Re: Re[6]: Advice take two :)
> Could anyone maybe give me a short introduction for the most common
> wm's?
<plug>a slightly longer one would make a GREAT artcile for linux gazette</plug>
Ok. The setup comes with twm, "tabbed window manager" or maybe "tom's" whoever
Tom was. Certainly not the Tom of Tom's Rootboot. Incredibly simple. Brain
dead even.
If you're a keyboard junkie but need X try ratpoison. It doesn't was screen
space on clicky things.
My friend Steve Savitsky uses ctwm, religiously. He's trained it to be very
nice about how it places the title tabs. It's still fairly plain, but has
a nicer look, doesn't feel so bad.
fvwm is the most common for people who dunno what to pick. It has *some*
compliance for the Desktops key action stuff, but not complete. Not that
this affects me much. You can change the pictures of the control corners
and do some coloration to it. So it can look quite pleasant and non-MSwin
and pretty much get the job done. It's still very lightweight.
"anotherLevel" if you happen to see it, is another fvwm variant. Not very
different, really.
After this comes the Cool Looking Stuff. They *can* be lightweight to some
degree but in practice the cooler themes start to cost some memory, and, they
have been stealing cool features from each other and vying to do right by the
Desktop users. So, my recommendations for people are usually based on their
programming preferences...
if you aren't a programmer, hate programming, can't figure it out, take the
one recommended by your favorite Desktop, so its control center app can set
things for you and you don't have to look under the hood. For Gnome that's
currently sawfish (probably E would still work too) and for K... uh... kwm
I guess.
Sawfish uses lisp under the hood. If you like read the gimp's script-fu
and you have no fear of parentheses or curly braces you will do fine.
Enlightenment is C-like under the hood. And there is a configurator program.
If you need to put it on a diet HackerPurple is an extremely slim theme.
It can do cool things like sliding buttons. See the shinymetal theme
(available from the debian system, express lane ;> ) for an example.
If you like dark there are mucho-mungous themese for you. There are light
ones too, but... goths seem to like E.
Windowmaker looks like Nextstap and many decisions revolve around being
comfy to Nextstep users.
icewm looks pretty good, I think its base weight is a bit less - but I haven't
looked under the hood, the last I played with it the machine already had a
whole bunch of themes installed. Many people create themes comfy for MSwin
and Mac users on this one.
At this point my direct experience ends...
* Heather Stern * star@ many places... Technical Editor, linuxgazette.com
Linux Gazette is part of the LDP
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