Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:12:54 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Window Manager Wars Message-ID: <199904131612.JAA01873@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990412222745.conrads@neosoft.com>
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In selecting a window manager, I'd encourage folks to consider a few things that may not have been given much prominence of late: * One of the reasons X supports multiple window managers is that "one size fits all" often doesn't: different folks have differnt requirements at different times (& places). * If one of your requirements is ability to be able to be (nearly) equally productive in multiple environments, it makes sense to use tools that facilitate that. For example, if you are comfortable with whatever desktop M$ has for one of its products, using an X window manager that resembles that might be a good choice. In my case, I had been using tvtwm on my old Sun 3/60 (at home) for years, so I use it here on FreeBSD, as well. I can make it do what I need it to do (mostly, have lots of virtual real estate; I tend to keep windows up for weeks or months, and devote certain sections of "virtual real estate" to certain activities). On the other home machine (a SPARCstation 5/110 running Solaris 2.6), I run olvwm -- some of the Solaris stuff seems to work better under olwm than under twm, and I need my "virtual" desktop. (I haven't figured out how to make a given window bigger than the screen in CDE, so that strongly discourages me from trying to do anything more with it.) * If you're trying to learn new things (vs. merely get stuff done), that's a rather different set of requirements. Indeed, in such a case, you might want to be sure that you include "xnest" when you select the parts of X Windows to install: that's a somewhat "special" X server that allows you to run an X environment within X. Given adequate virtual memory, you may be able to do some "interesting" things (such as side-by-side comparisons of different window managers). Of course, it may help to get familiar with such concepts as "recursion".... :-) Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill UNIX System Administrator dhw@whistle.com voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 371-4621 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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