11 ms·

The Antidesktop (2002)

196 points by yankcrime 10y ago

vidarh 10y ago
That's quite similar. I use i3wm, and usually keep most applications maximized. I have a bunch of keybindings to start Chrome, start new terminals etc., including some that start ssh sessions to specific servers and attached to a suitable screen session (my home server has several screen sessions with different configs and different coloured status lines running for different projects). Every now and again I split the screen, but rarely in more than two. With screen sessions running on my home server for most of my projects, I can also detach and close them and/or reboot my laptop and not lose state, so e.g. at the moment I just have one Chrome window and one screen session open (on separate virtual desktops). I have a shortcut to bring up Nautilus to manage files, but I use it so rarely I often forget the shortcut (I've got a keybinding to bring up a help file).
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I started using i3 back around 2012 I think. I had tried a couple of other tiling window managers (awesome, xmonad, etc). I occasionally try new ones every couple of months if I start using a new machine or laptop, but I keep coming back to i3. It feels like it's the easiest to use/deal with and I like the tree/stack way it handles windows. Having used a tiling window manager for years, I don't ever want to go back to overlapping windows. Even when I have to use my Windows machine, I tend to keep everything full screen in each workspace.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Yeah, I used Ion for a year or so around 2000, but then went back to a more normal setup because I felt there were too many limitations (e.g. things like Gimp was a nightmare), but what has happened since is that I use fewer and fewer native apps, so I'm now down to mostly browser windows and terminals and that has made it a lot easier to get a tiling setup that works great, and now I don't want to give it up. When I started using i3wm it was after a couple of years of realising I was running everything maximised anyway.
xelxebar 10y ago
My setup is remarkably similar: Xmonad and tmux. I only reluctantly leave the command line and feel like I only have X so I can have a reasonable browser. And I kind of loathe all the popular browsers because I feel crippled without my cli tools and ability to script up solutions to my problems. Uzbl is the only browser that feels like I'm still in the cli but just happen to also have a window that renders the web.
- colordrops 10y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted, but I think the Xmonad (or other tiling window manager) and Tmux (or screen) together are a pretty popular combination. I also settled on the Xmonad/Tmux combo after more than 20 years of mucking with window managers.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  The are a few VNC X servers.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I use a similar setup. Tmux is essentially my WM, as all my work is done on jump boxes. FWIW, vimperator is awesome in FF, though I hear it's going away soon with recent FF updates.
  - H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
    That's rights, Firefox is moving to Web Extension (iirc it's to ensure cross-compatibility with Chrome Extensions). Sadly it's losing most of the extensions which alter the behaviour of the browser in the process.
    - btschaegg 10y ago
      This is the reason I decided to give Qutebrowser a try. I really like it so far. Now I just need enough time to come up with some simple Keepass integration... (or just hope someone else does :-) )
zeveb 10y ago
I'm similar, but with StumpWM instead of ratpoison (it was written by ratpoison's creator), tmux instead of screen, and st instead of gnome-terminal. I will never, ever go back to a windowed desktop. This just works way too well for me. I feel like I can focus, and I never, ever have to drag a window. It's pretty awesome.
krupan 10y ago
So using screen or tmux means your non-gui apps keep running when you disconnect from your server, but what about X apps? I've been using xpra for the past few months for tmux-like functionality with GUI apps. It's /pretty/ good, but rough around the edges.
- fest 10y ago
  Thanks for mentioning xpra. I have always wanted something like that but hadn't ever thought about searching for "screen for X11".
  - vidarh 10y ago
    It's great, but it's basically "VNC for individual windows" and suffers many of the same issues - window updates happens according to the redraw algorithm of XPRA, rather than in the sequence carried out by the application, and the application doesn't wait on the rendering. That said I've been able to play back full screen full HD video on my several years old laptop via XPRA with minimal jerking or tearing, so it's not a major problem.
- Sunset 10y ago
  x11vnc with shared :0.
chc4 10y ago
I've been using a tiling WM for a while now, and it's pretty great. Most of the programs I use are in the terminal (urxvt with a pretty color scheme and font, unlike the OP), switching workspaces for different programs is just nice to use, and everything is minimal. I'd encourage everyone to check out /r/unixporn at least once. I use a fairly boring WM, too. spectrwm doesn't have a lot of config, it Just Werks, and lately I've been using a WM in wrote myself in Rust.
haddr 10y ago
The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.
- notalaser 10y ago
  The themes section is what I mourn the most. It was a great repository of computer art. And frankly, the content there was a lot more original, bold and and innovative than what you see on *-look.org today.
- sedachv 10y ago
  I actually did not realize freshmeat was gone until seeing this post. Apparently freshmeat became freecode.com sometime in 2011 with a terrible new layout. Then subdomains like palm.freecode.com disappeared entirely in 2013, after Dice Holdings acquired and ruined Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode. Those three websites were acquired by some holding company BIZX LLC last year, and the new owners seem to be serious about removing malware and adware from SourceForge and turning it around: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_... IMO the best thing they can do for freshmeat is restore the old pages and layout. There was some really good, hard-to-find information on that site.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    That depends on how much of that data is still on a server somewhere.
- rsync 10y ago
  "but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net" I don't understand this comment ... First, my experience is that most open source software is now on github. Second, I feel that github is infinitely better in every way than freshmeat was.
  - 10y ago
partycoder 10y ago
Some less popular alternatives not seen in this thread yet: - twin, vwm (curses based window manager) - dvtm (similar to tmux) There is plenty of stuff you can do without X. Some of them: - Web browsing (e.g: lynx, links, etc) - music (e.g: mp3blaster) - videos, surprisingly (e.g: mplayer + aalib)
- icebraining 10y ago
  aalib is amazing, but you can also use fbdev, which gives you regular video playback: https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m
  - partycoder 10y ago
    Yes but this can be used in the context of terminals (e.g: inside a tmux pane)
redsummer 10y ago
A lot of dev folks should (in theory) be able to get away with just having a browser on one side of the screen and a CLI terminal with tmux on the other. Both windows with tabs, and fixed in position. What kind of setup should be used for this? I know I can do this with split screens on the Mac. But is there a minimal Linux setup which provides this kind of experience?
- arebop 10y ago
  I use xmonad for this.
- combatentropy 10y ago
  The simplest set-up would be a Chromebook.
  - redsummer 10y ago
    I'm not familiar with Chrome. Can it be tiled in this way? I thought it was one tabbed window.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      It doesn't have to be tabbed (you can specifically open apps in new floating windows) but I don't know of any easy way of doing tiling, but I basically threat my Chromebook at a throwaway dumb terminal for when my "real" laptop is too big and heavy so I can't say I've learned every in and out of it.
- betenoire 10y ago
  I work almost exclusively with this setup: Dual split screens, shell on left, browser on right. The reason I comment is to share what took me too long to realize. If you want to resize the two full screen apps, the experience is much smoother if your browser is in focus first. Click browser, then drag to resize. Something to do with the terminal trying to keep to character-width bounds, I think.
  - 10y ago
Ajedi32 10y ago
> there is an element of obscurity to the system that can protect from a friend who wants to play a practical joke when I walk away. I keep xlock on "^O x", but even if I step away from the keyboard without locking it, someone stepping in tends to be confused by a screen that shows no "close" buttons and a keyboard set to Dvorak. Kinda reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1806/ https://xkcd.com/1806/
- milesrout 10y ago
  Yeah. Mildly funny story: a friend of mine and I installed dwm on our Linux users on the computers at university. Nobody else had a clue how to access them. We would constantly edit each others' PATH and bashrc in various prankish ways, which culminated in him accidentally locking himself entirely out of his own profile in an attempt to stop me from accessing it. Every command he tried, everything he tried to do, just got the rather succinct message 'Fuck off'. He had fun explaining that one to the sysadmins. One of the nice things about Linux is that you can do this. Download and compile dwm, put it in $HOME/bin, edit ~/.xinitrc to run it, and Bob's your uncle. Oh and the university also had xauth open on every computer, which meant that you could ssh into any other machine in the room and simply run 'DISPLAY=:0 firefox lemonparty.com' whenever someone turned their head away from their computer for a second. I wonder if they've ever fixed that.
soufron 10y ago
Basically, he's using only full screen apps... hence the "window" manager is more of a "focus" manager. It's the perfect setup.
sedachv 10y ago
I started using EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager, a few weeks ago, and it is by far my favorite window manager yet. It is the ultimate anti-desktop: all windows just become Emacs buffers. Since terminal windows are just Emacs buffers, managing terminal windows is exactly like managing X windows. After almost 20 years of: Enlightenment, Blackbox, Window Maker, StumpWM (only tiling window manager I could stand to use until EXWM), too much twm, Openbox most recently, and a few others I forget, EXWM feels really refreshing. https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  There's an Emacs WM, but not a decent text editor yet?
  - zamalek 10y ago
    Linus has more polishing yet to do.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      You mean RMS?
      - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
        Possibly a reference to microEmacs, of which Linus maintains his own fork (though the last commit was in 2014) [1]. [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/ https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Sure there is, it's called evil-mode :)
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  I used it for a while and really liked it, except for a couple snafus: modefulness, in terms of how keystrokes are interpreted, and my Java IDE did not love it. Otherwise it is fantastic.
shubb 10y ago
I tried this a while ago - its okay so long as you are doing specific, limited activities. If you need to explore beyond the things that you have already figured out for to do it slows you down. Websites you need don't work in lynx, Android dev is slower to pick up console first, etc. People expect you to see the pictures and word docs on your mail, or contact you via WhatsApp. You figure your way round these one by one, or give up after an hour and use the normal tool. And then onto tomorrows new distraction. Eventually this is a time sink.
- bitwize 10y ago
  Um. He's running X with a minimalist tiling wm with only one window at a time, not trying to live through a VT100. Of course, some Hackernews is now going to tell me about how this setup falls down hard when you need to do real work and how sensible people just use KDE or GNOME -- or Windows.
  - dsr_ 10y ago
    It's probably a little difficult running GIMP for photo editing. GIMP wants a half-dozen windows open at the same time to get much done. Personally, I like having a few widgets on-screen all the time - a clock, a volume control - and I enjoy having two or three things open on-screen: a terminal and a browser, for instance, or two terminals ssh'ing to different machines. Having lots of display area helps. Pretty much every window manager can handle this, and it's just a matter of figuring out which one gets out of my way fastest.
    - rhblake 10y ago
      Many tiling WMs (e.g. i3, xmonad) support floating windows. Also, GIMP supports single-window mode these days.
      - milesrout 10y ago
        Even dwm supports floating windows.
VA3FXP 10y ago
I'll chime in with a "met too!". i3 + tmux (it's the only sane way to manage servers.) I'm a sysadmin (not a developer like most of the HN crowd) so I usually have 10+ terminal windows open (depending on what project(s) I am working on. I think it would make for an interesting poll to see what the demographics are like for the 'power-user' crowd that exists here.
- jclulow 10y ago
  I'm a software engineer, and I have many terminals open as well. I've been using iTerm2 (with splits) on OS X, but with the awful new Macbooks I'm finally looking at heading back to xterm and dwm on Linux -- I miss it dearly!
zafiro17 10y ago
This is parenthetical to the discussion, but reading this article made me deeply nostalgic for 15 years ago, when we still had Freshmeat and Slashdot was decent and Mozilla was fresh and the web was largely full of information, not javascript. Back on topic, I wrote this back in 2006: "What's old is new again, the quest for distraction-free writing" (http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-New-Again-the-Quest-for-Distraction-Free-Writing.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-...). The topic remains relevant, and maybe more relevant than ever. It's super hard to arrange time and materials and commitments so that you can concentrate deeply on the task before you. We are perhaps not making much progress.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Freshmeat turned into Freecode and it's still there, but locked in perpetual read-only nostalgia mode from 2013. It is quite literally frozen in time.
- milesrout 10y ago
  I remember reading your article several years ago (2010ish maybe?) and thinking it was bloody fantastic.
- erickhill 10y ago
  I went down a very similar track last year with my own exploration in "How to Use Classic Amiga for Word Processing Today". I took a nostalgic trip inspired by George R. Martin, who still uses WordStar to write Game of Thrones. I did it for much of the same reasons you wrote your post - a desire for a distraction-free environment without a gazillion features to get a relatively basic task done. Thanks for sharing your post.
- Yetanfou 10y ago
  Back then there was Freshmeat, now there is Github (et al). In that respect I think things actually improved, especially given the ease with which git allows others to fork repositories, safeguarding against site disappearance. Given the distributed nature of git even the eventual disappearance - or total sellout - of Github (et al) will not diminish this as those who want can host their own repositories in a few minutes using the likes of Gogs/Gitea or Gitlab. Slashdot was fun while it lasted, there have been several attempts at a restart of similar communities (Soylent News etc.) but as far as I know none have managed to create the same 'feel of community'. Maybe that is because there is no real community? Anyway, with more and more people getting access to true broadband the possibilities of decentralised hosting only increase so I still have some hopes for the future when it comes to building something interesting outside of the walled-and-fenced big-data farms so popular nowadays.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
Reading this it makes sense as a highly productive system for a time when the screen size was small monitor. I keep wanting an Apple/Windows/Linux manager that really embraces the flexibility and size of a giant 4k screen (I'm using a 55" 4k TV as a monitor that's cheap in both current and real dollars than the 21" monitor I had in 2002). I've hacked together a system that works well for me on OS X with Divvy, but it still feels non optimal.
- jeromenerf 10y ago
  Tiling window managers on X11 are great on all sizes and number of monitors. They just allow to conveniently arrange windows on a grid, in a manual or dynamic fashion, with some handy functions to access and manage those windows. You can try using one for terminals on xquartz for osx. There is nothing close for non-X windows. The hardest part is to pick one ;)
zelos 10y ago
I remember being at my most productive on a similar setup - ratpoison on a SparcStation 5. No distractions, no notifications and paging the web browser back in took about a minute, so no quickly checking Slashdot.
transitorykris 10y ago
Full size split screen in MacOS is where I spend my time doing dev work. Visual Studio Code with the terminal extension and Chrome (I only wish I could do something like the author shows to get iTerm2 in there). I find this keeps me focused and productive without things getting in the way or unnecessary windows causing a distraction.
rrdharan 10y ago
Surprised that no one has pointed out this is nearly exactly the experience you get with a tablet + keyboard - and in fact the viewable screen/real estate probably lines up quite well with what a desktop gave you in 2002. That having been said, I tried using an iPad+bluetooth keyboard for a little while as a "workstation" and the inability to switch or launch apps from the keyboard doomed it for me.
- icebraining 10y ago
  On Android you can alt-tab between apps using a BT keyboard (including to the Launcher, from which you can launch apps). But alt-tab is the poor man's version of virtual desktops.
- ashark 10y ago
  You can use search (which is what I use to launch apps even on the desktop) and switch apps from a keyboard on the iPad. Could you not do it at the time you tried? Even my iPhone can do most of what I need—if only it had mouse support for Remote Desktop sessions my 7plus, at a native resolution of 1080p and with an hdmi adapter, would make a decent workstation (supported by remote Linux boxes, of course). They crippled keyboard support on it so I can't switch apps like an iPad can, but even so Search is a semi-serviceable app switcher.
owenversteeg 10y ago
Wow, I had a surprisingly similar setup almost exactly ten years after the author posted that - even down to the gnome-terminal. Recently though I've switched to i3 and xterm, because for some reason gnome-terminal has broken on my system. For anyone who's reading this, I highly encourage you to try i3 (a tiling wm similar to that in the article.) It even gives you a guide on keystrokes on first setup, and it's by far the most efficient for me.
shocks 10y ago
awesome + tmux, spacemacs, and ff with vimperator. I can go hours without touching the mouse.
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  s/awesome$.*$perator/xmonad\1fx/ for me.
kakwa_ 10y ago
I think we are a lot here using "minimal" tilling window managers. At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know). Personally I use dwm with some shell scripts: https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop It fits my need well and I adapt it to new version once in a while, not a lot of time spent maintaining my configuration. By the way, I love suckless projects (http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/), one of my favorites is dmenu, so simple yet so efficient. I also like surf, but I'm a bit too lazy to switch from chromium.
- kentt 10y ago
  > At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know). Agreed, but I know of precious few WM users who went back to a DE. It feels like it would be 100 more effort to do DE->WM then it was to do WM->DE.
davidgerard 10y ago
I ran an all-macho desktop with twm for a while. I rapidly went back to full-service KDE 3.
- kentt 10y ago
  Why?
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    'Cos it got to be a nuisance, and once I added another 512MB to the box full-service KDE 3.0 (this was 2002) wasn't an eternity of thrashing :-) What I ask of a desktop is not to annoy me while I'm doing stuff. Presently very happy with Xfce and desperately hoping they don't fall prey to the awful concept of "desktop innovation".
redsummer 10y ago
I'm drawn to this kind of setup, but I'm aware that there is an element of techno-machoism to it. It can seem more aspirational than useful.
- smhenderson 10y ago
  It's really not. Depending on your conditioning/muscle memory from other systems it can be a little hard at first but it really does get easy and intuitive if you do it everyday. And the benefits of extra screen real estate and less mousing are great. Of course it's more suited to someone using the cli than say someone doing heavy photo editing so your mileage may vary depending on your typical workflow. For me it's tmux and cwm but the result is very similar to the article.
- vidarh 10y ago
  If you want to avoid the techno-machoism (did you mean machoism or masochism? I thought you meant the latter, but realised it works either way though with different implications), find a tiling window manager that supports making windows floating, as that's really the one thing that is sometimes painful with some of them - if you e.g. start an application that opens tons of small windows (gimp used to be one of the great test cases for this - though now you can run gimp with few windows if you want). But for me I picked a setup liked this because I was simulating it with a regular WM anyway by running almost everything maximised because that's how I liked it. I was happy to squint at tiny text when I was younger, and I used to care more about having a desktop that looked cool, and spent endless time on themes etc., but I got tired of it, and now I want functional. I still care that it looks good, but with less window-chrome there's less effort involved: I have a background image that's part visible behind my terminals; I have a theme I like for Chrome etc., and that's about it. If you meant machoism: This kind of set up is far less flashy and in your face. If you mean masochism: For me at least this setup has removed friction and lowered the effort of managing windows, not increased it. I'm not using this setup to make this unnecessarily austere and minimal, but to remove stuff that got in my way. I can understand the feeling though: It used to be painful to run these kind of setups. When the article was written there was definitively more applications that worked poorly with that generation of tiling window managers etc.
lvh 10y ago
After ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is actively developed. [1] Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path; Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager) does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing, popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2] I'll miss hacking the good hack. [1]: https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm [2]: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway
- suvelx 10y ago
  One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver. So if you want to use Sway, you better get used to configuring your displays in a config file. What about applications that need to set environment variables (e.g. gpg-agent, gnome-keyring) how do you launch them if your compositor doesn't launch and export them for you? (That said, I still can't work out where gnome-shell decides to launch gnome-keyring-daemon on login) Ideally, I'd like a DE that provides display/audio/power/menu management, but with a (manual) tiling compositor that supports window stacking/tabbing (like i3/sway). And bonus points if it has a sloppy floating-desktop mode. Shelltile kinda works, but shits the bed when applications set window size hints, and there's no window stacking/tabbing.
  - bitwize 10y ago
    > One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver. A deliberate design decision intended to keep context switches off the hot path. It's one of those "just trust me; this way really is better" things. You're sacrificing very little to get an improved graphics stack.
    - rrix2 10y ago
      You're sacrificing composability, one of the biggest things that makes GNU/Linux so powerful in my mind. Right now, I'm running AwesomeWM embedded in a KDE session. As a result, I have a lean tiling window manager which I can configure to my liking, and a bunch of shit that I don't care about to that same level "just works" and is integrated in to the session like display management, network connectivity, even notifications daemon are a problem on other minimalist desktops that would have to be fully reimplemented for each Wayland WM.
fiatjaf 10y ago
"Copyright notice: All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the property and responsibility of its author; for reprint rights, please contact the author directly." Why would anyone care to print this out on the top of the page, right after the first sentence, destroying the text formatting?
druuu 10y ago
I use dwm for window manager, st(simple terminal) as terminal. They are more light weight than gnome-terminal and ratpoison.
jim-jim-jim 10y ago
I remember reading this back in the day and eventually winding up using a wm called ion3 instead of ratpoison. There wasn't much that set it apart from the other tiling wms and I forget why I liked it the best. Apparently the dev had a bad experience with open source and refused to continue working on it or something like that. I don't think it's around anymore.
- wowtip 10y ago
  Iirc ion3 was one of few tiling WMs at the time, that handled multi window applications, such as GIMP in a usable way.
cracoucax 10y ago
There are currently 2 usable OSx tiling window managers : - KWM https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm - Amethyst https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ I stopped using Linux on the desktop before tiling WMs were a thing, and was kinda fascinated by what i read about them, as i've always seen the overlapping windows GUI idea as somewhat broken. (what's the use of a window if it's even partially hidden, appart from clutter ??) Well those 2 projets really bring tiling to osx, not just as in "resize windows with a shortcut" like spectacles, etc, but as the real i3/xmonad deal : windows are mostly managed for you, using a BSP for kwm. I use kwm, it's beta quality, it has a few issues and i spent a few evenings tinkering to wrap my head about the concepts but ... it works, and it rocks ! Suddenly I can have 10 usable windows on my dual screen setup, focus follow mouse, etc. It feels so much peaceful having everything on your screen that being searching for windows all the time...
signa11 10y ago
ah the desktop/wm wars. sometime ago (> 15 years) i got fvmw working just so, and haven't looked back. though i have tried almost everything under the sun, including (but not limited to) afterstep, window-maker, litestep, cde, kde, gnome etc. etc. i just keep coming back to fvwm again and again. the hobbit within me would say "there and back again" ;)
- bitwize 10y ago
  Unfortunately, X is headed for the shitpile of history and fvwm has no Wayland equivalent.
  - signa11 10y ago
    this conversation in fvwm forum in 2k13 seems relevant: http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010 http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010 seems like even with wayland, X will not be ripped out, and window-managers can run alongsides (ref: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4)
    - bitwize 10y ago
      This info is old. Right now the goal is to deprecate X and move everybody to Wayland, except for legacy Motif apps and the like which can't be migrated. The major modern toolkits -- GTK and Qt -- will remove X11 support some time in the future.
      - signa11 10y ago
        hmm, have you looked at this: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html , where they talk about running _any_ Xclient on wayland ?
        bitwize 10y ago
        XWayland is only a stopgap/transition tool. Maintainers want to maintain as few code paths as possible; ideally one per platform. For toolkits that will be Wayland, not X11, once Wayland reaches critical mass. X11 is deprecated.
jlebrech 10y ago
why not directfb?
GuB-42 10y ago
Minimalist window managers are cool but unless you have a very specific workflow it tends to create more problems than it solves. X11 apps are usually designed with a typical, windows-like environment in mind and tweaks may be required to accommodate for an unusual desktop environment, if at all possible. Typical problems can be : - The title bar isn't visible, and there is important information in it - No system tray, which can mean no menu and no notifications - Normally small windows displaying full screen (ex : GIMP) - Key binding conflicts between the window manager and the app in use

196 points by yankcrime 10y ago

That's quite similar. I use i3wm, and usually keep most applications maximized. I have a bunch of keybindings to start Chrome, start new terminals etc., including some that start ssh sessions to specific servers and attached to a suitable screen session (my home server has several screen sessions with different configs and different coloured status lines running for different projects). Every now and again I split the screen, but rarely in more than two. With screen sessions running on my home server for most of my projects, I can also detach and close them and/or reboot my laptop and not lose state, so e.g. at the moment I just have one Chrome window and one screen session open (on separate virtual desktops). I have a shortcut to bring up Nautilus to manage files, but I use it so rarely I often forget the shortcut (I've got a keybinding to bring up a help file).

djsumdog 10y ago
I started using i3 back around 2012 I think. I had tried a couple of other tiling window managers (awesome, xmonad, etc). I occasionally try new ones every couple of months if I start using a new machine or laptop, but I keep coming back to i3. It feels like it's the easiest to use/deal with and I like the tree/stack way it handles windows. Having used a tiling window manager for years, I don't ever want to go back to overlapping windows. Even when I have to use my Windows machine, I tend to keep everything full screen in each workspace.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Yeah, I used Ion for a year or so around 2000, but then went back to a more normal setup because I felt there were too many limitations (e.g. things like Gimp was a nightmare), but what has happened since is that I use fewer and fewer native apps, so I'm now down to mostly browser windows and terminals and that has made it a lot easier to get a tiling setup that works great, and now I don't want to give it up. When I started using i3wm it was after a couple of years of realising I was running everything maximised anyway.

xelxebar 10y ago

My setup is remarkably similar: Xmonad and tmux. I only reluctantly leave the command line and feel like I only have X so I can have a reasonable browser. And I kind of loathe all the popular browsers because I feel crippled without my cli tools and ability to script up solutions to my problems. Uzbl is the only browser that feels like I'm still in the cli but just happen to also have a window that renders the web.

colordrops 10y ago
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, but I think the Xmonad (or other tiling window manager) and Tmux (or screen) together are a pretty popular combination. I also settled on the Xmonad/Tmux combo after more than 20 years of mucking with window managers.
lallysingh 10y ago
The are a few VNC X servers.
CaptSpify 10y ago
I use a similar setup. Tmux is essentially my WM, as all my work is done on jump boxes. FWIW, vimperator is awesome in FF, though I hear it's going away soon with recent FF updates.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  That's rights, Firefox is moving to Web Extension (iirc it's to ensure cross-compatibility with Chrome Extensions). Sadly it's losing most of the extensions which alter the behaviour of the browser in the process.
  - btschaegg 10y ago
    This is the reason I decided to give Qutebrowser a try. I really like it so far. Now I just need enough time to come up with some simple Keepass integration... (or just hope someone else does :-) )

zeveb 10y ago

I'm similar, but with StumpWM instead of ratpoison (it was written by ratpoison's creator), tmux instead of screen, and st instead of gnome-terminal. I will never, ever go back to a windowed desktop. This just works way too well for me. I feel like I can focus, and I never, ever have to drag a window. It's pretty awesome.

krupan 10y ago

So using screen or tmux means your non-gui apps keep running when you disconnect from your server, but what about X apps? I've been using xpra for the past few months for tmux-like functionality with GUI apps. It's /pretty/ good, but rough around the edges.

fest 10y ago
Thanks for mentioning xpra. I have always wanted something like that but hadn't ever thought about searching for "screen for X11".
- vidarh 10y ago
  It's great, but it's basically "VNC for individual windows" and suffers many of the same issues - window updates happens according to the redraw algorithm of XPRA, rather than in the sequence carried out by the application, and the application doesn't wait on the rendering. That said I've been able to play back full screen full HD video on my several years old laptop via XPRA with minimal jerking or tearing, so it's not a major problem.
Sunset 10y ago
x11vnc with shared :0.

chc4 10y ago

I've been using a tiling WM for a while now, and it's pretty great. Most of the programs I use are in the terminal (urxvt with a pretty color scheme and font, unlike the OP), switching workspaces for different programs is just nice to use, and everything is minimal. I'd encourage everyone to check out /r/unixporn at least once. I use a fairly boring WM, too. spectrwm doesn't have a lot of config, it Just Werks, and lately I've been using a WM in wrote myself in Rust.

haddr 10y ago

The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.

notalaser 10y ago
The themes section is what I mourn the most. It was a great repository of computer art. And frankly, the content there was a lot more original, bold and and innovative than what you see on *-look.org today.
sedachv 10y ago
I actually did not realize freshmeat was gone until seeing this post. Apparently freshmeat became freecode.com sometime in 2011 with a terrible new layout. Then subdomains like palm.freecode.com disappeared entirely in 2013, after Dice Holdings acquired and ruined Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode. Those three websites were acquired by some holding company BIZX LLC last year, and the new owners seem to be serious about removing malware and adware from SourceForge and turning it around: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_... IMO the best thing they can do for freshmeat is restore the old pages and layout. There was some really good, hard-to-find information on that site.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That depends on how much of that data is still on a server somewhere.
rsync 10y ago
"but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net" I don't understand this comment ... First, my experience is that most open source software is now on github. Second, I feel that github is infinitely better in every way than freshmeat was.
- 10y ago

partycoder 10y ago

Some less popular alternatives not seen in this thread yet: - twin, vwm (curses based window manager) - dvtm (similar to tmux) There is plenty of stuff you can do without X. Some of them: - Web browsing (e.g: lynx, links, etc) - music (e.g: mp3blaster) - videos, surprisingly (e.g: mplayer + aalib)

icebraining 10y ago
aalib is amazing, but you can also use fbdev, which gives you regular video playback: https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m
- partycoder 10y ago
  Yes but this can be used in the context of terminals (e.g: inside a tmux pane)

redsummer 10y ago

A lot of dev folks should (in theory) be able to get away with just having a browser on one side of the screen and a CLI terminal with tmux on the other. Both windows with tabs, and fixed in position. What kind of setup should be used for this? I know I can do this with split screens on the Mac. But is there a minimal Linux setup which provides this kind of experience?

arebop 10y ago
I use xmonad for this.
combatentropy 10y ago
The simplest set-up would be a Chromebook.
- redsummer 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with Chrome. Can it be tiled in this way? I thought it was one tabbed window.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    It doesn't have to be tabbed (you can specifically open apps in new floating windows) but I don't know of any easy way of doing tiling, but I basically threat my Chromebook at a throwaway dumb terminal for when my "real" laptop is too big and heavy so I can't say I've learned every in and out of it.
betenoire 10y ago
I work almost exclusively with this setup: Dual split screens, shell on left, browser on right. The reason I comment is to share what took me too long to realize. If you want to resize the two full screen apps, the experience is much smoother if your browser is in focus first. Click browser, then drag to resize. Something to do with the terminal trying to keep to character-width bounds, I think.
- 10y ago

Ajedi32 10y ago

> there is an element of obscurity to the system that can protect from a friend who wants to play a practical joke when I walk away. I keep xlock on "^O x", but even if I step away from the keyboard without locking it, someone stepping in tends to be confused by a screen that shows no "close" buttons and a keyboard set to Dvorak. Kinda reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1806/ https://xkcd.com/1806/

milesrout 10y ago
Yeah. Mildly funny story: a friend of mine and I installed dwm on our Linux users on the computers at university. Nobody else had a clue how to access them. We would constantly edit each others' PATH and bashrc in various prankish ways, which culminated in him accidentally locking himself entirely out of his own profile in an attempt to stop me from accessing it. Every command he tried, everything he tried to do, just got the rather succinct message 'Fuck off'. He had fun explaining that one to the sysadmins. One of the nice things about Linux is that you can do this. Download and compile dwm, put it in $HOME/bin, edit ~/.xinitrc to run it, and Bob's your uncle. Oh and the university also had xauth open on every computer, which meant that you could ssh into any other machine in the room and simply run 'DISPLAY=:0 firefox lemonparty.com' whenever someone turned their head away from their computer for a second. I wonder if they've ever fixed that.

soufron 10y ago

Basically, he's using only full screen apps... hence the "window" manager is more of a "focus" manager. It's the perfect setup.

sedachv 10y ago

I started using EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager, a few weeks ago, and it is by far my favorite window manager yet. It is the ultimate anti-desktop: all windows just become Emacs buffers. Since terminal windows are just Emacs buffers, managing terminal windows is exactly like managing X windows. After almost 20 years of: Enlightenment, Blackbox, Window Maker, StumpWM (only tiling window manager I could stand to use until EXWM), too much twm, Openbox most recently, and a few others I forget, EXWM feels really refreshing. https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
There's an Emacs WM, but not a decent text editor yet?
- zamalek 10y ago
  Linus has more polishing yet to do.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    You mean RMS?
    - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
      Possibly a reference to microEmacs, of which Linus maintains his own fork (though the last commit was in 2014) [1]. [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/ https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/
- DennisP 10y ago
  Sure there is, it's called evil-mode :)
fusiongyro 10y ago
I used it for a while and really liked it, except for a couple snafus: modefulness, in terms of how keystrokes are interpreted, and my Java IDE did not love it. Otherwise it is fantastic.

shubb 10y ago

I tried this a while ago - its okay so long as you are doing specific, limited activities. If you need to explore beyond the things that you have already figured out for to do it slows you down. Websites you need don't work in lynx, Android dev is slower to pick up console first, etc. People expect you to see the pictures and word docs on your mail, or contact you via WhatsApp. You figure your way round these one by one, or give up after an hour and use the normal tool. And then onto tomorrows new distraction. Eventually this is a time sink.

bitwize 10y ago
Um. He's running X with a minimalist tiling wm with only one window at a time, not trying to live through a VT100. Of course, some Hackernews is now going to tell me about how this setup falls down hard when you need to do real work and how sensible people just use KDE or GNOME -- or Windows.
- dsr_ 10y ago
  It's probably a little difficult running GIMP for photo editing. GIMP wants a half-dozen windows open at the same time to get much done. Personally, I like having a few widgets on-screen all the time - a clock, a volume control - and I enjoy having two or three things open on-screen: a terminal and a browser, for instance, or two terminals ssh'ing to different machines. Having lots of display area helps. Pretty much every window manager can handle this, and it's just a matter of figuring out which one gets out of my way fastest.
  - rhblake 10y ago
    Many tiling WMs (e.g. i3, xmonad) support floating windows. Also, GIMP supports single-window mode these days.
    - milesrout 10y ago
      Even dwm supports floating windows.

VA3FXP 10y ago

I'll chime in with a "met too!". i3 + tmux (it's the only sane way to manage servers.) I'm a sysadmin (not a developer like most of the HN crowd) so I usually have 10+ terminal windows open (depending on what project(s) I am working on. I think it would make for an interesting poll to see what the demographics are like for the 'power-user' crowd that exists here.

jclulow 10y ago
I'm a software engineer, and I have many terminals open as well. I've been using iTerm2 (with splits) on OS X, but with the awful new Macbooks I'm finally looking at heading back to xterm and dwm on Linux -- I miss it dearly!

zafiro17 10y ago

This is parenthetical to the discussion, but reading this article made me deeply nostalgic for 15 years ago, when we still had Freshmeat and Slashdot was decent and Mozilla was fresh and the web was largely full of information, not javascript. Back on topic, I wrote this back in 2006: "What's old is new again, the quest for distraction-free writing" (http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-New-Again-the-Quest-for-Distraction-Free-Writing.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-...). The topic remains relevant, and maybe more relevant than ever. It's super hard to arrange time and materials and commitments so that you can concentrate deeply on the task before you. We are perhaps not making much progress.

djsumdog 10y ago
Freshmeat turned into Freecode and it's still there, but locked in perpetual read-only nostalgia mode from 2013. It is quite literally frozen in time.
milesrout 10y ago
I remember reading your article several years ago (2010ish maybe?) and thinking it was bloody fantastic.
erickhill 10y ago
I went down a very similar track last year with my own exploration in "How to Use Classic Amiga for Word Processing Today". I took a nostalgic trip inspired by George R. Martin, who still uses WordStar to write Game of Thrones. I did it for much of the same reasons you wrote your post - a desire for a distraction-free environment without a gazillion features to get a relatively basic task done. Thanks for sharing your post.
Yetanfou 10y ago
Back then there was Freshmeat, now there is Github (et al). In that respect I think things actually improved, especially given the ease with which git allows others to fork repositories, safeguarding against site disappearance. Given the distributed nature of git even the eventual disappearance - or total sellout - of Github (et al) will not diminish this as those who want can host their own repositories in a few minutes using the likes of Gogs/Gitea or Gitlab. Slashdot was fun while it lasted, there have been several attempts at a restart of similar communities (Soylent News etc.) but as far as I know none have managed to create the same 'feel of community'. Maybe that is because there is no real community? Anyway, with more and more people getting access to true broadband the possibilities of decentralised hosting only increase so I still have some hopes for the future when it comes to building something interesting outside of the walled-and-fenced big-data farms so popular nowadays.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

Reading this it makes sense as a highly productive system for a time when the screen size was small monitor. I keep wanting an Apple/Windows/Linux manager that really embraces the flexibility and size of a giant 4k screen (I'm using a 55" 4k TV as a monitor that's cheap in both current and real dollars than the 21" monitor I had in 2002). I've hacked together a system that works well for me on OS X with Divvy, but it still feels non optimal.

jeromenerf 10y ago
Tiling window managers on X11 are great on all sizes and number of monitors. They just allow to conveniently arrange windows on a grid, in a manual or dynamic fashion, with some handy functions to access and manage those windows. You can try using one for terminals on xquartz for osx. There is nothing close for non-X windows. The hardest part is to pick one ;)

zelos 10y ago

I remember being at my most productive on a similar setup - ratpoison on a SparcStation 5. No distractions, no notifications and paging the web browser back in took about a minute, so no quickly checking Slashdot.

transitorykris 10y ago

Full size split screen in MacOS is where I spend my time doing dev work. Visual Studio Code with the terminal extension and Chrome (I only wish I could do something like the author shows to get iTerm2 in there). I find this keeps me focused and productive without things getting in the way or unnecessary windows causing a distraction.

rrdharan 10y ago

Surprised that no one has pointed out this is nearly exactly the experience you get with a tablet + keyboard - and in fact the viewable screen/real estate probably lines up quite well with what a desktop gave you in 2002. That having been said, I tried using an iPad+bluetooth keyboard for a little while as a "workstation" and the inability to switch or launch apps from the keyboard doomed it for me.

icebraining 10y ago
On Android you can alt-tab between apps using a BT keyboard (including to the Launcher, from which you can launch apps). But alt-tab is the poor man's version of virtual desktops.
ashark 10y ago
You can use search (which is what I use to launch apps even on the desktop) and switch apps from a keyboard on the iPad. Could you not do it at the time you tried? Even my iPhone can do most of what I need—if only it had mouse support for Remote Desktop sessions my 7plus, at a native resolution of 1080p and with an hdmi adapter, would make a decent workstation (supported by remote Linux boxes, of course). They crippled keyboard support on it so I can't switch apps like an iPad can, but even so Search is a semi-serviceable app switcher.

owenversteeg 10y ago

Wow, I had a surprisingly similar setup almost exactly ten years after the author posted that - even down to the gnome-terminal. Recently though I've switched to i3 and xterm, because for some reason gnome-terminal has broken on my system. For anyone who's reading this, I highly encourage you to try i3 (a tiling wm similar to that in the article.) It even gives you a guide on keystrokes on first setup, and it's by far the most efficient for me.

shocks 10y ago

awesome + tmux, spacemacs, and ff with vimperator. I can go hours without touching the mouse.

mrkgnao 10y ago
s/awesome$.*$perator/xmonad\1fx/ for me.

kakwa_ 10y ago

I think we are a lot here using "minimal" tilling window managers. At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know). Personally I use dwm with some shell scripts: https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop It fits my need well and I adapt it to new version once in a while, not a lot of time spent maintaining my configuration. By the way, I love suckless projects (http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/), one of my favorites is dmenu, so simple yet so efficient. I also like surf, but I'm a bit too lazy to switch from chromium.

kentt 10y ago
> At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using minimal setups (not so representative I know). Agreed, but I know of precious few WM users who went back to a DE. It feels like it would be 100 more effort to do DE->WM then it was to do WM->DE.

davidgerard 10y ago

I ran an all-macho desktop with twm for a while. I rapidly went back to full-service KDE 3.

kentt 10y ago
Why?
- davidgerard 10y ago
  'Cos it got to be a nuisance, and once I added another 512MB to the box full-service KDE 3.0 (this was 2002) wasn't an eternity of thrashing :-) What I ask of a desktop is not to annoy me while I'm doing stuff. Presently very happy with Xfce and desperately hoping they don't fall prey to the awful concept of "desktop innovation".

redsummer 10y ago

I'm drawn to this kind of setup, but I'm aware that there is an element of techno-machoism to it. It can seem more aspirational than useful.

smhenderson 10y ago
It's really not. Depending on your conditioning/muscle memory from other systems it can be a little hard at first but it really does get easy and intuitive if you do it everyday. And the benefits of extra screen real estate and less mousing are great. Of course it's more suited to someone using the cli than say someone doing heavy photo editing so your mileage may vary depending on your typical workflow. For me it's tmux and cwm but the result is very similar to the article.
vidarh 10y ago
If you want to avoid the techno-machoism (did you mean machoism or masochism? I thought you meant the latter, but realised it works either way though with different implications), find a tiling window manager that supports making windows floating, as that's really the one thing that is sometimes painful with some of them - if you e.g. start an application that opens tons of small windows (gimp used to be one of the great test cases for this - though now you can run gimp with few windows if you want). But for me I picked a setup liked this because I was simulating it with a regular WM anyway by running almost everything maximised because that's how I liked it. I was happy to squint at tiny text when I was younger, and I used to care more about having a desktop that looked cool, and spent endless time on themes etc., but I got tired of it, and now I want functional. I still care that it looks good, but with less window-chrome there's less effort involved: I have a background image that's part visible behind my terminals; I have a theme I like for Chrome etc., and that's about it. If you meant machoism: This kind of set up is far less flashy and in your face. If you mean masochism: For me at least this setup has removed friction and lowered the effort of managing windows, not increased it. I'm not using this setup to make this unnecessarily austere and minimal, but to remove stuff that got in my way. I can understand the feeling though: It used to be painful to run these kind of setups. When the article was written there was definitively more applications that worked poorly with that generation of tiling window managers etc.

lvh 10y ago

After ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is actively developed. [1] Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path; Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager) does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing, popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2] I'll miss hacking the good hack. [1]: https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm [2]: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway

suvelx 10y ago
One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver. So if you want to use Sway, you better get used to configuring your displays in a config file. What about applications that need to set environment variables (e.g. gpg-agent, gnome-keyring) how do you launch them if your compositor doesn't launch and export them for you? (That said, I still can't work out where gnome-shell decides to launch gnome-keyring-daemon on login) Ideally, I'd like a DE that provides display/audio/power/menu management, but with a (manual) tiling compositor that supports window stacking/tabbing (like i3/sway). And bonus points if it has a sloppy floating-desktop mode. Shelltile kinda works, but shits the bed when applications set window size hints, and there's no window stacking/tabbing.
- bitwize 10y ago
  > One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver. A deliberate design decision intended to keep context switches off the hot path. It's one of those "just trust me; this way really is better" things. You're sacrificing very little to get an improved graphics stack.
  - rrix2 10y ago
    You're sacrificing composability, one of the biggest things that makes GNU/Linux so powerful in my mind. Right now, I'm running AwesomeWM embedded in a KDE session. As a result, I have a lean tiling window manager which I can configure to my liking, and a bunch of shit that I don't care about to that same level "just works" and is integrated in to the session like display management, network connectivity, even notifications daemon are a problem on other minimalist desktops that would have to be fully reimplemented for each Wayland WM.

fiatjaf 10y ago

"Copyright notice: All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the property and responsibility of its author; for reprint rights, please contact the author directly." Why would anyone care to print this out on the top of the page, right after the first sentence, destroying the text formatting?

druuu 10y ago

I use dwm for window manager, st(simple terminal) as terminal. They are more light weight than gnome-terminal and ratpoison.

jim-jim-jim 10y ago

I remember reading this back in the day and eventually winding up using a wm called ion3 instead of ratpoison. There wasn't much that set it apart from the other tiling wms and I forget why I liked it the best. Apparently the dev had a bad experience with open source and refused to continue working on it or something like that. I don't think it's around anymore.

wowtip 10y ago
Iirc ion3 was one of few tiling WMs at the time, that handled multi window applications, such as GIMP in a usable way.

cracoucax 10y ago

There are currently 2 usable OSx tiling window managers : - KWM https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm - Amethyst https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ I stopped using Linux on the desktop before tiling WMs were a thing, and was kinda fascinated by what i read about them, as i've always seen the overlapping windows GUI idea as somewhat broken. (what's the use of a window if it's even partially hidden, appart from clutter ??) Well those 2 projets really bring tiling to osx, not just as in "resize windows with a shortcut" like spectacles, etc, but as the real i3/xmonad deal : windows are mostly managed for you, using a BSP for kwm. I use kwm, it's beta quality, it has a few issues and i spent a few evenings tinkering to wrap my head about the concepts but ... it works, and it rocks ! Suddenly I can have 10 usable windows on my dual screen setup, focus follow mouse, etc. It feels so much peaceful having everything on your screen that being searching for windows all the time...

signa11 10y ago

ah the desktop/wm wars. sometime ago (> 15 years) i got fvmw working just so, and haven't looked back. though i have tried almost everything under the sun, including (but not limited to) afterstep, window-maker, litestep, cde, kde, gnome etc. etc. i just keep coming back to fvwm again and again. the hobbit within me would say "there and back again" ;)

bitwize 10y ago
Unfortunately, X is headed for the shitpile of history and fvwm has no Wayland equivalent.
- signa11 10y ago
  this conversation in fvwm forum in 2k13 seems relevant: http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010 http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010 seems like even with wayland, X will not be ripped out, and window-managers can run alongsides (ref: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4)
  - bitwize 10y ago
    This info is old. Right now the goal is to deprecate X and move everybody to Wayland, except for legacy Motif apps and the like which can't be migrated. The major modern toolkits -- GTK and Qt -- will remove X11 support some time in the future.
    - signa11 10y ago
      hmm, have you looked at this: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html , where they talk about running _any_ Xclient on wayland ?
      - bitwize 10y ago
        XWayland is only a stopgap/transition tool. Maintainers want to maintain as few code paths as possible; ideally one per platform. For toolkits that will be Wayland, not X11, once Wayland reaches critical mass. X11 is deprecated.

jlebrech 10y ago

why not directfb?

GuB-42 10y ago

Minimalist window managers are cool but unless you have a very specific workflow it tends to create more problems than it solves. X11 apps are usually designed with a typical, windows-like environment in mind and tweaks may be required to accommodate for an unusual desktop environment, if at all possible. Typical problems can be : - The title bar isn't visible, and there is important information in it - No system tray, which can mean no menu and no notifications - Normally small windows displaying full screen (ex : GIMP) - Key binding conflicts between the window manager and the app in use