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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see the GNUstep project still alive and kicking. WindowMaker has been the daily driver at my home desktop since 2000 when I first installed Debian and found the KDE & GNOME desktops way too heavy and unstable.

At this point, I am just too accustomed to WM to try anything different. It's a great window manager and has all the bells & whistles I ever need, yet it's blazingly fast. Though lately some KDE software has been misbehaving under my present-day Arch Linux install (small rendering issues, probably a theme configuration error), but as long as GTK + Firefox + xterm work, I am happy enough.

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I've been using WindowMaker through multiple distros, at least from Red Hat (back before Fedora) through Slackware and now Ubuntu.

It's stable, low-resource without being needlessly weird, and visually appealing.

I may have to come back to it - I forget why I moved away a few years ago, but have been missing it things about it. Actually, looking at the whole of GNUstep, I'm going to have to think about trying it out - the use of a non-annoying init is a huge plus, as is ditching some of the "helpful" cruft Ubuntu layers on top of Debian.

I just have less time and energy for playing with this crap than I used to.

Do you still get plug and play for e.g. USB drives and such when using Windowmaker? (As compared to a full desktop environment such as XFCE or KDE.)

Yes. This is all handled via udev, udisks & co., XFCE, Gnome and KDE have nothing to do with it (other than having it work more or less out of the box).

Cool. Is much tweaking needed to get it to work smoothly?

If you mean auto-mounting on inserting USB devices, it is handled a bit differently depending on your distribution. E.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udisks https://wiki.debian.org/AutoFs

I personally don't think it's that much of a trouble to just journalctl for the /dev/sdX of the inserted device and then sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/tmp manually, because I so rarely plug USB drives. For permanently attached or frequently used devices you can add them to fstab and mount by UUID to a fixed path.

Either way, you will still always need to umount manually or risk loosing data.

Honestly -- I have no idea, I only had to do it a few times, on Yocto and buildroot images, and in pretty restricted cases. It was pretty easy (basically udev has this file which matches a set of device selection rules with a set of actions, effectively saying "if I encounter a device of this type, I'm going to do these particular things"), but I googled my way through it.

I expect there are some distro-specific hoops to jump through, but I have no idea which ones -- I really don't like automounting, I keep it disabled even on KDE.

(Why? Old habits die hard, I guess?)

Of course, since the headlined article mentions the absence of systemd, this raises the question of whether there is udev in there.

They do have it: http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/gnustep-2.5.txt

udev existed before systemd, but was merged to it sometime in 2014. By quick Googling there are still several forks that maintain it as a separate component.

My understanding is it's in the same repository (for convenience), but is logically separate, so "forking" it mainly means copying the correct directory.

No, it's tied to systemd. That was one of the big reasons behind systemd adoption in the first place.

Eh, not really. Many Parabola users who use OpenRC instead of systemd still use systemd-udev, as opposed to eudev or one of the other non-system forks.

I don't know what they use, but there's always eudev, Gentoo's fork which works just fine, and offers pretty much everything that udev offers (except for the systemd dependency).

The headlined article explains that it is Debian 9, which does not have eudev, nor vdev (which is in Devuan), nor Suckless mdev.

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