Hacker News Reader

Comment by v1ne | Hacker News Reader

What a blast from the past. WindowMaker served me well for many years, mainly on small screens. But once I started using multi-monitor setups, I switched to i3.

One thing: WindowMaker is easy to use yet full of options to customize the appearance and behaviour of windows, per-application and per-window.

Yet I think its killer feature for many years was the huge (64x64 pixel) "dock apps". There, you could put widgets with a ton of nice functionality, such as WiFi status, mailbox, disk monitoring — or just a clock. I don't remember if NeXTStep/WM were the first to offer those widgets, but I remember being a fond user of them.

View on HN

I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).

Actually at some point in recent years i used NeXTStep and having being using Window Maker for many years by that point, i felt a bit of an uncanny valley effect: what i was looking at the screen felt very familiar but still somewhat "wrong" and a ton of what i was used to didn't work (or worked in a different way) :-P. It made me realize what the people around the mid-2000s who tried various Aqua-like themes on GNOME 2, etc and said that it looks off/wrong were feeling like :-P.

EDIT: also i think Window Maker is not the only window manager that supports/uses dockapps. I think FVWM and Afterstep can also use the same dockapps.

Fluxbox also has first class support for Dockapps. They're a great pairing.

An old screengrab to prove my point: https://www.thran.uk/img/desktop-aug-21.jpg. I'm especially fond of the VU-meter style ethernet traffic monitor, 'wmnd'.

Find dockapps here: https://www.dockapps.net/

That screenshot makes me want to use Fluxbox, it looks great!

I use Fluxbox since the first version. Very easy to customize. I've just an issue with Firefox, the Firefox windows doesn't want to play with Fluxbox (on Debian)...

I think this is a bug in upgrade path, I have my normal profile with this problem (and a lot of accumulated things) but if I launch Firefox with a fresh profile then it works nice.

It's very usable when paired with PcManFM, and there are a plethora of themes available. Customising is done by an intuitive config file. There are tools to auto-generate the application menu, so you don't need to toil after installing a new program.

The hardest part was setting up automount to handle my network drives and USB drives - no gvfs here! A result you'll welcome if you like sane paths to mountpoints.

That's useful information, huge thank you!

Fluxbox is awesome.

I used to use it on hardware-limited machines at first, then started to prefer it for its minimalism.

Fun fact: though years after WMaker/AfterStep were already a thing, the Mac OS X Developer Previews, Public Beta, and 10.0 had “Docklets” that worked somewhat similarly. The default Dock for a new user contained one for adjusting Monitor resolution and color depth. They were deprecated almost immediately when the MenuItem API was added to Mac OS X 10.1

> I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).

According to my computer history knowledge, NeXTSTEP version 0.8 introduced the dock in 1988.

At the launch, Steve Jobs said: “The dock — It turns out that, when you’re running applications, things can get lost. These icons can get hidden and you might want to read your mail at a moment’s notice. So we allow you to take any icon and take it over to any one of these dock positions and it’ll snap in and dock. And the minute it docks, nothing can go in front of it. And so it’s a place to always have the applications that you use handy. You can customize it any way you want to, and nothing will ever keep these things from being a glance away. That’s what the dock’s all about. And if you decide that you need to use that right part of the screen for an awfully big window, and you don’t want to undock things, you can just slide it down and everything, but the little logo will go off the screen.”

https://youtu.be/92NNyd3m79I?si=PjcfOEhf2-S-QzB1

That's a different thing, though. Obviously NeXTStep had a dock for apps. That was probably its primary influence on UI design and why OSX/MacOS has an dock. That's different than "dockapps" which are programs that live in the dock which aren't just normal programs. The closest thing to that would be the clock/calendar app of NeXTStep (which does exist as a dockapp for WindowMaker)

As I understood it, the dockapps of the Windowmaker world were basically a work-around for the fact that the X11 had no concept of a dock icon (or a dock at all, for that matter). On Nextstep, the normal Mail app would show status in its dock icon, much like Mail.app does on macOS today, the calendar app would show event reminders in its dock icon, etc. Your X11 mail app wouldn’t know that there was such a thing as a dock, so you had to run a separate little app to get the “biff” function in the dock. Then the Windowmaker afficionados took the concept and ran with it, creating lots of little apps that had nothing but a dock icon, a thing that didn’t really exist on Nextstep.

I think GNUMail and some GNUStep software supported notifications as dockapps. Such as the number of new mail messagges.

Yep. I used windowmaker then enlightenment ( I fell prey to shiny baubles ) then kde3 ( yes, in my mind still the single best desktop environment I’ve ever used ), and now i3. I love i3.

KDE3 will always be the pinnacle of Desktop Linux for me as well.

The functionality that was there at the time is astounding. Kmail was better than Evolution (minus the Exchange support), KOffice was half decent and a lot more performant than OpenOffice. KDevelop was a quite progressive IDE. Heck even Konqueror was a decent browser, with an engine that was so well designed and portable, that when Apple decided to make a browser, they forked KHTML.

Everything was cohesive, used a unified design language, worked great on a system with 1GB of RAM.

I don't understand how all these years later, on systems infinitely more powerful, desktop Linux is yet to get to a similar state. KDE4 was such a disaster, I left KDE and have never really gone back since.

If you feel ever nostalgic, there's Trinity! https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

The last versions of KDE 4 had fixed a lot of issues and were a solid DE IMHO. I had left KDE for a while when KDE 4 was first released indeed, but came back later.

They decided they would not do the same mistake of releasing such unstable versions again in the future, and indeed, plasma 6.0 was usable since day one.

Have you tried Plasma 6 or a recent plasma 5? If you liked KDE 3, you might like it. I find it's a really pleasant environment, I'm not sure something from KDE 3 is missing. It's also quite lightweight, I run it on a tablet with 1GB of RAM, it's a bit slow but quite usable. The web is pretty much unusable though for the most part unfortunately.

There's also a big work of ironing out the small bugs and they are working on making things more cohesive with a design system and some work to unify qml-based and qtwidget-based components (yes, on that front, qml was not a thing when KDE 3 was released, the UI was probably more cohesive - though Breeze, KDE's theme, already does a lot for this and is beautiful).

I don't know Trinity but that's of course another option.

> I don't understand how all these years later, on systems infinitely more powerful, desktop Linux is yet to get to a similar state.

CADT ?

They redesign the whole thing every couple of years instead of fixing bugs.

Another vote for KDE3 as the best Linux desktop environment.

I forgot how it was called, but one could easily automate the whole desktop back then via scripts and an interface to the KDE3 programs.

KDE IMHO never returned to that level of polish and quality (yes, I tried 6).

Today I am a GNOME user and its killer feature for me is provisioning via dconf and Evolution is my favorite email client on any platform.

I only started using KDE 4, then quit and came back for KDE 5. Now I'm running KDE 6 on Wayland and it the most stable it ever has been. There is a significant push for bug fixing and polish. Port to Qt 6 started a major release cycle and I expect it to mature a lot in the next few releases.

The wharf? Suddenly that name made sense when linking about the heritage and the dock. TIL I guess.

Fascinating to see WindowMaker still going strong. I was a keen fan back in the day (late 90s/early 2000s?). It had a nice feel to it and made my Linux desktop look cooler than the other Linux desktops in our open plan office on a university campus!

Using i3 with rofi on X11 git version (because of new TearFree option) myself. A very thin top bar for virtual desktops, tray icons, email notifications, sound volume and date time is all that I need anymore. Tiling is the best way for me to use my single 32" monitor.

The publication of high quality fonts since WindowMaker was a thing 25 years ago and expired patents for font rendering also needs to be mentioned. Desktop Linux has evolved nicely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com