Window Maker Live: When less is more, but more is also ... more? Back in August, a new version of Window Maker arrived. Now there's a corresponding update to Window Maker Live, so you can try it out without installing. Window Maker Live, or wmlive for short, is a Debian-based distro designed to run directly from a boot medium, although it does have an installer, so you can install it …
I can't even remember when I first used WindowMaker but I've certainly been using it as my main work desktop since 2000. Just the perfect balance of ease of configuration, performance, stability and perhaps most important of all - steady maintenance without some moron deciding every year or so to completely change how everything works!
I remember using this off and on back around the late 90s and early 2000s. Along with AfterStep, IceWM, Enlightenment, and some of the FVWM variants. If there was a free window manager for X11, I probably used it. Then of course KDE came along, and after briefly flirting with the idea of letting you use any window manager you want, seem to have settled on allowing only their own. GNOME lasted a bit longer, but think they don't really allow other window managers to hook into their API any longer either.
For our illustrious FOSS desk hack: has Enlightenment been up to much lately? I remember some years back they had a big falling out with GNOME, after they were briefly considered to be the choice for the official GNOME window manager. Then they did the whole "Stupid desktop environment! I'll build my own desktop environment!" thing, but don't recall ever seeing much of anything come from that. Just a bunch of themes with dark colors and tiny fonts that require better than 20/20 vision to be able to read beyond a few inches from the screen.
In one of my few brief experimental deviations from WindowMaker I switched back to Enlightenment for a little while (post E16). It was as glitzy and swish as ever but I quickly got sick of the binary configuration format which I wouldn't have cared so much about had it not the maddening habit of obliterating my settings every time I upgraded to a new version; also stability wasn't quite good enough for my tastes. On my main desktop I think staid and boring is a good thing...
Window Maker Live, intended to show off one minimalistic window manager,
I re-read the article a couple times, but I'm still missing something. What window manager is it showing off?
There's one mention that IceWM was born in 1997, the same year that WindowMaker was born. Are we to conclude that WindowMaker was created to show off IceWM? Is IceWM currently the default window manager in Window Maker?
Window Maker is the window manager, and Window Maker Live is a LiveCD distribution built around showing off Window Maker. The mention of IceWM is just sort of incidental and apparently confusing for those not already at least passingly familiar with things.
Window Maker is basically intended to mimic the design of NeXTStep's UI before Apple bought it and turned it into OS X/macOS. I think it also has something to do with the GNUStep project, which aims to implement the OpenStep API used by NeXTStep and, to some lesser extent these days, macOS, but my memory on that aspect is fuzzy.
And? Does every distribution have to be about catering to Windows users and trying to cushion the blow by making Linux as Windows-like as possible? What's the point of using Linux if you just make it as close to Windows as you can? Why not just... you know... use Windows? Skip all the headaches of trying to pound that square peg into a round hole.
Point taken. But much of the speech-making about Linux is to broaden its reach - which means converting Windows users to Linux.
Perhaps this particular distro is aimed at knowledgeable Linux users [rather than possible Windows converts]. But that is a small market, and would seem problematical in providing resources for continued development.
If Linux on the desktop were going to happen, it would have over the last 30 or so years. Considering the desktop market is slowly dying thanks to phones and tablets, it's time to just give up on that dream. Well past. Linux will remain popular on the server side, but a niche also-ran in the desktop race.
In the case of Window Maker, as TFA points out, this is the first release in many years. Clearly the developer(s) are just working on it in their spare time as a passion project and not trying to make a living off of it. Whenever they feel like they've accomplished enough for a new major release it's probably not that hard to grab a livecd distro, configure it to load X11 and this particular window manager, and call it a day.
> If Linux on the desktop were going to happen, it would have over the last 30 or so years.
Linux on the desktop has happened and continues to happen. If you meant whether it will it ever gain a substantial portion of the desktop computing OS market, I think that remains an interesting question. As I'm always keen to point out, no OS has ever, or will ever, gain large traction until such time as it is routinely shipped pre-installed on commercial hardware. This is true of every major OS in the desktop (and indeed mobile) market, and easy to understand: firstly, home users have zero incentive to change the OS that came pre-installed on their machine, even if they knew that were possible (which largely they don't) - and why would they, if what they get is familiar and works according to their (possibly low) expectations? Secondly, business usage tends to be locked into existing systems for legacy commercial reasons, and pure inertia.
Apart perhaps from Chromebook, for various reasons (none of which have anything to do with quality/functionality) no mainstream hardware vendors have as yet chosen to promote Linux as a pre-installed OS on the home desktop market (although in the business PC sector Red Hat and Canonical have made some inroads). Ironically, though, as companies like Microsoft move away from the traditional "your OS on your PC" paradigm towards cloudy stuff and computing-as-a-service, there seems to me a possibility that this may open up an avenue for Linux on the desktop, e.g., in the PC gaming sector.
> In the case of Window Maker, as TFA points out, this is the first release in many years. Clearly the developer(s) are just working on it in their spare time as a passion project and not trying to make a living off of it.
Completely misses the point: WindowMaker has a strong and well-defined functional and visual identity which is not broken and doesn't need fixing or bloating out with bells and whistles. As window managers go, it is lightweight, lightning-fast, extremely stable, polished, and virtually bug-free. It gets out of the way and lets you get on with actually using your machine. Would that other desktop developers adopted that attitude.
"Linux on the desktop has happened and continues to happen. If you meant whether it will it ever gain a substantial portion of the desktop computing OS market, I think that remains an interesting question."
Yes, thank you for that tortured bit of pedantry no one asked for and that shows the sad tortured logic some poor sods in the Linux world continue to hold onto. If you like Linux and it works for your specific use case, great. I'm genuinely happy for you. Or at least as happy as you can be for someone you've never actually met and maybe only interacted with impersonally a few times. Doesn't change the fact that for the vast majority of people, Linux is not suitable. Maybe if they have someone who will spend the time and energy needed to make it ready for their specific use case, and be willing to answer their random questions until the end of time, but that still leaves out hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
Linux on the desktop is never going to happen. I'd be happy if I were proven wrong, but I've been hearing people proclaim that every year is the year of Linux on the desktop since the late 90s. There were plenty of opportunities for Linux to capitalize on, like the introduction of product activation with XP, the bumpy rollout of Vista, the backlash over the UI changes in Windows 8, the bumpy rollout of Windows 10... Yet Linux on the desktop still remains in the low to mid single digits overall. The fractious nature of the community meant they couldn't get out of their own way, just like always and forever.
If it works for you, great, but just do yourself a favor and don't pretend like tomorrow you're going to wake up and suddenly the scales will have fallen from everyone's eyes and they'll all be flocking to use Linux. That's a recipe for a wasted and miserable life. Just be happy that it works for you and let that be enough. Stop trying to pretend like it will ever be more when we both know it won't.
"Completely misses the point"
No, you missed the point. That comment was in response to another person's comment.
Seems my main point wooshed straight over your head (or you simply chose to ignore it): that no OS has ever gained mass take-up unless it has been bundled with mass-marketed commercial hardware (and/or, for whatever reasons, become a de facto standard in the business workplace). I don't expect Linux to be any different in this regard.
As it happens, I don't personally give a flying one whether Linux "makes it" on the desktop - and have no interest in evangelising for it. I am indeed happy to use it, as it fits my needs, which vary from everyday stuff to more niche scientific and technical computing, better than the alternatives.
I also made a more subtle (and not terribly original) point: that the gradual demise of traditional desktop computing in favour of cloud-based services may leave a gap in the PC desktop market in areas such as gaming. I don't actually give a fig whether Linux does or does not take up that slack (I have no interest in gaming), and really couldn't care less what OS anyone else chooses to use.
> Doesn't change the fact that for the vast majority of people, Linux is not suitable.
Sure, it's "not suitable" for the non-tech user simply because they would actually have to install it - which as I remarked, even if they knew the option were available (which they probably don't), why would they bother? If it happened to be pre-installed on their machine, they'd just get on with it; this is in fact my personal experience with a few folks, mainly family members, who I've installed it for in the past. (FWIW, that was because I was their PC helpline, and found it easier to troubleshoot Linux remotely.)
And sure, there are Linux fanbois and evangelists out there, who I understand annoy you terribly. I'm sorry you mistook me for one of them.
Try Steve Jobs' post-Apple venture NeXT. and what would become the foundation for the Mac OS X/macOS UI. Window Maker aims to replicate the NeXTStep UI as closely as possible, while AfterStep (if it's even still around) stuck more with the general concept, but wasn't afraid to change things when they thought they had a better idea. Back in the day, it was considered to be one of the best UIs in *nix-land, and back before everyone just spent their days doing shitty copies of whatever Apple and Microsoft are doing.
"paradoxically both lightweight and cluttered with multiple redundant choices"
That's exactly why I use Linux as my daily driver: sometimes it's useful to have gVim, Kate and Gedit open with different files...
The same with window managers/desktop environments: I like being able to run IceWM one day, i3 the following day, GNOME the next day.
The Linux distribution project Window Maker Live is now available for download in version 12.8:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/wmlive-bookworm-12.8
The Window Maker Live DVD is an installable Linux live ISO, and is based mostly on the current “Bookworm” stable branch of Debian. It relies on the Window Maker window manager as its default graphical user interface. To make the Window Maker based desktop as useful as possible, it has been carefully preconfigured to provide an environment with a unified visual appearance. Window Maker Live integrates selected components taken from other desktop environments like XFCE4, MATE, LXQT, and GNUstep.
The former versioning scheme based on Window Maker's version number has been changed to emphasize the close relationship to the version of Debian/Bookwom on which the project is ultimately based.
What's new in this release is the much better integration of GNUstep components in their most current versions and the general expansion of the scope of the included software:
* Previous [https://sourceforge.net/projects/previous], which implements the m68k hardware of NeXT computers in software and allows the operation of the NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP operating systems.
* 86Box [https://github.com/86Box/86Box], an emulator for x86-based PC's with support for Intel CPU's up to a maximum of Pentium II. Perfectly runs both NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP for Intel.
* scantailor-advanced [https://github.com/ScanTailor-Advanced/scantailor-advanced], an excellent program for post-processing scanned book pages.
* TeX Live [https://www.tug.org/texlive], the internationally leading document production system for TeX and LaTeX.
* .. and so much more that you can find out better in practice.
Not included are common YouTube-enabled web browsers such as Chrome/Brave/Vivaldi/Firefox/Opera/etc. or something like LibreOffice or Thunderbird and other standard programs. Instead, the web browsers PaleMoon [https://www.palemoon.org], the Otter-Browser [https://otter-browser.org] and for the command line lynx [https://lynx.invisible-island.net] and 'links' [http://links.twibright.com] are included. For mail there are claws-mail [https://www.claws-mail.org] and GNUMail [http://www.nongnu.org/gnustep-nonfsf/gnumail], as well as mutt [http://www.mutt.org] on the command line.
What is not immediately apparent from the graphical interface and has therefore been deliberately ignored in all the reviews I have seen so far is the scope and usefulness of the command line tools included. Pretty much everything you need for system administration and repairing broken systems is there. This includes all possible and impossible tools for repairing most file system variants, clonezilla, Android tools, chntpw and ntfs-3g, various partitioning tools, (de)compression programs, and much more. And of course tlp [https://linrunner.de/tlp] is also included.
With this equipment, it should certainly be possible for so inclined users to be able to do without the graphical interface entirely and, thanks to screen/tmux, mc, vim/emacs, mutt and so on, still be able to work relatively comfortably just on the console.
This description at best actually only scratches the surface and I didn't want to have to break my fingers writing. Instead of trying to get an idea based on a necessarily incomplete description, it is advisable to simply examine the downloaded ISO more closely in a VM.
This distribution is almost certainly unsuitable for users who are rather inexperienced in UNIX matters, as its handling goes beyond the usage conventions of Windows and MacOS. For normal users, it is better to use Mint, MX Linux, Ubuntu, or EndevaourOS instead, where no historically influenced UNIX rough edges are to be expected.
Unfortunately, the ISO images are only available for i386 and amd64. While creating an ARM variant (arm64) is easily possible on a Pinebook Pro, the result cannot be booted on the very same Pinebook Pro due to its lack of EFI, and how to create an ISO that can be booted with u-boot is still a mystery to me. The arm64 ISO apparently works as expected in QEMU, but whether this also works on a real ARM machine is unknown. Since there is no other ARM hardware for minimal testing, an arm64 ISO of unknown quality was not provided for the time being.
If you want, you can build your own customized ISOs from the build tree source code [https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/wmlive-bookworm-12.8/wmlive-bookworm-12.8.tar.xz] which was used to create the ISO. In any case, a Window Maker Live system installed to disk already integrates everything necessary to create its distribution medium. Obviously, there is some fascination with this recursion aspect.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
