Your favorite window manager?

[natto fire]

Just curious, doesn't have to be the one you are using now, and sorry if your WM of choice is not in the poll, please post if that is the case. Also post if you want to proclaim your favorite display manger.

Having only been into Linux for a few years, I haven't had a chance to try many of the multitude of window managers out there, but I liked the simplicity/stability of fluxbox, and on the other end of the spectrum, the ooh and ahh of Beryl. For me, the happy medium between the two is Metacity, so I guess that is my favorite. I run Linux on two separate machines that are miles apart as far as hardware specs, but even with Gnome's bloaty nature, it runs pretty well on my PIII 600 with 256MB of RAM.

 

[Alone]

Beryl.

 

[Nothinman]

E16 here, I hate the full desktop crap that comes with Gnome and KDE.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I use a few, depending on mood:
Fvwm
wmii

Sometimes, but rarely:
9wm

I'm looking forward to trying cwm too.

 

[OctaneZ]

e16

 

[stupidkid]

Beryl is the prettiest and the most distracting. But I still like it, why don't you have IceWM?

Can someone explain to me the difference between all those *boxes?

 

[Nothinman]

Can someone explain to me the difference between all those *boxes?

Random people with free time on their hands? When the source is open to all anyone with a compiler can copy and release code in any way they want.

 

[natto fire]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Can someone explain to me the difference between all those *boxes?

Random people with free time on their hands? When the source is open to all anyone with a compiler can copy and release code in any way they want.

I only used Fluxbox, and I thought it was great, I think the simplicity of it is why there are so many forks.

 

[drag]

Fluxbox is a fork from Blackbox, not the other way around.


Personally my favorite now is OpenBox due to it's EWMH compliance and it's configuration file format. It started off as a fork, but it underwent a full rewrite so now it's completely it's own thing.

Still though I generally use Metacity because I am lazy and Metacity does a decent job of staying out of my way.

Can someone explain to me the difference between all those *boxes?

Blackbox was the original *box Window Manager. The desire was to create something modern, Unix-y, and light weight. A usefull alternative to Gnome or KDE-land. This was a long time ago, back when Enlightenment 0.16 and earlier was considured 'heavy duty'.

Fluxbox was created as a fork from Blackbox as a effort to improve it. Blackbox development stalled and the original people seemed to dissappear, Fluxbox was created to keep moving the concept forward. A while after Fluxbox forked Blackbox development picked up again.

OpenBox was created as a fork from Blackbox to bring the '*box' WM concepts, look, and theming system to a wider audiance. It supports EWMH (extended window manager hints) which is a standard created to address the incompatable nature of many Window managers. Also it got rid of the standard BB dock at the bottom, but it can support it if you want it. With Openbox 3 it went a full rewrite, and is now a C program (were as others are C++)


If a WM supports EWMH then it can be used as a drop-in replacement for the default window managers used in KDE or Gnome as well as maintain application compatability. For example applications that spawn new windows will offer hints on what type of windows they are (dialog vs standard, for example).

 

[Darkstar757]

E17 here

 

[lousydood]

ratpoison

kill the rat -- go keyboard only!

 

[dandragonrage]

FVWM

 

[DasFox]

What kind of Linux Geek forgets these extremely popular WindowManagers... LOL :roll:

Icewm
Openbox
Window Maker

ALOHA

 

[Brazen]

Where's Luna and Aero?

edit: my bad, thought I was OS (I hate all these freaking categories)

 

[Nothinman]

Where's Luna and Aero?

Well technically those aren't window managers anyway. Luna is just a theme for Explorer and Aero is just a theme for DWM.

 

[Brazen]

eh, I was really just being facetious, and that is the closest equivalents I could think of.

 

[BW86]

Beryl

 

[thehstrybean]

Beryl

 

[TheVrolok]

Was e17 until Beryl.