Gimme that old time interface...

[Coleman Kane]

Star wrote:
> I know the benies to using KDE and Gnome, i'm wondering about the
> multitude of users with Black/Whitebox with PERLed out menues and the
> likes...
>   
For me, it has been only recently that my hardware has actually been of
a relatively current breed. During college, I relied upon a string of
antiquated Thinkpads beginning with the compact 486 model that had the
spring-loaded collapsing, pop-out keyboard.

As such, KDE/GNOME never really "fit" these notebooks. Instead, I
managed to craft together some pretty nifty solutions built around VTWM
(http://www.vtwm.org/) and a set of perl scripts to make the most out of
the applications being run therein. It served my needs, as a minimal
window manager that was relatively easy to hack on, yet still provided a
virtual desktop.

I experimented with evilwm (http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/) for a bit,
and managed to convert one of my former classmates to it for life.

I also used SCWM (http://scwm.sourceforge.net/) for a long time until
some incompatibility between it and guile crept in. All my configuration
was belong to Scheme.

Later on, I found golem (http://golem.sourceforge.net/) which is another
minimal one, but this one supports some of the WindowMaker features
while adhering to a minimal, yet powerful configuration language and
plugin API. If you want some simple changes, write a script for it. If
you want some bigger changes, write a plugin in C. A true "hacker WM".

Eventually, I ended up moving to GNOME and Metacity because of the
desktop integration into many of the apps I used and some of the more
advanced visual effects (and when I got an AMD64 laptop, the speed
problem was not an issue anymore). Also, non-GNOME window managers seem
to confuse some aspects of GNOME/Gtk2 applications.

I did find that you can make the most of Gtk2/GNOME-based applications
under other WM's by making sure the following daemons run (via .xinitrc
or otherwise):
gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-vfs-daemon, dbus-launch

They typically help make Gtk2 apps look better, without having the full
resource hit that GNOME typically does.

--
Coleman Kane