Hacker News Reader

He probably means he's using a simple window manager (twm, fvwm, etc) instead of the fancy everything-managers that include desktop functionality.

X alone doesn't provide that -- think back to Windows 3.1 days. You had a background, but not a desktop.

I figured something like that. I generally avoid using the term 'Window Manager' because none of twm, fvwm, blackbox, enlightenment, etc. only provide window management - there's almost always some included app launcher.

_pra is right. I use a very lightweight tiling window manager called dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/).

I do have a desktop background, though I rarely ever see it.

What I meant was I don't have a desktop in the Windows/Mac OS X sense -- a place with icons, documents, mounted drives and the like.

Why do you need a desktop to have a web browser? ¬_¬

Window management would be required to align the web browser with the terminal windows. A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.

A text web browser wouldn't require window management but omits a lot of content.

It does, but after using one for a while, most of it seems superfluous.