Choosing the look that's right for you

In recent years, as Linux has become more popular, members of Linux community have tried hard to shake off the reputation, which I feel has always been unwarranted, that the graphical user interface for Linux is at best, boring and at worst, unmanageable. This is based on, of course, comparisons with the user friendliness of the omnipresent MS Windows and the well-deserved good reputation of the Macintosh OSes. After using Windows 95 from 1995 until the end of 1997 and testing various Mac OSes extensively (at one point using Mac OS 8 exclusively for one month - I was staying with relatives and needed to get some work done), I can safely say that Linux doesn't and probably hasn't had a reason to envy the other two major OS offerings in terms of graphic interfaces since about 1998. Graphic user interfaces under Linux are comparable with these other ones in just about everything and even enjoy some advantages. The major one over MS Windows is, of course, stability and security. The advantage over Macintosh is primarily cost related.

If you're reading this, then you've probably made the decision to try Linux. Before we talk about what your Linux desktop is going to look like, we should first talk about the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment.

Window managers

Most programs made for computers nowadays run in a graphic environment. However, it became apparent that these programs would be more efficient if they could take their attributes from a common source. This is what a window manager does. It decides how the window is going to look, the aspect of its buttons and frames. It determines how it is going to reacted when you click in it or you reduce it or re-size it.

There are more than two dozen different window managers available for Linux. The more popular ones make their way onto Linux distributions. They range from completely minimalist to well-engineered works of art. Here is a list of the ones that generally find their way onto the major distributions' CDs.

• the fvwm family
• Blackbox
• IceWM
• Sawfish
• Enlightenment
• WindowMaker
• AfterStep

You can check out the above sites and find one that you like. The first one, FVWM, is my personal favorite. It is also the most minimalist of the one's I've listed here. This is, as far as I know, the oldest of the aforementioned as well. This is not meant to be an endorsement of this window manager. I just happen to like its minimalist approach and low memory requirements. I'd rather pass that RAM savings on to the really important applications running on my computer.

I have provided a screenshot (153k) of the my view on the world of Linux. ^* I have a menu item that links to a script that will place a new picture as the desktop image when I get bored of the one I've been seeing for a couple of days (or hours, depending on my threshold of boredom at the moment).

I have fun tweaking the configuration file. I think the main reason that a lot of people prefer other windows managers to fvwm2 is that the file that sets up your desktop menus and buttons and other things has to be worked on by hand. They really prefer the click-as-you-go configuration of other window managers. I happen to like experimenting and I am prone to change it once a month or so (depending on that threshold of boredom factor again). Fvwm2 is so configurable that if you got 5 different configuration files, known as .fvwm2rc, off the Internet and tried them out, you would swear that you're seeing 5 different window managers.

You can check out the .fvwm2rc file behind the above screenshot. I'd like to acknowledge that the main file was written by Jay Kuri. Thanks Jay, wherever you are. I also included some tweaks that I got here and there. The main buttons you see are from Eric S. Raymond's (author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar) .fvwm2rc and modified slightly.

Of course, everyone is not into tweaking and prefer a more "clickable" configuration. Peruse the offerings out there and choose one that suits your needs. You may also want to hold of on the window managers for a bit and read the next section. We talk about desktop environments, the ultimate user-friendly GUI experience for Linux.

^*There's a neat application called gkrellm that keeps track of a lot of things that are going on with the system besides displaying the time and date. MS Windows users should take note of the uptime (last time of reboot) of 27 days, 21 hours. We had a power blackout that lasted about 3 hours while a transformer in my neighborhood was being fixed. Previous uptime was 31 days. I don't remember what happened 31 days before that.

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