSS is “crap” (http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/faq/entries/Xinerama.html).
Then again, he did convince me of the beauty of non-anti-aliased fonts, so his opinions aren’t all bad.
Anyway, if you want to try a tiling window manager that’s willing to adapt to you until you adapt to it (you can use the mouse for basic tasks), try Ion.
Seconded. Best window manager ever; I’ve been using it exclusively since 2005.
Poor article. How can you name awesome without considering dwm[1]? Many window managers have been inspired both in code and behaviour by wmii/dwm: awesome itself is nothing else than a dwm fork.
[1]: http://www.suckless.org/dwm/
It would be nice to see some useful screenshots. The ones given in the article are too small to be useful. For example, the thumbnail he provides for Fluxbox looks like it has some interesting commentary, which I would really like to read. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the author that anyone lacking a magnifying glass would be able to read it. At least add a link to the source image!
I can’t provide you any fluxbox shots since I don’t use it, but here is a dwm screenshot: 2 tags selected and tiling layout in action
http://www.minimalblue.com/gallery/screenshots/big/dwm-20080718.png
Fluxbox (top, xmms, gkrellm) – http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/faijeya/desktop.jpg
Fluxbox (with 3ddesktop) – http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/faijeya/flux3d.png
Screens are quite old, though.
Thanks for the last link – didn’t know about 3ddesktop
I would guess that the author took out the full-size images after the article got “OSNews’d”.
That is a real question not some slight.
I mostly run Gnome applications. When I run a minimalist window manager, would it make any difference since many of the shared libraries used for more loaded (non- Lib-X11) WM’s such as Metacity are also loaded. I do not notice any gain when running non-xterm applications such as Firefox or Kino.
No of course not. When running on a reasonable recent computer, trivial things like a window manager doesn’t speed up or slow things down, only some of your applications do.
How many windows do you open, close, move per second anyway?
…why all the whiz-bang effects for a simple Window Manager? I prefer something in which I can actually get work done, like Openbox. It_just_works (and let’s ME work on my PC without it being in the way).
But I guess some people really do like everything and the kitchen sink. Which is why I love Open Source, ’cause everybody can choose what suits them best.
I was messing around on Synaptic the other day, and I found a replacement WM for Gnome. It made the whole Ubuntu system speed up no end. I think it was Openbox for Gnome. I am not sure though.
It is not a replacement WM like going from Gnome to KDE or from Afterstep to Fluxbox.
Gnome looks and works almost the same, except the theme is different and things work faster.
The same manager is available for KDE and Enlightenment