Window Maker wanted to be the foundation of an entire "GNUstep" desktop environment, not just a window manager. Unfortunately, that environment never materialized; for better or worse, all of the development effort went towards GNOME and KDE. WMaker is still (barely) usable as an X11 WM, but there's no real ecosystem around it; based on the video at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net/, this distribution is mostly running GTK apps with a (rather ugly) theme to make them fit in.
I can't see any reason for this to be a distribution, incurring the overhead of replicating all of Debian, when instead it could be a single-digit number of packages that apply on top of a stable Debian release.
Why are you doing all that extra work? What value does it give you beyond "it is slightly fewer steps to install my image vs a standard Bookworm"?
Because i can. A standard Debian install doesn't provide the software we prefer because it appears to mainly focus on end user type desktops instead of providing a well equipped Unix toolbox. It's just great to be able installing a system that already has included all the nice tools and utilities we rely on since almost 30 years. And Window Maker is a good enough environment to run terminal emulator windows.
Thanks for maintaining this distro.
Although nowadays I install things manually, when I started to get into windowmaker, I used your distro to get an idea of how to configure things in a cohesive environment.
Things like the layout of the autostart file or which gtk theme to select are not so obvious for beginners, and for me it was more valuable than a bunch of packages.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadNice nostalgia-factor whooshing in :)
https://distrowatch.com/index.php?newsid=11963
Agreed.
Window Maker wanted to be the foundation of an entire "GNUstep" desktop environment, not just a window manager. Unfortunately, that environment never materialized; for better or worse, all of the development effort went towards GNOME and KDE. WMaker is still (barely) usable as an X11 WM, but there's no real ecosystem around it; based on the video at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net/, this distribution is mostly running GTK apps with a (rather ugly) theme to make them fit in.
https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
This is a modern setup for Debian 9, 10 & 11.
(Not 12 yet AFAIK.)
It inherits a little bit of code from the earlier NEXTSPACE desktop, which was based on CentOS Linux:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
NEXTSPACE is Ukrainian and development has been on hold since Russia invaded the author's country.
I used to look at the windowmaker and KDE themes in that daily.
Nostalgia, would like to see them again.
There is still xwinman.org and even though it's not about themes it still has screenshots of some old windows managers, for nostalgia sake.
(updated windowmaker, aux config to make it the default, and wallpaper/icons/art/misc)
It even contains slightly more than three packages.
A distribution is much more than just the superficial aspect of its primary GUI. So dig a bit deeper first.
Might be a good idea to first have a closer look at the things questioned instead of being led astray by just a few few random screenshots...
I can't see any reason for this to be a distribution, incurring the overhead of replicating all of Debian, when instead it could be a single-digit number of packages that apply on top of a stable Debian release.
Why are you doing all that extra work? What value does it give you beyond "it is slightly fewer steps to install my image vs a standard Bookworm"?