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I non-sarcastically switched to Window Maker (https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/) on my main desktop for a little while out of curiosity

by bogwog 5y ago

I non-sarcastically switched to Window Maker (https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/) on my main desktop for a little while out of curiosity and was very impressed by the experience. I even installed GNUStep and made a crappy little GUI for an old software renderer I had with the Project Center IDE (http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html) which is surprisingly powerful and full of features. Sure, it was all old and ugly by today's standards, and a big step backwards overall from the Plasma desktop I was used to, but it felt really good to use. The whole GNUStep ecosystem is crazy impressive too, and idk the history around it, but I assume interest for it died off a long time ago. Which is a shame, because having that development environment on a modern (free as in freedom) desktop would be awesome. Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other bloat. But apparently development for GNUStep is still alive (last stable release was ~2 months ago), so maybe there is still hope that it will take off one day!

marcodiego 5y ago
Take a look at this: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
pak9rabid 5y ago
Awesome! I ran WindowMaker religiously back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have very fond memories of how elegant and snappy it was compared to other popular window managers & desktop environments of the time.
incanus77 5y ago
I used Window Maker back in the 90s, and now that I’ve gotten back into Linux on Pi and other hardware, I use it again as my preferred desktop (usually on DietPi). It’s just fast, clean, and easy to configure, as well as port or copy the configuration wholesale.
em-bee 5y ago
i used window maker too. it was actually after i had a chance to work with the real NeXTstep interface, that i started to get disappointed, because as nice as window maker looks, it is not NeXTstep and the quirks and differences in behavior were just irritating.
handrous 5y ago
Ran Windowmaker for a long time on my laptop in the early and mid 00s, on Gentoo. It's entirely fine when you're not going to be able to run more than 3-4 things at a time anyway, and manage all your system stuff like wifi from the command line, because the GUI tools are unreliable or absent. Very light, and tiny on disk. Eventually switched to XFCE near the end of my time with Gentoo, and kept that when I changed distro to Ubuntu.
drewzero1 5y ago
I switched to WM for a year or so at work and became very comfortable with its way of doing things. It reminds me of the parts I liked of early Mac OS X. The main thing I wished for was a miller columns file manager like in NeXTStep or OS X. I briefly contemplated trying to write my own, but my Objective-C knowledge is minimal and very rusty. Unfortunately I changed positions and needed a DE that other people could use without getting confused, so I switched to Mate and made it act like Windows 10.
pjmlp 5y ago
> Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other bloat. The hate for the amount of @, [ and ] I have to type, specially in non-US layouts is deserved.

by bogwog 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago

Take a look at this: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

pak9rabid 5y ago

Awesome! I ran WindowMaker religiously back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have very fond memories of how elegant and snappy it was compared to other popular window managers & desktop environments of the time.

incanus77 5y ago

I used Window Maker back in the 90s, and now that I’ve gotten back into Linux on Pi and other hardware, I use it again as my preferred desktop (usually on DietPi). It’s just fast, clean, and easy to configure, as well as port or copy the configuration wholesale.

em-bee 5y ago

i used window maker too. it was actually after i had a chance to work with the real NeXTstep interface, that i started to get disappointed, because as nice as window maker looks, it is not NeXTstep and the quirks and differences in behavior were just irritating.

handrous 5y ago

Ran Windowmaker for a long time on my laptop in the early and mid 00s, on Gentoo. It's entirely fine when you're not going to be able to run more than 3-4 things at a time anyway, and manage all your system stuff like wifi from the command line, because the GUI tools are unreliable or absent. Very light, and tiny on disk. Eventually switched to XFCE near the end of my time with Gentoo, and kept that when I changed distro to Ubuntu.

drewzero1 5y ago

I switched to WM for a year or so at work and became very comfortable with its way of doing things. It reminds me of the parts I liked of early Mac OS X. The main thing I wished for was a miller columns file manager like in NeXTStep or OS X. I briefly contemplated trying to write my own, but my Objective-C knowledge is minimal and very rusty. Unfortunately I changed positions and needed a DE that other people could use without getting confused, so I switched to Mate and made it act like Windows 10.

pjmlp 5y ago

> Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other bloat. The hate for the amount of @, [ and ] I have to type, specially in non-US layouts is deserved.