Some general window manager questions

[cleverhandle]

Something broke in your first apt-get dist-upgrade, then. Maybe a source was temporarily unavailable and it bombed out or something. But at the start of this thread you were certainly not runnng unstable, as evidenced by the XFree version. And if you have GNOME 1.4 now, then you're still stuck somewhere in the middle - unstable GNOME is 2.2/2.4.

With unstable sources, what output do you get from

apt-get clean
dpkg --clear-avail
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

KDE isn't a window manager, it's an entire "desktop environment." One of its many parts is a window manager, kwin. You can run it with other wms, though.

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Enlightenment still has things that other WMs don't (although I believe atleast one of the box managers will be getting proper window memory soon or has recently) and I run it on all my machines.

Fair enough. Window memory has always seemed good enough to me in other WM's, but everyone's needs are different. I'd guess that Openbox 3 should have window memory, but I haven't looked into it. It's a great WM in any event and worth a try.

I dunno, I talked with the openbox author about this exact issue a while back, and we both agreed (or at least I thought he did) that it was impossible to do it right. How do you properly identify a window? How do you know that when the window appears to be "the same" (same name, class, size, etc) to the window manager, that it also is "the same" to the user? You can't really analyze the contents of the window with the wm, and they could be totally different. IMO it can't be done perfectly, and if it's not done perfectly, then it won't be 100% predictable, and regular smart window placement *is* 100% predictable. Predictable is good. 🙂

p.s. <plug>in kahakai you can code your own custom window memory 😉 </plug>

 

[Nothinman]

Well on top of that I've never liked the look and feel of any of the box managers. I used WindowMaker for a long time and switched to E because of the GTK2 focus bug in WindowMaker (which of course was fixed ~2 days after I switched, after it had remained unfixed for months prior) and I don't see a reason to switch again. E does it's job well, by today's standards it's a light weight WM and most of the themes are really cool.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Well on top of that I've never liked the look and feel of any of the box managers. I used WindowMaker for a long time and switched to E because of the GTK2 focus bug in WindowMaker (which of course was fixed ~2 days after I switched, after it had remained unfixed for months prior) and I don't see a reason to switch again. E does it's job well, by today's standards it's a light weight WM and most of the themes are really cool.

No matter how much I want to go on and on about how much better *box is than the rest of the WMs mentioned in the thread, I really think this is what is great. There are enough GOOD choices that everyone can find something they like and works well for them.