It's a matter of personal taste. I find that the Window Maker interface is outdated looking, with the boxes and stuff. At the time when I tried it, it still didn't have anti aliased fonts for the menus and stuff. In fact I couldn't even use my true type fonts with it.

Fluxbox seems much more modern to me.. rounded corners, anti-aliased fonts, transparency... and above all it is 1.5 MB. Then after using it a while I found that it has tabed windows, you can chunk say xterm in the firefox window. And you can also just drag stuff of the screen to put it in a different workspace. Those are two features that I've never seenanywhere else.

It is really just a matter of taste though.

I agree--window managers are totally a matter of personal taste. I prefer fluxbox for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the simplicity of the config files. You can tweak just about anything you want to without having to search through a ton of man pages. Another major plus is the ability to customize it--through individual style files and the init file almost every aspect is configurable. And all of this is possible without adding too much bloat. You can set up a really sharp desktop and still keep it lean and mean. And there's the tabs--every time I use a different window manager I'm disappointed that I can't group windows. But even though fluxbox is by far my favorite, I still use others. Windowmaker is awesome, and if I feel like using a full featured desktop, Gnome is great too. If either one of them had the ability to tab windows, it would be a really tough decision. But until that happens, I'll probably always keep going back to flux.

Fluxbox. It's light, configurable, and can look pretty darned good without hogging resources.

KDE man myself. I have ran fluxbox and blackbox. I like the way they look. I have ran WM and Gnome as well. But the thing I like about KDE is I don't want to waste time on trivial things like menus. It's interesting to tweak it as you like in flux the first few times, but it just becomes redundant for me. I had a script that would take care of a lot of those issues...but then that wasn't quite as much as I needed.

I think it depends on how long you have used GNU/Linux. I have used it for about 8 years now. So after a while, all the little tweaks that are somewhat trivial lose their appeal. I liked WM. Ran it on FreeBSD a few years back.

Well, you may not learn anything, but you get a nice little screensaver :P

calcon

funny I find it the exact opposite. Once I have my fluxbox setup it looks awesome, editing the few text files is easy. Everything is nice and clean.. no clutter. I find the kde and gnome to be much harder to use and conigure... and they completly clutter up and overwhelm my desktop. And on top of that they use all my resources! I'm booting into fluxbox and I'm not even breaking 80 MB of RAM! I would love to see a windows desktop do that!

Why does XP boot with 50 MB of virtaul memory already used? I always wondered that.

Oh the one thing I don't like about slackware... probably the only thing is that is still using the 2.4 kernel. Premptive kernel is the biggest thing in 2.6 for desktop users. I running the 2.6 kernel for a while now and wondering why the long delay. I havn't had any problems yet.

Still even though I compiled the 2.6 kernel the new interfaces can not be taken advantage of fully because glibc is was compiled and linked against the 2.4 headers, which sucks.

Pat provides the 2.6 headers with a warning, but installing them over the 2.4 headers and compiling source against them is just asking for trouble, since all the glibc libraries are still linked against the 2.4 headers.

I think pwm was the first with tabs - ion and pek (and probably others) have them now - flux got them after the others. And most (or at least many) wm's can drag across though it's almost never a default setting. I don't use it, but I think ice can do it - I know E can. Not to take anything away from flux - just an fyi if you wanted to try something else with those features.

perfect_circle: I used flux for a long time, switching from blackbox, because it just added some nice things while still being very blackbox-like. It's since gotten away from that and I quit using it; switched to ice. But I always play with others. Kind of ironic that you mention windowmaker because - no offense (because some people take it as an insult) - I hate windowmaker. I'm not saying it's bad or anything - I simply *can't use it*. Squares all over my desktop and blocky slidy menus and weird behaviors. That's just me. Flux's slimness, simplicity, configurability, ability to look good, and features like tabs - yeah. It's got a lot going for it if you're looking for certain things. Although I think the flux devs use Gentoo, there's probably a bigger overlap of Slackers and fluxers than any other distro and wm combo.

But, yeah, it's totally a matter of taste. Different people like to work different ways and the tiniest little thing can make a window manager seem unusable to one, and perfect to another.

well said!!

You will know the feeling after you used it. The feeling that convinced yourself, oh I can do this and that. Eventually you will like to edit config files and you will be learning Linux :-)

[edit] gee now i really feel like a goober. did not realize how old this thread was until i posted. i did a search in the slackware forum and this post was pretty high on the list so i assumed it was new. oh well, if anyone is still watching this thread, here ya go! [/edit]

ok, im gonna give this a go

i have used slackware off and on for a long time. right now i use arch as my primary machine. why? i think mainly because of pacman. it works so much better than apt for me and i have had no problems with it at all. it just works and the man pages for it is great. also i like how packages are installed and where they are installed to.

what i have read here so far is a lot of what you could say about other distros. yes i know there are some out there that are not as fast or stable than others. but a distro is what you make of it. i dont get the argument about slack being the most unix like...so what. why does that matter? linux isnt unix as far as i know. maybe im more of a desktop user. ive never compiled or re-compiled a kernel. never had the need to (yet). never had to install linux on a machine that was so out dated that i couldnt run kde, so i dont buy the argument that it is light and that you should run fluxbox

let me stop myself. im in no way trying to flame anyone or start any flame wars, just stating my opinion, with that i'll continue

yes, i have learned a lot about linux from slackware. but i have also learned a lot from arch too. im sure if i give it the same amount of time the things i learned from arch i would have learned from slack, but in my experience i just couldnt get slack figured out. which config file do i edit? where is it? why isnt it in this folder with the other ones? why do i have to change permissions on a script file to get it to load on system startup?

i guess like i said before maybe im just a desktop user who does not need to be all in the middle of why the os works or why it is so unix like. i like my distros to be easy enough to learn yet difficult enough that you have to learn what you need to do to make it your distro, which is what linux is to me.

what makes slackware so great? make it yours and then you tell me.

it feels 'clean'

• stable as possible
• secure as possible
• reliable as possible
• vanilla as possible
• predictable as possible
• minimalistic as possible
• direct control as possible

Taking care of many Linux and a few Win2k servers is my daily bread and Slackware based are those I am the most satisfied and happy with. Fortunately not all companies demand commercial distros like RHEL or SUSE.
I can't enough explain my gratefulness to ingenious and devoted person named Patrick Volkerding.
Amen.

I try other distros, but I keep using Slack because it's just a better fit and
is more comfortable. I'm currently trying PC-BSD on my test computer. It will take some time
to get used to that one.

That was quite a bump...

I don't really like slackware that much. It is stable, but so is every other distro i use. It is simple, but so was Arch Linux.

I use Slackware for 2 main reasons. Dropline gnome and ease of creating packages. Making packages in slackware is so much easier than making them in any debian/rpm based distro by far. It's also very flexible, like i can merge 2 packages together into one.(i made a package that had scim, anthy, scim-anthy, and japanese fonts all at once so you only needed one package to read/type japanese)

I have no idea how to do that in debian.