[Eug-lug] Favourite WM/Desktop

[T. Joseph CARTER]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 11:19:34PM -0800, Jeff_W wrote:
> > > http://www.rpgopher.com/poll/
> >
> > you typo'd blackbox
> 
> And you didn't include WMX - my favorite :/

Also no Window Maker.  A little taste of NeXT is good for the soul.
Additionally, it's fast, a person with no art talent can theme it however
they like in about five minutes, and its window decorations are more
intelligent than those used by Windows, MacOS X, Metacity (whose can be
changed I think), or anything else I've seen in the past five years.  Like
the old mac, Window Maker keeps the close button seperate from the other
border buttons so you don't accidentally click it.

UNLIKE Afterstep, you don't need to edit a config file.  You can, but you
don't need to.  I used Afterstep untin wmaker became mature enough to
depend on.  Honestly, wmaker is faster than Afterstep.


My runner-up choice is xfce (which I voted for) because xfce4 is actually
useful.  It's not as light as some people imagine "light", but it's quite
small and fast for being as graphically heavy as it is.  It is meant to be
a tightly integrated environment, but nobody is writing major applications
for it, so you may as well classify it as a mini-environment which is
somewhat Gnome-friendly.

I do not know if xfwm4 can actually replace metacity in Gnome, but I don't
know if wmaker can--some years ago it could not, but that's because Gnome
2.0 changed things that didn't need changing and all of the old
Gnome-friendly window managers suddenly were worse than a non-Gnome window
manager.

The best system at this point appears to be XFCE (4) and a small selection
of Gnome apps set up to run using XFCE's session and config managers (that
was almost possible way back when..)  You get the app support of Gnome
while still having a core set of tools that work pretty fast on a system
you're likely to have bought in the past five years.  What more can you
ask for?