4 ms·

Having 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

by thom 6y ago

Having 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 ago
I 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 ago
    Random 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.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.
    - noja 6y ago
      > when preceding a consonant or a vowel. When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.
      - doesntmeananyth 6y ago
        This is somewhat tautological, since consonants and vowels are already speech sounds.
        tremon 6y ago
        No, not really. The word "user" starts with a consonant sound, for example, even though "u" is a written vowel.
        asveikau 6y ago
        From what I have seen, people writing about linguistics do not usually bother specifying this distinction in this context. It is usually implied that an expression like "following a vowel" or "following a consonant" has nothing to do with orthography, but the actual phonetics. The orthography is not really considered a source of truth.
        noja 6y ago
        They are sounds as well as groups of letters, but the OP didn't specify, hence my clarification. Some examples: * "He has an MBA" because "M" sounds like it starts with a vowel (here: "em"). * "a university" ("you-ni...")
    - msla 6y ago
      In linguistics, it's called rebracketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing > Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite". > Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above). Other examples: > The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French. > Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.
- glenstein 6y ago
  IceWM is everything I love about Linux from a ux perspective. IceWM is brutally fast and never crashes or loads. It handles multiple desktops light years better than Windows. Yet it's so simple and lightweight you'd assume it's barely doing anything at all. And it's awesome on old hardware.
  - onli 6y ago
    Right! That's why I stumbled over it actually. Needed something for my dad's AMD K6-2-333 system, with 64MB ram and a 4GB HDD. Windows 95 was not that useable anymore and XP obviously not an option for that system. Thus the second Ubuntu release with IceWM it was, and when I later changed my own system to Linux I stuck to IceWM, since it worked great (and I already had learnt how to configure it).
dpedu 6y ago
I believe it's intended to be lightweight. I've used it in places where I need to run a GUI app on a remote machine that acts like a server. Looking at it now, my instance is using 20MB ram.
- ta988 6y ago
  Yes that's also my go to WM for x2go. Light, efficient and doesnt get in the way.
ogre_codes 6y ago
It's funny, I haven't used Linux in some time, but my choices were very similar to yours. At least back in the late 90s and early 00s, IceWM seemed to be the Window Manager that was designed to look like a sexier Windows 95. 15-20 years later, that seems like a weird thing to hang your hat on, but it looks like that is pretty close to where it is. I also tried Blackbox, used Gnome's desktop for a while, but it was too heavy and settled on XFCE. Were I to go back to Linux, I would probably end up on XFCE again (or maybe Elementary).
- thom 6y ago
  I put Elementary on my daughter’s inherited 2011 MacBook Air and runs very nicely (far better than whatever macOS it had on in the end). Had to replace Epiphany as the default browser because lots of things didn’t work but it seems a reasonable environment. Lags a bit behind Ubuntu though.
disown 6y ago
I've played around with blackbox, fluxbox and all kinds of lightweight WMs but settled on xfce as well. Never liked Gnome and KDE because they were resource hogs and trying to be like "Windows".
wrp 6y ago
It's the best combination of lightweight plus Windows-like. I will still use it for setting up a limited machine for someone just moving off Windows. It's more work to set up, but very stable.
samuel 6y ago
Same feeling. I used to prefer WindowMaker, but switched wm's in an almost weekly basis and definitely IceWM got its share.
- bloopernova 6y ago
  I used the heck out of WindowMaker back in the day. Makes me wish I could use a Linux laptop or desktop in my day job nowadays. (we use Macs, and I've moved from sysadmin to devops)

by thom 6y ago

onli 6y ago

I 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 ago
  Random 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.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.
  - noja 6y ago
    > when preceding a consonant or a vowel. When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.
    - doesntmeananyth 6y ago
      This is somewhat tautological, since consonants and vowels are already speech sounds.
      - tremon 6y ago
        No, not really. The word "user" starts with a consonant sound, for example, even though "u" is a written vowel.
        asveikau 6y ago
        From what I have seen, people writing about linguistics do not usually bother specifying this distinction in this context. It is usually implied that an expression like "following a vowel" or "following a consonant" has nothing to do with orthography, but the actual phonetics. The orthography is not really considered a source of truth.
      - noja 6y ago
        They are sounds as well as groups of letters, but the OP didn't specify, hence my clarification. Some examples: * "He has an MBA" because "M" sounds like it starts with a vowel (here: "em"). * "a university" ("you-ni...")
  - msla 6y ago
    In linguistics, it's called rebracketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing > Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite". > Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above). Other examples: > The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French. > Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.
glenstein 6y ago
IceWM is everything I love about Linux from a ux perspective. IceWM is brutally fast and never crashes or loads. It handles multiple desktops light years better than Windows. Yet it's so simple and lightweight you'd assume it's barely doing anything at all. And it's awesome on old hardware.
- onli 6y ago
  Right! That's why I stumbled over it actually. Needed something for my dad's AMD K6-2-333 system, with 64MB ram and a 4GB HDD. Windows 95 was not that useable anymore and XP obviously not an option for that system. Thus the second Ubuntu release with IceWM it was, and when I later changed my own system to Linux I stuck to IceWM, since it worked great (and I already had learnt how to configure it).

dpedu 6y ago

I believe it's intended to be lightweight. I've used it in places where I need to run a GUI app on a remote machine that acts like a server. Looking at it now, my instance is using 20MB ram.

ta988 6y ago
Yes that's also my go to WM for x2go. Light, efficient and doesnt get in the way.

ogre_codes 6y ago

It's funny, I haven't used Linux in some time, but my choices were very similar to yours. At least back in the late 90s and early 00s, IceWM seemed to be the Window Manager that was designed to look like a sexier Windows 95. 15-20 years later, that seems like a weird thing to hang your hat on, but it looks like that is pretty close to where it is. I also tried Blackbox, used Gnome's desktop for a while, but it was too heavy and settled on XFCE. Were I to go back to Linux, I would probably end up on XFCE again (or maybe Elementary).

thom 6y ago
I put Elementary on my daughter’s inherited 2011 MacBook Air and runs very nicely (far better than whatever macOS it had on in the end). Had to replace Epiphany as the default browser because lots of things didn’t work but it seems a reasonable environment. Lags a bit behind Ubuntu though.

disown 6y ago

I've played around with blackbox, fluxbox and all kinds of lightweight WMs but settled on xfce as well. Never liked Gnome and KDE because they were resource hogs and trying to be like "Windows".

wrp 6y ago

It's the best combination of lightweight plus Windows-like. I will still use it for setting up a limited machine for someone just moving off Windows. It's more work to set up, but very stable.

samuel 6y ago

Same feeling. I used to prefer WindowMaker, but switched wm's in an almost weekly basis and definitely IceWM got its share.

bloopernova 6y ago
I used the heck out of WindowMaker back in the day. Makes me wish I could use a Linux laptop or desktop in my day job nowadays. (we use Macs, and I've moved from sysadmin to devops)