[HN Gopher] Window Maker Live: When less is more, but more is al...
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       Window Maker Live: When less is more, but more is also more?
        
       Author : LorenDB
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2023-10-26 11:11 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | gjsman-1000 wrote:
       | "The Window Maker Live ISO is a hefty two and three-quarter
       | gigabytes in size. We feel that its maintainers need to learn to
       | exercise a great deal more discretion, and how to perform the
       | unpleasant task of pruning."
       | 
       | Is it just me or is this a delusional criticism?
        
         | dpe82 wrote:
         | Did you read the rest of the article? Much of it is a criticism
         | of the distribution including multiple application launchers,
         | file managers, etc. that don't necessarily work well together,
         | and contrasting that with Ubuntu distributions which tend to
         | give you _one_ of each category (and are thus smaller).
        
           | gjsman-1000 wrote:
           | Perhaps... but even there, I could see that being useful for
           | a more offline-only experience. Otherwise, as they say, why
           | not AntiX?
        
         | Lammy wrote:
         | Agreed. If it was a small download they'd instead be
         | complaining that it didn't come with enough software to be
         | usable.
         | 
         | WMaker is by far my favorite X11 wm and I'm happy to see it get
         | any press at all though :)
        
         | pacifika wrote:
         | You misquoted
        
       | muppetman wrote:
       | My first 3-4 years with Linux was using WindowMaker and it'll
       | always have a special place in my heart. Eventually I compiled
       | from scratch KDE v0.4 and never really went back. I should give
       | this a go though, even just for Retro's sake.
        
       | msh wrote:
       | I think I used window maker exclusively from maybe 2000-2008 but
       | in the end it felt outdated. How is it holding up these days?
        
       | bbarnett wrote:
       | Wish they actually reviewed the desktop, as in, actual app
       | changes, improvements, instead of just discussing the distro
       | only.
        
       | shrubble wrote:
       | I remember with great fondness using a NeXTStation Mono Turbo for
       | about 8 months as my desktop many years ago. It was a great
       | experience and the simple color scheme avoided "color poisoning"
       | even when I later upgraded to a Color Turbo, and still looked
       | elegant.
       | 
       | I had worked with NEXTSPACE under a VM, which is a Centos7 with
       | custom GNUStep , it was nice, not quite as nice as original NS
       | but still very nice. The problem is that getting that last 2% of
       | full integration in terms of graphics, fonts, etc. is still not
       | done.
       | 
       | Will definitely check this out.
        
       | nuancebydefault wrote:
       | Why does a tool that is called Window Maker have windows and
       | icons that have the looks from previous century? It almost
       | reminds me of my Atari ST with GEM or maybe I'm exaggerating,
       | let's say windows3.11 of the nineties. Yes I know this is Linux,
       | but still.
        
         | _Algernon_ wrote:
         | I find it refreshing. At least it's not preinstalled candy
         | crush, advertisement in the start menu, forced updates,
         | unresponsive and bloated software, and constant prompts to
         | collect more telemetry.
        
           | nuancebydefault wrote:
           | That's the other extreme that frankly you only get if you
           | click 'continue' or 'okay' everywhere and don't bother to do
           | any tweaking. I must say, I most liked the win98 times when
           | things got more stable and a lot less bloated than today
           | (sollitaire and pinball were quite okay).
           | 
           | Would you say refreshing is the right word? I would say
           | barebones.
        
             | paradox460 wrote:
             | Windows 98 was many things, but stable was not one of them.
             | The os would crash if you left it running for too long
        
             | pdntspa wrote:
             | > That's the other extreme that frankly you only get if you
             | click 'continue' or 'okay' everywhere and don't bother to
             | do any tweaking.
             | 
             | No, that's the default on Windows 10/11. Much of which
             | cannot be opted out of without tweaking.
        
         | shrubble wrote:
         | It's supposed to look like NextStep in it 3.x versions. If you
         | look at screenshots of that operating system it will be very
         | clear.
        
         | AntoniusBlock wrote:
         | Looks nice to me. Also it's very lightweight and fast. I ran
         | WindowMaker on a 500mb RAM machine back in the early 2000s and
         | it was very snappy.
        
           | meepmorp wrote:
           | Off topic, but do you play chess with Death?
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-28 23:01 UTC)