Linux Window Managers
February 13th, 2007[ Linux ]
One of the nicest things about linux is the window manager paradigm. I was about to attempt to sum that up but the Ion Conclusion does a good job:
“To ultimately solve usability problems to the extent possible with current technologies, applications should be written independent of their user interfaces and the UIs should be built according to the user’s preferences based on a high-level semantic description of commands provided by the application”
What is a Windows Manager?
“One of the guiding philosophies of The X Window System (and also UNIX itself) is that its functionality is achieved through the co-operation of separate components, rather than everything being entwined in one huge mass (or should that be mess?). The advantage of this is that a particular part of the system can be changed simply by replacing the relevant component. The best example of this is the concept of a window manager which is essentially the component which controls the appearance of windows and provides the means by which the user can interact with them. Virtually everything which appears on the screen in X is in a window, and a window manager quite simply manages them.” [link]
The window manager is ultimately what most user’s think of as their operating system. They don’t think of disk I/O, process management, etc. They think of what happens when they right-click here or where their taskbar’s located etc. It could be argued that the window manager is THE most important part of the OS in the end user’s eyes. Ask a OSX user why they prefer it over windows and most of the time the answer will involve descriptions of OSX’s window manager.
The beauty of linux is that the end user is given the ‘keys’ to their window manager. Trust me, once you get a taste of this it’ll be difficult for anyone to pry those keys out of your hands. You can swap your window manager all day long if you like. So if you don’t like the way your “OS” works then just shop around and find another, or build one yourself.
Even in windows I don’t use icons on my desktop and rely on shells to launch applications. So I’m currently having good success trying out fluxbox:
“It aims to be lightweight and highly customizable, with only minimal support for graphical icons, and only basic interface style capabilities. The basic interface has only a taskbar and a menu accessible by right-clicking on the desktop. Fluxbox also supports user-created keyboard shortcuts.” [link]