Come July and the release of the Dapper Drake, I need to make a crucial decision. Crucial as in not really that important; what window manager am I going to use?
I’ve been using Metacity in GNOME pretty much most of the time I’ve been using Ubuntu. Metacity and GNOME are pretty fair, I’ve had some fun customising things.
My Ubuntu desktops using Metacity on GNOME. Pretty standard as far as eye candy goes, but very useable.
I’ve used xcompmgr to dress things up, but xcompmgr is a dead end for eye candy. Then came along XGL/Compiz, and with a spare partition, I gave Dapper and Compiz a go. If you don’t know what XGL/Compiz is, all I can say, is you are missing out. 3D desktops, true transparency, wobbly windows(!) its a blast.
Fun things you can do with compiz. I like the ‘expose’ trick, it resizes and moves all windows so they are displayed (exposed). Too bad you can’t work in them while exposed
I tried to get into KDE, but we didn’t get off to a good start. Messing with themes in KDE completely screwed my installation. I still don’t know what it messed up, but if I ever use KDE with GNOME again, each gets their own user. So KDE, while I really wanted to get into that in-built compositor and SuperKaramba, is put on the shelf for now.
A couple of months ago, I really got into Xubuntu, XFCE on Ubuntu. The mouse is soo cute, and the window manager xfwm is a lot faster than metacity on GNOME. Actually I had a lot of fun messing around with XFCE. The Dapper version of Xubuntu is really cool, and xfwm’s built in compositor can reproduce some of the cool effects that compiz can too. Of course I can always, swap out Xorg for XGL and XFWM for Compiz. So Xubuntu is a real candidate.
Xubuntu Breezy (left) and xcompmgr and Xubuntu Dapper (right) using xfwm’s in-built compositor. It’s hard to look past Xubuntu for a well-finished, but responsive desktop.
The last couple of weeks I’ve also gotten into OpenBox by itself. On a server install and built-up from scratch, OpenBox is really, really fast on my hardware. Its been great hacking the menu and fbpanel, to get it looking nicer. Pypanel is nice as well. I think OpenBox is a major candidate for my future Dapper window manager.
OpenBox is a window manager, so running it by itself is a very minimal desktop. A bit daunting at first, but fortunately its very easy to configure, and runs real nice. Fbpanel is a great panel application (show at bottom left and right)
I’ve also given Fluxbox a whirl, it just didn’t click with me, IceWM, which again, I didn’t get into, FVWM where I borrowed a really nice config, that made the desktop look like this, but I don’t have time to understand how it works, and change it to fit my needs. I also tried E16 which has a butt ugly default theme, and I really wasn’t in the mood to mess around. Having seen some really nice E16 desktops, I might try again soon. And having just browsed the Enlightenment site, I saw how easy it should be to change the default look. Lastly I also tried Enlightenment DR17. So beautiful, some of the coolest effects, light the flashing across the title bars, but ultimately buggy as all hell. I played with it for an hour, and it segfaulted almost ten times. It was so much fun though.
Enlightenment DR17 (Development Release) is just that, under heavy development. The version I ran was from the CVS too, so extra fun. E17 will never head towards 3D, which is a pity. Still it is capable of some great effects.
So after all this playing around with window managers, when I could have been doing someting really useful, what did I come up with.
- E17. Unlikely, I want to use my computer too.
- Fluxbox/IceWM/FVWM/E16. Not unless I have time to configure them.
- Metacity on GNOME, a basic Ubuntu install. Never a problem, but fairly ordinary.
- KDE. Can I schedule some time to try before June?
- Compiz. Seriously cool. Everyone is going to be using this come June.
- Openbox. Love it, love it. No fancy eye candy though.
- XFWM on Xubuntu. Or even XFCE on a server install to trim things out.
- XGL/Compiz and Xubuntu. Getting warmer.
Of course I will probably run several installations of Ubuntu (or other distros) to play with some of these further, I just need one to be my main setup.
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