begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Wed, May 02, 2007 at 04:40:24PM -0700: > Gabriel Sechan wrote: > >Lets face it, for a desktop machine the number one concern is the window > >manager. > > I'm not so sure about that. The average end-user of a desktop machine > doesn't know what a window manager is, doesn't know they have a choice > of window managers, and generally just takes what they are given. If we > are talking about desktop machines for Linux power-users then perhaps > you are correct.
Surely that depends on the distribution. Some distributions give the user a choice at login, some give 'em a choice from some menu after they login, and others, presumably, offer no choice at all by default. I really dislike calling the next step up from the passive "I don't want options" users "power-users". The term "power-users" is a rather derogatory epithet in my book -- it fits in with "power-ties" and "power-lunches" and such things. > I am also confused as to why we call it a "window manager" still. A > window manager just provides dressing for windows and defines some basic > window behavior. Yup. X provides a canvas and a mouse. Window managers give you (draggable) windows on top of X. Applications generally don't know about window managers. There's a mostly-clean decoupling between what your environment looks like and what you're running. Desktop environments dispose of the decoupling in favor of integration. There's an upside in the richness of possibilities that come with the integration, at a cost of some additional level of complexity. Other windowing systems will have a different view of the world. > Back in the days of fvwm, twm, olwm, etc. people talked > about window managers because the "desktop environment" hadn't really > been invented yet. But now it seems that most of us are talking about > the latter when we say the former. Or it had, and they didn't like it. Wasn't OpenLook more of a desktop environment? -- X wasn't the first *nix WIMP interface. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
