Giving WindowMaker Another Try

Once upon a time, I was a Lin­ux user who had just grad­u­at­ed from n00b to adventurer.  I loved the flex­i­bil­i­ty pro­vid­ed by Unix, and the free­dom pro­vid­ed by open source software.  Min­i­mal­ist graph­i­cal user inter­faces appealed to me, before I ever dared to shed X entire­ly, and enlight­en­ment was the great­est thing that ever happened.  In the years since then, I’ve stuck to either KDE 3 or GNOME because I absolute­ly love Compiz.  I can scarce­ly live a week with­out the full screen zoom, col­or neg­a­tive tog­gle, and real-time bright­ness control.

I first tried Win­dow­Mak­er about three years ago, iron­i­cal­ly run­ning the same ver­sion I’m run­ning right now.  I loved the per­for­mance, dock­apps, and the NeXT‑y look.  Of course, I even­tu­al­ly suc­cumbed to the call of Compiz.  Whether it’s my aging lap­top that crams a 1024x768 res­o­lu­tion into a 12 inch screen or my 24 inch mon­i­tor that dis­plays tiny pix­els at 1920x1200, I have a gen­uine need for a high qual­i­ty zoom.

This time I will stick with Win­dow­Mak­er, for­sak­ing all oth­ers, until such as time as XZoom final­ly dri­ves me insane.  All those giant pix­els rep­re­sent­ing the zoomed region, it’s so…2004.  Then again, the look of Win­dow­Mak­er is pret­ty much 1994.  Oh well, the pur­ple theme goes well with the Ambiance GTK style which debuted in Ubun­tu 10.04.  Come to think of it, why the hell can’t the GNOME Appear­ance dia­log export the set­tings to ~/.gtkrc‑2.0?  Why does GNOME con­tin­ue it’s march away from the beau­ti­ful sim­plic­i­ty of Unix? That is a rant for anoth­er time; I leave you with a screen­shot.

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