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Comment by gnuvince | Hacker News Reader

Back in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever hold a special place in my heart.

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I never liked Window Maker much. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I tried a lot of Window Managers and desktop environments and usually ended up back on either K Desktop Environment or Sawfish. Obviously everyone’s heard of KDE but I don’t see many people talking about Sawfish.

I never really liked GNOME much either; even when everyone was running it in the 2.x days.

Enlightenment was (and still is) cool though and in my opinion never got enough credit.

BeOS aesthetics (and the OS as a whole) will always have a special place in my heart too.

Ultimately this all just boils down to personal preference. I’m definitely not suggesting that you’re wrong nor weird for liking Window Maker (if anything, I’m probably the weird one…)

I actually preferred stock afterstep over windowmaker, but I agree with you in that I preferred any windows manager with a taskbar.

Why did you stop using it?

I can tell you why I did back then. I saw screenshots of openbox/blackbox/fluxbox and wanted that instead.

I went to Blackbox because its UI elements were smaller (title bars are more narrow, no 64x64 dock icons) which gave me more real estate on my 1024x768 monitor. I then migrated to Openbox because that had more active development at the time.

This year, I've switched to herbstluftwm, a tiling window manager that's really nice and works in a way that agrees with me.

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