Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

ice-wm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 72 posts

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#11

Post by npteljes »

saagarjha wrote: post #4

I’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?

I once had a task to set up custom web crawlers. I made my crawlers as a Firefox extension, and to host a Firefox instance, I chose debian I think and IceVM. IceVM was light on the resources and it was easy to set up so that my Firefox starts minimized.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#12

Post by smabie »

I used to use icewm, it's okay. It's not particularly inspired, but there isn't anything wrong with it either. Right now I use cwm which I absolutely love, but have also heard very good things about i3.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#13

Post by brobinson »

npteljes wrote: post #11
saagarjha wrote: post #4

I’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?

I once had a task to set up custom web crawlers. I made my crawlers as a Firefox extension, and to host a Firefox instance, I chose debian I think and IceVM. IceVM was light on the resources and it was easy to set up so that my Firefox starts minimized.

You could probably use something like Xvfb instead of running a full window manager.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#15

Post by laqq3 »

I use IceWM as my daily driver since it has all the features I need and is very lightweight.

The maintainer is super nice too: I had a feature request in mind, raised an issue on GH, and the he eventually implemented it.

It may be appropriate to link to the donation page of the author: https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/

Thanks for IceWM!

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#16

Post by icewm--user »

saagarjha wrote: post #4

I’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?

been using it for five years now. it's no-nonsense and does exactly what i want it to. no fancy graphics. multiple monitors, autosuspend and fullscreen work without configuration. has a fancy liquid crystal clock.

it's the peak of desktop computing.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#18

Post by onli »

thom wrote: post #9

Having a very Obi-Wan "that's a name I've not heard in a long time" moment. I can't remember ever settling on IceWM at any point - in my early forays into Linux I always just used Blackbox, before using KDE until it got weird, and then just settling on Xfce and Wxfm because my needs are simple. I'd be interested to hear what it excels at?

I use IceWM for well over a decade now. It's a nice WM. It is close enough to Win 95/98/2000/XP to not feel too new in the beginning, with its start menu and regular window decorations. But it also has the features of a real Linux WM, with virtual desktops, window rules, mouse focus settings, configurable shortcuts, integrated command runner etc. I don't use use the taskbar anymore (replaced it with a combination of conky/simdock/trayer, but the desktop still works with IceWM at the core), but the integrated network and load indicator was very useful to get additional feedback, that a program is starting or stuck, or a download finished or paused.

It's a complete package, but at the same time a very lightweight WM. It's great.

Just back then the default theme was ugly. Coming from Ubuntu I'm still using https://www.box-look.org/p/1018090/ - doesn't look any worse than a modern DE to me now.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#19

Post by dpedu »

thom wrote: post #9

Having a very Obi-Wan "that's a name I've not heard in a long time" moment. I can't remember ever settling on IceWM at any point - in my early forays into Linux I always just used Blackbox, before using KDE until it got weird, and then just settling on Xfce and Wxfm because my needs are simple. I'd be interested to hear what it excels at?

I believe it's intended to be lightweight. I've used it in places where I need to run a GUI app on a remote machine that acts like a server. Looking at it now, my instance is using 20MB ram.
Post reply on HN