24 replies
6d23h
Related: There is an in-development Wayland compositor for the Window Maker look and feel called wlmaker¹. It is already quite usable, but is very barebones right now.
23 replies
6d23h
What a blast from the past. WindowMaker served me well for many years, mainly on small screens. But once I started using multi-monitor setups, I switched to i3.
One thing: WindowMaker is easy to use yet full of options to customize the appearance and behaviour of windows, per-application and per-window.
Yet I think its killer feature for many years was the huge (64x64 pixel) "dock apps". There, you could put widgets with a ton of nice functionality, such as WiFi status, mailbox, disk monitoring — or just a clock. I don't remember if NeXTStep/WM were the first to offer those widgets, but I remember being a fond user of them.
12 replies
6d21h
I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).
Actually at some point in recent years i used NeXTStep and having being using Window Maker for many years by that point, i felt a bit of an uncanny valley effect: what i was looking at the screen felt very familiar but still somewhat "wrong" and a ton of what i was used to didn't work (or worked in a different way) :-P. It made me realize what the people around the mid-2000s who tried various Aqua-like themes on GNOME 2, etc and said that it looks off/wrong were feeling like :-P.
EDIT: also i think Window Maker is not the only window manager that supports/uses dockapps. I think FVWM and Afterstep can also use the same dockapps.
6 replies
6d20h
Fluxbox also has first class support for Dockapps. They're a great pairing.
An old screengrab to prove my point: https://www.thran.uk/img/desktop-aug-21.jpg. I'm especially fond of the VU-meter style ethernet traffic monitor, 'wmnd'.
Find dockapps here: https://www.dockapps.net/
4 replies
6d19h
That screenshot makes me want to use Fluxbox, it looks great!
1 replies
6d12h
I use Fluxbox since the first version. Very easy to customize. I've just an issue with Firefox, the Firefox windows doesn't want to play with Fluxbox (on Debian)...
0 replies
6d8h
I think this is a bug in upgrade path, I have my normal profile with this problem (and a lot of accumulated things) but if I launch Firefox with a fresh profile then it works nice.
1 replies
5d5h
It's very usable when paired with PcManFM, and there are a plethora of themes available. Customising is done by an intuitive config file. There are tools to auto-generate the application menu, so you don't need to toil after installing a new program.
The hardest part was setting up automount to handle my network drives and USB drives - no gvfs here! A result you'll welcome if you like sane paths to mountpoints.
0 replies
5d4h
That's useful information, huge thank you!
0 replies
6d18h
Fluxbox is awesome.
I used to use it on hardware-limited machines at first, then started to prefer it for its minimalism.
3 replies
6d17h
I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).
According to my computer history knowledge, NeXTSTEP version 0.8 introduced the dock in 1988.
At the launch, Steve Jobs said: “The dock — It turns out that, when you’re running applications, things can get lost. These icons can get hidden and you might want to read your mail at a moment’s notice. So we allow you to take any icon and take it over to any one of these dock positions and it’ll snap in and dock. And the minute it docks, nothing can go in front of it. And so it’s a place to always have the applications that you use handy. You can customize it any way you want to, and nothing will ever keep these things from being a glance away. That’s what the dock’s all about. And if you decide that you need to use that right part of the screen for an awfully big window, and you don’t want to undock things, you can just slide it down and everything, but the little logo will go off the screen.”
2 replies
6d17h
That's a different thing, though. Obviously NeXTStep had a dock for apps. That was probably its primary influence on UI design and why OSX/MacOS has an dock. That's different than "dockapps" which are programs that live in the dock which aren't just normal programs. The closest thing to that would be the clock/calendar app of NeXTStep (which does exist as a dockapp for WindowMaker)
1 replies
6d11h
As I understood it, the dockapps of the Windowmaker world were basically a work-around for the fact that the X11 had no concept of a dock icon (or a dock at all, for that matter). On Nextstep, the normal Mail app would show status in its dock icon, much like Mail.app does on macOS today, the calendar app would show event reminders in its dock icon, etc. Your X11 mail app wouldn’t know that there was such a thing as a dock, so you had to run a separate little app to get the “biff” function in the dock. Then the Windowmaker afficionados took the concept and ran with it, creating lots of little apps that had nothing but a dock icon, a thing that didn’t really exist on Nextstep.
0 replies
6d7h
I think GNUMail and some GNUStep software supported notifications as dockapps. Such as the number of new mail messagges.
0 replies
6d20h
Fun fact: though years after WMaker/AfterStep were already a thing, the Mac OS X Developer Previews, Public Beta, and 10.0 had “Docklets” that worked somewhat similarly. The default Dock for a new user contained one for adjusting Monitor resolution and color depth. They were deprecated almost immediately when the MenuItem API was added to Mac OS X 10.1
6 replies
6d22h
Yep. I used windowmaker then enlightenment ( I fell prey to shiny baubles ) then kde3 ( yes, in my mind still the single best desktop environment I’ve ever used ), and now i3. I love i3.
3 replies
6d19h
KDE3 will always be the pinnacle of Desktop Linux for me as well.
The functionality that was there at the time is astounding. Kmail was better than Evolution (minus the Exchange support), KOffice was half decent and a lot more performant than OpenOffice. KDevelop was a quite progressive IDE. Heck even Konqueror was a decent browser, with an engine that was so well designed and portable, that when Apple decided to make a browser, they forked KHTML.
Everything was cohesive, used a unified design language, worked great on a system with 1GB of RAM.
I don't understand how all these years later, on systems infinitely more powerful, desktop Linux is yet to get to a similar state. KDE4 was such a disaster, I left KDE and have never really gone back since.
0 replies
6d18h
If you feel ever nostalgic, there's Trinity! https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
0 replies
6d12h
The last versions of KDE 4 had fixed a lot of issues and were a solid DE IMHO. I had left KDE for a while when KDE 4 was first released indeed, but came back later.
They decided they would not do the same mistake of releasing such unstable versions again in the future, and indeed, plasma 6.0 was usable since day one.
Have you tried Plasma 6 or a recent plasma 5? If you liked KDE 3, you might like it. I find it's a really pleasant environment, I'm not sure something from KDE 3 is missing. It's also quite lightweight, I run it on a tablet with 1GB of RAM, it's a bit slow but quite usable. The web is pretty much unusable though for the most part unfortunately.
There's also a big work of ironing out the small bugs and they are working on making things more cohesive with a design system and some work to unify qml-based and qtwidget-based components (yes, on that front, qml was not a thing when KDE 3 was released, the UI was probably more cohesive - though Breeze, KDE's theme, already does a lot for this and is beautiful).
I don't know Trinity but that's of course another option.
0 replies
6d7h
I don't understand how all these years later, on systems infinitely more powerful, desktop Linux is yet to get to a similar state.
CADT ?
They redesign the whole thing every couple of years instead of fixing bugs.
1 replies
6d12h
Another vote for KDE3 as the best Linux desktop environment.
I forgot how it was called, but one could easily automate the whole desktop back then via scripts and an interface to the KDE3 programs.
KDE IMHO never returned to that level of polish and quality (yes, I tried 6).
Today I am a GNOME user and its killer feature for me is provisioning via dconf and Evolution is my favorite email client on any platform.
0 replies
6d11h
I only started using KDE 4, then quit and came back for KDE 5. Now I'm running KDE 6 on Wayland and it the most stable it ever has been. There is a significant push for bug fixing and polish. Port to Qt 6 started a major release cycle and I expect it to mature a lot in the next few releases.
0 replies
6d8h
Using i3 with rofi on X11 git version (because of new TearFree option) myself. A very thin top bar for virtual desktops, tray icons, email notifications, sound volume and date time is all that I need anymore. Tiling is the best way for me to use my single 32" monitor.
The publication of high quality fonts since WindowMaker was a thing 25 years ago and expired patents for font rendering also needs to be mentioned. Desktop Linux has evolved nicely.
0 replies
6d22h
The wharf? Suddenly that name made sense when linking about the heritage and the dock. TIL I guess.
0 replies
6d21h
Fascinating to see WindowMaker still going strong. I was a keen fan back in the day (late 90s/early 2000s?). It had a nice feel to it and made my Linux desktop look cooler than the other Linux desktops in our open plan office on a university campus!
9 replies
6d22h
That brings me Etoile from memory: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ - it's like a mix of NeXTSTEP/GNUstep with Apple's Aqua. Sadly the project is pretty much dead - github shows last changes done 8, 10 and 11 years ago.
6 replies
6d22h
I was very interested in seeing where Etoile might go as it looked fantastic to me. Right now the most interesting thing I have seen in this space is helloSystem.
5 replies
6d22h
I feel like the premise of helloSystem is the simple fact that macOS uses parts on FreeBSD therefore they decided to dress up FreeBSD to look more like macOS lol.
To me that’s not some meaningful that solves a fundamental problem. GNUSTEP is meaningful because it actually attempts to reimplement Cocoa.
Because of that, I found Etoile more interesting than helloSystem because in turn it attempted to make GNUSTEP presentable to the non tech world in a way WindowMaker never will.
I can understand helloSystem choice to ignore GNUSTEP given the GNUSTEP community is small and virtually inactive but again, it’s just another ooh aah shiny project that won’t get off the ground ever.
If I were them I’d just port one of the many macOS looking desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or PopOS uses to FreeBSD and build from there. That’s obviously more productive, but productivity can be boring because it’s real and not a hobby project. :P
4 replies
6d20h
If I were them I’d just port one of the many macOS looking desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or PopOS uses to FreeBSD and build from there. That’s obviously more productive, but productivity can be boring because it’s real and not a hobby project. :P
I’m not sure how much productive it’d be in the long run, at least if faithfully replicating macOS is the goal. PopOS is bailing on GNOME (what it had been using) in favor of a bespoke DE because modifying GNOME had become too much of a pain, even for their relatively modest changes. Pantheon (elementary’s DE) closely resembles GNOME for likely similar reasons.
Not that any of the other DEs would serve as better bases, unfortunately. No matter what making a Mac-style DE is going to be a steep uphill climb.
1 replies
6d20h
No matter what making a Mac-style DE is going to be a steep uphill climb.
I looked more into the project, his goal is actually to replicate the macOS from the 90s to early 2000s. I’m optimistic about a goal like that, but it’s more about the QA that comes with these sorts of higher level projects. I don’t think they have the resources to make something as out of the box as Ubuntu unless they use elementary or pop as their basis.
That being said, why can’t they just branch off into a DE with easy installation on BSD or any *nix loke XFCE or MATE? From what I’ve seen, they don’t have a real reason to even use FreeBSD.
This way they’d increase the likelihood of adoption but maybe at the trade off of supporting multiple platforms which I’d imagine can be a pain.
0 replies
6d20h
I agree that using FreeBSD as the base OS probably isn't necessary, but it does make sense if they're trying to provide an alternative to macOS, with the macOS userland much more closely resembling FreeBSD's than GNU's. There are BSD-styled Linux distros that could serve this purpose too, though.
The problem with using almost any existing DE as a base is that Linux DEs are all inclined toward non-mac UI paradigms (most being Windows-like and a couple iPad-like), which means required changes will be numerous and deep. So much so that the benefit of not starting from scratch is dubious.
1 replies
6d20h
Not that any of the other DEs would serve as better bases, unfortunately. No matter what making a Mac-style DE is going to be a steep uphill climb.
No idea what the Elementary, helloSystem, Etoile, etc. folks are messing around about. The Cappuccino Project's Aristo is the best base to start with, and arguably looks better than Aqua. (I was never a fan of Aqua's overshined blue dialog buttons and scrollbars.)
0 replies
6d19h
Neat — I like it https://www.cappuccino.dev/aristo/showcase/
1 replies
6d8h
It's not dead at all. You're probably looking at https://github.com/etoile/Etoile which only contains the basic directory structure, but the code itself is in other repositories under https://github.com/etoile
0 replies
5d12h
Heh, classic - I stand corrected.
Back then when I saw it, I had hope that Etoile become a really big thing - especially at the dawn of Gnome 3 which initial release bring disappointment to many
8 replies
6d19h
Personally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework.
GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with GNUstep.
Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for free.
People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.
1 replies
6d3h
Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation
We see what you did there!
0 replies
5d9h
:)
1 replies
6d17h
This is mentioned in the WINGs documentation here: https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html
Also I was under the impression that GNUstep's Wayland support was experimental at best. I believe it's very incomplete, at least that's what the readme says: https://github.com/gnustep/libs-back/tree/master/Source/wayl...
0 replies
6d1h
Feel free to try yourself http://bananas.ethz.ch/debian/gnustep-back/2/
0 replies
6d5h
GNUStep still looks pretty much stuck in the pack.
Okish if only pretending it is Next step clone, macOS is probably still around Panther or Snow Leopard.
Window Maker was my favourite window manager, until I went back to Windows 7 as main OS.
0 replies
6d19h
Interesting! I used to use WM as a desktop, and while it wasn't bloated feeling, it did feel like there were rough edges. GNUStep looked interesting, but I guess I never gave it much thought, or hit a roadblock with it.
If both are really two sides to the same coin, it would be nice if they merged. I obviously don't have the full details, though.
0 replies
6d16h
Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support
I feel like this oversimplifies the situation. It's not like WindowMaker could adopt gnustep and then automatically be a Wayland compositor. It would need code tailored to that situation, which wouldn't fit the gnustep architecture without modification. Same for using it as an x11 wm. You can't just drop in gnustep inside a WM and it instantly becomes a window manager for all the existing rendering targets supported by gnustep. Gnustep is not currently a WM on any platform.
0 replies
6d17h
Concur.
On the other hand, I had high hopes for Etoile, which had the goal of being a modern GNUstep-based user environment: http://etoileos.com/etoile/
5 replies
6d23h
Still one of my faves, only edged out by tweaking XFCE to look like Mac OS Platinum: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 (I love collapsing windows for some reason).
1 replies
6d21h
I wish somone could do this with contenporary GNOME. It's a be a good fit.
0 replies
6d20h
There was an extension for that someplace, but I forget where.
1 replies
6d16h
That looks cool, but I don't see any config files shared.
0 replies
6d11h
It’s a publicly available theme.
0 replies
6d22h
Window shade was a brilliant feature!
5 replies
6d20h
Back in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever hold a special place in my heart.
2 replies
6d19h
Why did you stop using it?
0 replies
6d8h
I can tell you why I did back then. I saw screenshots of openbox/blackbox/fluxbox and wanted that instead.
0 replies
6d6h
I went to Blackbox because its UI elements were smaller (title bars are more narrow, no 64x64 dock icons) which gave me more real estate on my 1024x768 monitor. I then migrated to Openbox because that had more active development at the time.
This year, I've switched to herbstluftwm, a tiling window manager that's really nice and works in a way that agrees with me.
1 replies
6d17h
I never liked Window Maker much. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I tried a lot of Window Managers and desktop environments and usually ended up back on either K Desktop Environment or Sawfish. Obviously everyone’s heard of KDE but I don’t see many people talking about Sawfish.
I never really liked GNOME much either; even when everyone was running it in the 2.x days.
Enlightenment was (and still is) cool though and in my opinion never got enough credit.
BeOS aesthetics (and the OS as a whole) will always have a special place in my heart too.
Ultimately this all just boils down to personal preference. I’m definitely not suggesting that you’re wrong nor weird for liking Window Maker (if anything, I’m probably the weird one…)
0 replies
5d21h
I actually preferred stock afterstep over windowmaker, but I agree with you in that I preferred any windows manager with a taskbar.
3 replies
6d23h
I miss dock apps.
2 replies
6d21h
Aren’t the panel widgets in e.g. KDE the same concept?
1 replies
6d21h
Sort of, but dock apps all had to fit within a 64x64 pixel square. There was something nice about the constraint and how clever people were about fitting information within that square.
0 replies
6d21h
Note that while 64x64 is the default, it is not the only size - you can configure the dock to use "icons" (dock/window/etc blocks) of sizes from 24x24 up to 240x240. Though in practice most dockapps are limited at 64x64 (there have been some in recent years updated to allow other sizes from people who want to use Window Maker in HiDPI monitors) and using a different size has them centered (it might be possible to use the X11 composition extension to scale them in the future though, Window Maker already uses it to make previews for "miniaturized" -aka minimized- windows).
3 replies
6d22h
I've been using it since it came out. Before that, I used a NextStep theme for FVWM.
I'm dependent on WindowShade and wouldn't want to use a window manager without it.
I have the Window List menu pinned below the dock on the right side of the screen, from where it can pop out to full width if the mouse pointer touches the screen edge. I much prefer that over a "task bar" that doesn't show full titles but takes up a lot of space. (and no, I don't use other icons intended for the purpose)
I used to have my own patch with a few graphical tweaks but stopped compiling from source a long time ago.
2 replies
6d20h
Got any any screenshots? I’m having a hard time imagining this..
0 replies
6d20h
The WindowMaker screenshots page has one just like they described: http://www.windowmaker.org/screenshots/lumpi-wmaker.png
0 replies
6d4h
fvwm was extremely flexible and skinable but you had to really dig around in its config files to make it do it.
3 replies
6d22h
Dude I need this for MacOS 8. God I would pay so much money for a replica iMac with MacOS 8.
2 replies
6d14h
mlvwm? https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm
I accept all major currencies.
0 replies
6d7h
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.
0 replies
6d11h
doge?
3 replies
6d17h
Unlike many here, I never grokked or really liked WindowMaker.
The biggest thing was how the dock icons were occupying too much precious screen space, and were distracting. Especially in the Olden Days when monitor ratios were 4:3. In contrast with a 16:9 or 16:10 modern monitor, where you can put things on the side and they'll be more out of focus.
Animated/informational dock icons, to show system stats or whatever, were more of a distraction than were worth it, and if you reduced the size of the dock icon then they became worthless. Couldn't have it both ways.
I did not like how big a dock icon was when you minimized a window. This was long after Windows 95 showed a thinner taskbar was perfectly sufficient.
I did not like the context menus that stuck around. Muscle memory, perhaps, but again: a distraction.
I did love its columnar file/tree navigator, which macOS continues to provide in Finder, although it's not a default!
All in all, it felt like an interesting exploration of the computer desktop UX space, but a dead end.
2 replies
6d16h
The dock(s) and clip can be autohidden, expanding when hovered over. I've found this a useful compromise.
(MacOS's dock can be configured ... somewhat ... similarly.)
1 replies
6d15h
Indeed, I always configure the macOS dock to auto-hide.
(I do not understand the people who don't and also leave it at the bottom of the screen rather than on the side. All that screen real-estate, wasted!)
0 replies
6d14h
There are dozens of us side-hides! Dozens!
2 replies
6d23h
I remember that years go (probably 2014) I was in one of the biggest retail stores in Brazil and I saw a different looking operating system in the salesmen computers.
Years later I found that it was probably a Linux running Window Maker. It was surprising to see such a niche desktop environment being largely used by non-technical users
0 replies
6d22h
If I remember right, Best Buy used to run NextStep
0 replies
6d21h
Casas Bahia. I think they still use it to this day. Their IT must be made of heros.
2 replies
6d21h
I ran this way back in probably the late 1990s in my college dorm!
1 replies
6d21h
Me too! Our small Linux group was split between Window Maker and AfterStep, and then the kid with the nice GPU was running Enlightenment. Good times.
0 replies
6d18h
I was in camp Afterstep for years. Still use it now and then in a VM with NetBSD.
1 replies
6d22h
I am using it for twenty years now. With disabled dock it's a minimalism at its best. Looking at comments, I should give i3 a try.
0 replies
6d20h
I agree, especially with Maximus and other tweaks.
I will take our weird defaultsdb implementation over some of the alternatives that get pitched. Scheme? No thanks..
1 replies
6d19h
Also: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace for various versions of Linux:
"NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT OS. It is developed according to the "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines"."
0 replies
6d17h
I have been following the project for some years, and I wish the project success.
1 replies
6d7h
Who does this appeal to and why? I use Rectangle on OSX to give me the layout options I need which basically amounts to switching between full screen and two apps split vertically, then I use the in-built OSX shortcuts for moving apps between screens.
What kind of workflows suit something as advanced as Window Maker? Where does the line sit between this and something like Gnome? I'm struggling to get my head around the nuances.
0 replies
6d6h
Window maker is a glimpse into the past. A modern-ish look into the NeXTSTEP UI, which would become OS X’s Aqua. personally it’s my preferred Linux UI. Simply because I find it cozy.
0 replies
6d15h
I miss the abundance of dock apps. It'd be neat if those could make a comeback.
0 replies
6d8h
That's a name i haven't heard in a long time... Window Maker was my first desktop interface when I started Linux. Though I can see in 20 years not much seems to have change, it is good to see it is not dead. It is quite a unique style.
0 replies
6d13h
I used it for years on FreeBSD and hacked around its many parts. So much nostalgia!
0 replies
6d23h
Taking me back to when I first installed Linux back in 2001.
0 replies
6d20h
I kept it for a few years as my favorite WM, paired with Rox Filer with its panel switched off, that is, exclusively as a (very fast) file manager. WMaker turned out really useful when over 20 years back I had to set up lots of PCs for remote points of sale operations. Users should be able to do nothing beyond the strict necessary: send-receive mail, go to company's site, schedule remote management, print receipts, etc. No games or other distractions, no downloads, no customizable menus etc. Certainly not rocket science, but users would have very little computer experience, certainly none with Linux, therefore arranging user-proof kiosk-like desktops became mandatory or we would have been overwhelmed by complaints. WMaker did its job brilliantly, I put icons on the dock for all basic operations plus some safeguards to avoid deleting them and opening dangerous menus, and for what I know it still worked great when I left the company one year later. Good memories.
0 replies
6d14h
Missing AfterStep from back in the day.
0 replies
6d11h
This is nostalgic. I think I used to use sawfish/sawmill in those days. These days, I just use i3. Nothing extra.
0 replies
6d23h
Nice to see they're still doing updates to WindowMaker ("https://www.windowmaker.org/news/"). I last used it 25 years ago, but always liked it, and wouldn't have minded having an entire desktop that started with NextStep design.
(Lately, I use XMonad or i3wm on workstations that I use heavily. On systems that I use only rarely, I use the default Debian desktop, which currently is more Gnome-opinionated than I think is ideal for new user ramp-up, but it's stock.)
0 replies
6d9h
Used that for years on my Gentoo installation back when I had more time to spend on my home computer. Can't recommend it enough.
0 replies
6d8h
Fond memories, using it extensively during my early years with Linux. I do still like very much the neat look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI. A couple of months ago I attempted to develop a small example using the SDK and it was an extremely dissapointing experience. Not related to Objective-C per se, but the way you are supposed to develop GUI apps (GORM: is surprisingly convoluted and confusing to use it). That combined with the fact that documentation is scarce (and pretty bad) to non existant, made me to put it away within days. I actually picked up WindowMaker as an excuse to have a peek at Objective-C and play around a bit and see if I could do some silly GUI apps. Is there any good up to date documentation out there for doing GUI development with the GNUStep SDK? All resources that I found seem to be really old. Another WM that I used during my first contact with Linux was BlackBox, though don't know if still alive.
0 replies
6d20h
I used this for a couple years many many years ago. I even made several dock widgets for it for various purposes. The source code for these widgets even helped me get my first programming job!
Good memories!
0 replies
6d21h
I tried Window Maker because I liked the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP when I'd used it. On Linux though, I just couldn't get used to the left-side scrollbars. It was ok on NeXTSTEP because that's how that always was, but seeing my Linux like that was one STEP too far.
0 replies
6d20h
Used it for many years on various machines, good stuff!
0 replies
6d20h
I ran this on my Sparc 10 for a few years (late 90's, early 2000's.)
0 replies
6d4h
I'm in my forties and have been doing ironic retro window managers since I was a teen rocking olvwm on my slackware 486 box in the mid-nineties.
Months fade into years, which have faded into decades. My hair is graying and thinning, and the light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer. Yet not one single human soul has ever noticed or cared about my really impressive desktop setup.
0 replies
6d15h
I remember trying both WindowMaker and AfterStep on RedHat 4.2 (or maybe 5.0). I picked AfterStep because it handled 256-color mode better. It wasn't long after that I had a card that could do 16-bit color and left AfterStep behind. Still I have a fond respect for those window managers, trying to build a desktop environment that was outside the box for the time.
0 replies
6d23h
Ha! Long time since I’ve seen that. That was the first open source project I got involved in and wrote the FAQ off irc and mailing list questions.
0 replies
6d20h
Too bad GNUstep never got popular
0 replies
6d22h
Happy memories! I switched to i3, but man...yeah those were the days. I even built my workstation at the time to mimic the black-cube look of a NeXTcube.
0 replies
6d18h
WM-Live is built-off of the Debian/Bookworm 12.1 ISO.
Reminds me of the Open BSD team's incremental modification of proprietary ATT code.
Will dd 0.96 onto an optical drive soon.
0 replies
6d1h
Try wlmaker? https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker
0 replies
6d19h
If you like the aesthetic of this window manager, you may also like NsCDE:
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
I've personally used it on old 1.3 GHz P-III system running Debian 10, it's remarkably fast and usable even on such old hardware.
0 replies
6d23h
used it for years, .. then switched to i3. Never looked back :)
0 replies
6d4h
Is this the window manger that’s shipped with ps2 Linux?
0 replies
6d22h
Really has that retro-cool look down pat, a bit like CDE. My journey was Openbox -> i3 -> bspwm, but I always wanted to try it just for the aesthetics.
0 replies
6d4h
I'm using it now. It's my primary wm for all my machines. I don't need a "desktop"; I just want something to manage windows. I don't "drag-n-drop". And I don't systemd, plus I kill as much of the rest of their FreeDesktop.Org code as I possibly can.
I've tried to switch to other wms, but I just can't get the same usefulness out of them, and end up switching back.
0 replies
6d15h
I used to use Window Maker all the time on Slackware. It was wicked fast, barebones, reliable, configurable. I just noticed it's packaged for Alpine (my current distro), I'll have to revisit it
X11 did nothing wrong. You hear me? Nothing.
x11 doesn't do much of anything to begin with, these days. It will still exist for the people that want to use it, but distros are right to not default to it anymore.
Did they ever fix the accessibility situation on Wayland? Non-accessible defaults are not great IMO.
The issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it still is very much a problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
gnome and cosmic are both using accesskit for some of the parts that aren't completed yet.
X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord".
An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace.
(If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ )
X11's architecture, on the other hand, is arguably better than Wayland's. Server-side rendering is a great way to
It also has lots of flaws. "Mechanism, not policy" has to go, because you are trying to make a desktop environment, not draw arbitrary rectangles to the screen. It is already a given that there is one special client called the window manager; it would serve the architecture well to know that's the window manager instead of treating every client as if it could potentially be a window manager. But Wayland goes even further in this direction, eschewing things like icons, title bars and resize borders, which are basic expectations of a desktop environment. While X11's way of doing these things is esoteric, at least it has one. (If it were up to me, standardized window properties would be promoted to requests, so you'd just call xcb_set_window_title instead of fussing with atoms and window properties).
Another anecdote is HDR: Wayland seems to still have not standardized how it should work; meanwhile on X11, there is already protocol support for multiple pixel formats (1-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit displays) and you could just add 48-bit color to that list. That would be one of the things Wayland stripped out while striving for simplicity (since everyone had 24-bit colour at the time) that turned out to actually be important.
---
At some time before the heat death of the universe, I will get around to trying to fork Xorg and remove all the cruft and see where that goes. (Server-side rendering is not cruft. User-mode SVGA drivers are.)
I did minimal work on this already - as in, I downloaded Xorg's source code and had a look through. The whole configuration system has to go. The XFree86 driver code and driver abstraction has to go, and the DRM driver hard-wired in place. Using dlsym to locate compiled-in modules makes tracking dependencies impossible.
I suspect this has something to do with the state of Xorg: Nobody knows what it should and shouldn't do, and the module API for Xorg is the entirety of Xorg, so changing anything is liable to break someone's external module that wasn't on the "it should do this" list.
It wouldn't be the first time the X server was forked with the intention of cleaning it up: Xorg is a fork of XFree86, which was a fork of X386, which was based on something I don't remember.
There are some advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
However, there's just stuff that X assumes that isn't true anymore. A good example is how it handles input. How many cursors does a screen have? One machine? okay, One input device?
One of the folks behind both Wayland and X gave a fantastic talk on the issues and the hell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HllUoT_WE7Y
I'll have to see the talk later. If a new input model is needed, why can't it be an incremental upgrade? I know that UI frameworks still have the traditional mouse down/up/move events, so they've been able to make it an incremental upgrade in that layer. If it's so incompatible that it can't coexist with the old model in the same connection, we make it an option for the client to request. If we're very very sure it's the future, we make it X11R8 or even X12 (the difference between X10 and X11 was smaller than this), we allow the server to support X11 and X12 clients and deprecate X11, and remove it after a very long time (if ever). All of this is still less invasive than Wayland.
It's true except no one wants to maintain it anymore because the code is a mess. This is how software dies.
You're confusing X11 with Xorg. There were X servers before Xorg and there will be X servers after. (Xwayland is one!)
The problem is what X11 didn't do: attract and retain maintainers.
The majority of SW developers want to make shiny new things, not fix old bugs.
Wrong.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
It did have some of the worst code in open source. We didn't need to abandon the protocol, ABI & backwards compatibility (fuck Wayland sideways a broom) but a rewrite was sorely needed
Why can't we have a wayland server that can run different window managers like X did? That way, we only need one wayland compositor, and everyone can just write their own window managers.
Mir is perhaps the closest thing to that ideal that I'm aware of. Maybe arcan, but I don't know anything about the architecture
TIL that Mir is not dead, but pivoted to be built on top of Wayland.
That’s what wlroots is (almost). Many wayland window managers use that to offload wayland stuff.
This looks doable. Create a Wayland compositor that does not do visible window management itself, but exposes an API to help relatively easily port and run an ICCCM-compliant WM.
This looks so obvious that it ought to have been tried.
I just skimmed but it looks like it’s missing something like WiNGs
If gnustep has a Wayland backend that would be a logical pairing.
I seem to recall WindowMaker had special support for gnustep's NeXT style detachable menus.
It's the first, and hopefully the only, time I will say I'm glad I see something on Wayland. I had some nasty visual issues once with WindowMaker, I feel like such a fundamental move is needed.
A big thanks to phkaeser for this work.
If I am ever forced to use Wayland (yes forced), I could very well seem my self using Compositor.
Great work!