Window Maker - Your NeXT window manager

I kind of like WindowMaker but it seems to me like there have been no updates or improvements for several years now. Is it even still under development or is it essentially a dead product? Does anyone know?

I like the idea of it. And tried to use it a couple of times, also tried it on naive users. The attraction was that it is fast and light. Yes, that is true. But its no faster and lighter than fluxbox, and the learning curve is no less steep. With FB, you do have to edit the menu for them. But once you have done that, they get quickly into right click and find what I want. You do have to explain about file managers, but once you have, its not really an issue. I use Thunar with FB, and it works just fine.

The last case, I had an old shuttle with 512Mb memory, an Athlon 1.2Ghz processor, and put in fluxbox with some trepidation. Edited the menu of course. After a while playing with it, I got the reaction from customer that it was great, that this is what I had always expected Linux to be like, just very stripped down and no nonsense, and who needs all this clutter anyway?

Makes you think about HIGs, and then think again.

Caitlyn: It depends.

Yes, it's dead, no changes the last few years, no active development. Have been using it for five years now, not much new to it.

Yes, it's stable so it doesn't need gazillion bugfixes / updates like Gnome and KDE and what-else-do-you-have. It doesn't depend on complex stuff like MySQL (like kdepim-4 with Akonadi) or Mono, so there's no political debate to justify another gazillion changes.

There's only one bugfix I'd like to see, because it doesn't seem to remember which app is running in which workspace. For the rest I'm quite happy with it: It's better than Blackbox, the only other "Unix-WM" I used for longer than a week.

It's not at all dead. I sit in the #windowmaker channel on irc.freenode.net and chat with the developers.

OK, and what are the developers up to? No releases for years at a time is dead to me.

AFAIK the 'old' main developers left, and some others stood up to do some minor maintenance and bug fixing.

On a related topic:

The GNUstep live CD v2.0 is now out.

http://io.debian.net/~tar/gnustep/

Why do all these alternative window managers produce such poor screenshots? They always use some ugly Win95-like GTK or Qt theme alongside these WMs. It really makes these WMs look poorer than they are.

Please, show a stock Gnome or Stock KDE with your WM running on top. The screenshots will look better to the uninitiated. Also, people will immediately see what's different on comparison to stock KDE/Gnome.

Because people who care about aesthetics normally don't use these alternative Window Managers I guess. Anyway, I'm busy trying to upload my own screenshot of my current 'screen'. Same ugly theme though.

Should be here: http://lxer.com/pub/files/hkwint/WM_screenshot.jpg

Hmpf. I use Sawfish, one of the "alternative window managers", because it has the most flexible, Motif-ish theme out there, "Mwm". I fell in love with the look-and-feel back when I used Geoworks Ensemble, and I still prefer the default color scheme of CDE. Heck, I even found a sweater in a Goodwill store with the default CDE colors.

Yes, I need a life.

I'm totally into Awesome at the moment. It's both a tiling and a floating windowmanager. Usually it's set to tiling but for some apps or windows tiling just doesn't work (e.g. popup windows). I also love how it is completely programmable using Lua.