I've wished for a better WindowMaker experience for years -- and that more places would adopt the distribution solution that NeXT and its children adopted.
Is it perfect? No, but it's sure a step closer to an ideal than whatever .so hell that we came up with before.
I wonder how well WindowMaker integrates with modern applications, I've always wanted to give it a try but was worried about this. Does anyone use it as their daily driver?
Window Maker looks alien to me as a Unix user. CDE is good, but I like TWM which is the default window manager in Slackware (if you want someting more Windows-like, you can switch to MWM).
Having used both NeXTSTEP and Window Maker, the weirdest thing for me was the left-side scrollbars especially on the file/column browser where there's 3 side by side. Great to see this still alive and kicking.
It's hard to make it work really well even on a normal workstation these days. Heck, I have an RPi 5 and I can't even get good enough 2D X11 acceleration to use it performantly; basically forced to use Wayland on there.
The NS UI looked really odd to me until relatively recently having grown up on Mac OS Classic, Win9x. Now I look at that and think, damn.. that aged well.
In fact, this should rather be considered a Window Maker based Debian/Bookworm distribution instead the stated reverse. Certainly more then 95% of the shipped packages are plain Debian/Bookworm packages, with only a few additional packages contributed by yours truly.
The main merit of wmlive is providing the necessary glue to properly preconfigure Window Maker with an out of the box usable environment (unlike Debian's crude/primitive Window Maker configs) and make it the default GUI.
The other merit is to make the supplied software complete enough to serve as a standalone system without the immediate need to connect to the internet to install more useful packages than are normally supplied by distributions in their quest to provide an initial system too generic to be really useful by already experienced users. This is not meant for beginners,
While some work went in homogenizing the overall looks with Window Maker's own WINGs widget set, no efforts were wasted with further eye candy stuff. The themeability of the WINGs widgets are limited to that crufty NeXTSTEP look everybody either loves or despises, being the least common visual denominator. Not being particularly enamored of these visuals, but this was the only way to find some common ground for the look and feel.
Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]
What most people don't seem to get is that there is much more to wmlive than just the visible desktop. Below the hood is a wide range of command line tools suitable for system rescue and repair when using it as a live system booted from an USB stick. Supposedly many youngsters who were yet to be born when we already grew up with Linux from day one have never learned to look beyond what's visually obvious.
If anyone who downloaded it does like wmlive, I'd appreciate a donation via the download pages. While i hate sounding like a beggar, given the current economic situation i could really use it. Thanks!
windowmaker! now there's a nice bit of nostalgia. I always wanted to write a library to make dockapps in a nicer language than C but never got around to it and eventually switched over to other desktop environments.
Nice, I like seeing projects like this. In fact I always wanted someone to make a complete system based on GNUstep. Like a Mac but open source software and hardware. App store, customer support, all that.
@wmlive has already brought these up, but I think they're worth highlighting again: check out these projects if you're interested in NeXTSTEP-like desktop environments:
I used to use WindowMaker back when I regularly used Linux on the desktop¹, and as I'm about to pave a Win10 desktop & laptop and Linux them rather than being forced down the Win11 route² I'm considering trying it again.
Is it currently maintained though? The main page for it states “Latest source of stable version is 0.96.0, released on 2023-08-05.”. The previous couple of releases where a few years apart so this could just be because it is largely (entirely?) feature complete but still actually supported, or not…
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[1] I still use Linux a lot, but mostly server-side via CLI rather than anything GUI. Those few occasions when I've found myself using something in the GUI fold it is usually via X remoting (via SSH) or where I'm working more offline such as with a LiveCD I just use whatever the default is for the distro I'm interacting with.
[2] It won't even officially run on this desktop, and I refuse to use hacky tools to get around that so that I can regrade to something I don't even want, and Win10 has had a couple of issues on the laptop (wrt waking from sleep, or not) for a couple of years (it used to be fine, the issues started immediately after one of the big updates, I forget which, various firmware and driver updates since have had no lasting effect).
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[ 114 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] threadIs it perfect? No, but it's sure a step closer to an ideal than whatever .so hell that we came up with before.
In fact, this should rather be considered a Window Maker based Debian/Bookworm distribution instead the stated reverse. Certainly more then 95% of the shipped packages are plain Debian/Bookworm packages, with only a few additional packages contributed by yours truly.
The main merit of wmlive is providing the necessary glue to properly preconfigure Window Maker with an out of the box usable environment (unlike Debian's crude/primitive Window Maker configs) and make it the default GUI.
The other merit is to make the supplied software complete enough to serve as a standalone system without the immediate need to connect to the internet to install more useful packages than are normally supplied by distributions in their quest to provide an initial system too generic to be really useful by already experienced users. This is not meant for beginners,
While some work went in homogenizing the overall looks with Window Maker's own WINGs widget set, no efforts were wasted with further eye candy stuff. The themeability of the WINGs widgets are limited to that crufty NeXTSTEP look everybody either loves or despises, being the least common visual denominator. Not being particularly enamored of these visuals, but this was the only way to find some common ground for the look and feel.
Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]
What most people don't seem to get is that there is much more to wmlive than just the visible desktop. Below the hood is a wide range of command line tools suitable for system rescue and repair when using it as a live system booted from an USB stick. Supposedly many youngsters who were yet to be born when we already grew up with Linux from day one have never learned to look beyond what's visually obvious.
If anyone who downloaded it does like wmlive, I'd appreciate a donation via the download pages. While i hate sounding like a beggar, given the current economic situation i could really use it. Thanks!
[1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace [2] https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop
Is it currently maintained though? The main page for it states “Latest source of stable version is 0.96.0, released on 2023-08-05.”. The previous couple of releases where a few years apart so this could just be because it is largely (entirely?) feature complete but still actually supported, or not…
--------
[1] I still use Linux a lot, but mostly server-side via CLI rather than anything GUI. Those few occasions when I've found myself using something in the GUI fold it is usually via X remoting (via SSH) or where I'm working more offline such as with a LiveCD I just use whatever the default is for the distro I'm interacting with.
[2] It won't even officially run on this desktop, and I refuse to use hacky tools to get around that so that I can regrade to something I don't even want, and Win10 has had a couple of issues on the laptop (wrt waking from sleep, or not) for a couple of years (it used to be fine, the issues started immediately after one of the big updates, I forget which, various firmware and driver updates since have had no lasting effect).