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IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager
- tux 6y agoIceWM Screenshots Collection (https://ice-wm.org/screenshots/ https://ice-wm.org/screenshots/)
- rahimiali 6y agoI see two instances of the rootcow in these sceeenshots. I had assumed rootcow was specifically a Berkeley thing circa the 90s. Was it a broader phenomenon?
- Lammy 6y agoI imagine that person's shell profile pipes fortune to cowsay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay
- rahimiali 6y agoIndeed the link to the archived web page from that wiki page confirms this originated in Berkeley (the link to tmonroe’s page). It’s nice to see that it made it widely.
- bitexploder 6y agoSlackware.. my first Linux district. In 1995. Classic shell font. I miss those days, but modern Linux is amazing.
- koolba 6y agoThey say you never forget your first, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore as the combination of cloud VMs and graphical installers have reduced nearly all Linux installs to a couple mouse clicks.
- Shared404 6y agoWell, rest assured that for at least some noobies they will still remember their first. For me, it was ~ 2 - 3 years ago, I had just bought myself a new laptop. I knew what Linux was from some experience with a raspberry pi, and wanted to try it on my main machine, so I installed Fedora as a dual boot. I've only booted Windows on that(this) machine twice, and no longer have it installed. Edit: The installer itself was graphical and mouse clicks, but X11 did not play well with optimus graphics at the time, so I found myself offline using man pages and tmux very quickly. Daily drove TUI only for a couple weeks before I sat down and fixed X. Hopefully this counts.
- bitexploder 6y agoEveryone has to start somewhere. No Linux purity guardians here :)
- tux 6y agoThis depends on which distro you are installing. There is still many CLI based installations. Arch Linux for example.
- deepakhj 6y agoMy first too. I remember installing Linux with 30 or so floppy disks. I also use to go through and configure the kernel and build it myself because I was into over clocking at the time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- op03 6y agoWhats happening in the FileZilla screenshot?
- geokon 6y agoTo bad none of these are paired with themes/configurations. Anyone have any idea how the 7th one is configured? https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2936638/44629544-3e05bd80-a90e-11e8-8a55-27a8a3f0d185.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2936638/44629544-3... Look pretty good...
- pantulis 6y agoI think it was one of the included themes, maybe nice or nice2. I loved the "Motif" one, though.
- jepler 6y agoicewm used to be my wm, but it's been QUITE awhile. I wonder if it's time to try it again.
- saagarjha 6y agoI’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?
- ptx 6y agoIt has an OS/2 theme, which goes well with the DFM file manager. But it's been a long time since I last used it.
- anthk 6y agoToday rox is a good replacement.
- mynegation 6y agoI used it 20 years ago on SPARC Solaris as it was the easiest window manager to compile from the source and replace Solaris’ default CDE with it.
- npteljes 6y agoI once had a task to set up custom web crawlers. I made my crawlers as a Firefox extension, and to host a Firefox instance, I chose debian I think and IceVM. IceVM was light on the resources and it was easy to set up so that my Firefox starts minimized.
- brobinson 6y agoYou could probably use something like Xvfb instead of running a full window manager.
- icewm--user 6y agobeen using it for five years now. it's no-nonsense and does exactly what i want it to. no fancy graphics. multiple monitors, autosuspend and fullscreen work without configuration. has a fancy liquid crystal clock. it's the peak of desktop computing.
- thom 6y agoHaving a very Obi-Wan "that's a name I've not heard in a long time" moment. I can't remember ever settling on IceWM at any point - in my early forays into Linux I always just used Blackbox, before using KDE until it got weird, and then just settling on Xfce and Wxfm because my needs are simple. I'd be interested to hear what it excels at?
- onli 6y agoI use IceWM for well over a decade now. It's a nice WM. It is close enough to Win 95/98/2000/XP to not feel too new in the beginning, with its start menu and regular window decorations. But it also has the features of a real Linux WM, with virtual desktops, window rules, mouse focus settings, configurable shortcuts, integrated command runner etc. I don't use use the taskbar anymore (replaced it with a combination of conky/simdock/trayer, but the desktop still works with IceWM at the core), but the integrated network and load indicator was very useful to get additional feedback, that a program is starting or stuck, or a download finished or paused. It's a complete package, but at the same time a very lightweight WM. It's great. Just back then the default theme was ugly. Coming from Ubuntu I'm still using https://www.box-look.org/p/1018090/ https://www.box-look.org/p/1018090/ - doesn't look any worse than a modern DE to me now.
- asveikau 6y ago> It's a nice WM. This sounds like a good slogan. It's a nice WM. It's an ice WM.
- bluejekyll 6y agoRandom off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there are a bunch of other words that it happened with as well.
- smabie 6y agoI used to use icewm, it's okay. It's not particularly inspired, but there isn't anything wrong with it either. Right now I use cwm which I absolutely love, but have also heard very good things about i3.
- usr1106 6y agoAfter hearing good things about i3 for years, I made the somewhat steep learning curve switching to it in the office several years ago and have not looked back. At home I still stayed with xfwm. Some variation between work and free time I guess :) However, with being at the office at most a couple of hours a week under current circumstances I notice that my muscle memory doesn't fully work any more. Reminds me of the steep learning curve in the beginning. No plans to give up though, maybe I should switch to i3 at home, too. From reading the IceWM FAQ I see nothing that it would displace my i3.
- laqq3 6y agoI use IceWM as my daily driver since it has all the features I need and is very lightweight. The maintainer is super nice too: I had a feature request in mind, raised an issue on GH, and the he eventually implemented it. It may be appropriate to link to the donation page of the author: https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/ https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/ Thanks for IceWM!
- dang 6y agoWe changed the url from https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/2.0.0 https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/2.0.0 to the project home page, since this project doesn't appear to have been discussed on HN before.
- backtoyoujim 6y agodoes Enlightenment still exist ?
- nfoz 6y agodoes Google still exist? https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/
- backtoyoujim 6y agoHappy Holidays to you.
- approxim8ion 6y agoI believe some distros like Elive (https://www.elivecd.org/ https://www.elivecd.org/) still use E16 and are actively supported. Bodhi uses a fork of Enlightenment called Moksha too.
- usr1106 6y agoIceWM used to be the fallback window manager in some OpenSUSE installations (haven't made any for a while, so no idea whether that is still the case). If you configured your desktop environment to death or your machine was very short on memory you could still get a simple graphical session. I don't think I needed it more twice over 5-10 years. Reading the FAQ looks like a jump 15-25 years back. They mention Windows95, xmodmap instead of XKB for example. No mentioning of 4K displays or multiple monitors. Whether that's a good or bad thing? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... Seems very configurable without getting a resource hog. If you enjoy tweaking things on your old 1GB RAM laptop this might be for you. I did not see that it competes to replace my i3 (tiling only), so I stay with the latter for now.
- Arnavion 6y ago>IceWM used to be the fallback window manager in some OpenSUSE installations Yes, Tumbleweed still installs it by default.
- zafiro17 6y agoFunny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content. I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode. So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.
- dlgeek 6y agorxvt-unicode is what you want.
- IgorPartola 6y agoWow that’s another Obi-Wan!
- iso947 6y agoI moved fro black box to xfce as my WM About a decade ago for the wifi integration. I remain With it on my desktop as I like having the docked apps (pidgin, slack, teams, vlc and volume), and of course inertia. Like the rest of linux it just works and doesn’t get in my way. However aside from Firefox, and screenshots, everything I launch is via alt-escape which pops upend a new rxvt-Unicode window.
- anthk 6y agoJust append nm-applet & or wicd-gtk -t & to ~/.fluxbox/autostart. For the volume tray, volumeicon & will do the same at the end of autostart.
- exebook 6y ago
- joshmarinacci 6y agoWhat does it mean for a window manager to have audio support? Why is the WM messing with audio at all?
- JNRowe 6y ago"icesound - play audio files when interesting GUI events happen". The full man page list all the details¹. Note that it is optional too, you don't have to enable MovieOS swooshing and zooming sounds to use icewm ;) ¹ https://ice-wm.org/man/icesound https://ice-wm.org/man/icesound
- known 6y agoI just installed it; Very colorful :)
- IgorPartola 6y agoI remember it as one of my stepping stones into nix systems. I tried a huge number of window managers, DEs, all sorts of arrangements. IceWM stuck around on my computer for a bit but since I was a teenager it just didn’t look hackery enough. I wanted something more so I ended up with openbox, so minimalistic it’s all in lower case. I think it’s fun to experiment with how your environment works but eventually you need to get actual work done and the fun of setting up different environment fades a bit. Still, I am grateful to all those projects for getting me to mess around with my computer in yet another way.
- satyanash 6y agoIf you have a thing for obscure window managers, are looking for massive configurability and have time to sink, check out Fvwm2[1]. Fully configurable using text files[2][3] that can be version controlled. Edit: apparently it has been revived as Fvwm3[4]. [1] https://www.fvwm.org/ https://www.fvwm.org/ [2] https://satyanash.net/software/2011/12/25/my-fvwm2-desktop.html https://satyanash.net/software/2011/12/25/my-fvwm2-desktop.h... [3] https://satyanash.net/software/2012/12/04/fvwm2-explained.html https://satyanash.net/software/2012/12/04/fvwm2-explained.ht... [4] https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3 https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
- INTPenis 6y agoI was inspired by the Hackers movie to pimp my laptop in the late 90s, early 2000s. IceWM was a great candidate but I don't remember using it as much as Fluxbox or IonWM. Of course I also modified the boot splash in FreeBSD to display the Duke Nukem nuclear logo when the computer started. That scene in Hackers where all the kids setup their laptop in a phone booth and each of them opens up a customized laptop really stuck in my mind. It gave me a fantastic sense of pride and belonging to a sub-culture everytime someone saw my custom laptop. :)
- Lapsa 6y agosway on disk encrypted, kernel hardened Arch wayland. It's the future.
- anthk 6y agoIcewm+rox+volumeicon+wicd+udiskie=fastest DE for Linux, ever. On OpenBSD, tray-app and hotplug-diskmount will do the same.
- charliebrownau 6y agoI will consider giving this a go Please dont support Wayland, Electron, Java or python Keep Tradational Keep Classic Keep non bloated
- jbirer 6y agoMy first interaction with IceWM was in 2008 with Puppy Linux. It still amazes me how they were able to provide a full desktop in such a minimalist way.