Moinak Ghosh wrote: > Garrett D'Amore wrote: >> Alan Coopersmith wrote: >> >>> Garrett D'Amore wrote: >>> >>>> Christian Kelly wrote: >>>> >>>>> There's always CDE :) >>>>> >>>> CDE isn't too bad. Its certainly much better than gnome in this >>>> particular regard. But it isn't OpenSource, and my fear is that Sun >>>> plans to do away with it. >>>> >>> At this point, the question is not "if" CDE will go away, but "when". >>> >>> >> >> Exactly. So I am requesting that Sun and the community consider some >> lightweight replacement (xfce4, blackbox, whatever). Heh, wouldn't it >> be a hoot if olwm came back? :-) >> > > olvwm :) > >> Frankly, I'd prefer one that is so lightweight that it didn't involve >> any non-window-manager behavior. Even CDE could get horked up by messed >> up configuration files, incorrect network configuration, etc, and having >> an alternative that is resilient against this kind of misconfiguration >> is likely to be useful for the cases I'm considering. (This is one of >> the reasons that I'm using xfce4 -- it seems to be much more resilient >> against configuration file corruption, stale locks, etc. than the other >> desktops I've tried.) >> > > Windowmaker is also an excellent fit for what you desire. It gives a > lot in a minimalist > package and useful keybindings.
Right, I've used windowmaker in the past. The point is that we want a simple window manager, that adheres to the principle of least surprise. A motif look and feel, and window behavior, is most likely, IMO, to fit that need (primarily because of its "closeness" in L&F to Windows). For that reason, I wouldn't choose a NeXT-ish window manager like window maker. I would choose fvwm, blackbox, or xfce4 as my choices. Frankly, for the need I'm targetting, blackbox may well be the best choice. Because it is so simple, it is probably pretty immune to the problems that other desktop environments have. I am not sure how the decision of _which_ window manger should be made, but I'm encouraged by the notion that others see the need for a light replacement for gnome for use with by the system admin/root user. (Possibly the basic window manager from gnome would work too, as long as we only start up the window manager and not all the other gobbeldy-gook associated with gnome. I haven't looked lately, so I have no idea how tightly integrated the window manager in gnome is to the rest of the desktop.) I hope that we can identify the need, choose one, and integrate it without devolving into a bikeshed about window managers. My point is to provide a reasonable version for use with suninstall, system admin tasks, and such. Not to provide a replacement desktop for end users. (Hopefully that will forestall some of the bikeshedding.) -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
