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IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

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Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#41
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slackware.. my first Linux district. In 1995. Classic shell font. I miss those days, but modern Linux is amazing.

They say you never forget your first, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore as the combination of cloud VMs and graphical installers have reduced nearly all Linux installs to a couple mouse clicks.

Well, rest assured that for at least some noobies they will still remember their first.

For me, it was ~ 2 - 3 years ago, I had just bought myself a new laptop.

I knew what Linux was from some experience with a raspberry pi, and wanted to try it on my main machine, so I installed Fedora as a dual boot.

I've only booted Windows on that(this) machine twice, and no longer have it installed.

Edit: The installer itself was graphical and mouse clicks, but X11 did not play well with optimus graphics at the time, so I found myself offline using man pages and tmux very quickly. Daily drove TUI only for a couple weeks before I sat down and fixed X. Hopefully this counts.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a nice WM. This sounds like a good slogan. It's a n ice WM. It's an i ce WM.

Random off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there ar…

I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a nice WM. This sounds like a good slogan. It's a n ice WM. It's an i ce WM.

Random off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there ar…

> when preceding a consonant or a vowel.

When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#44
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?

It's the best combination of lightweight plus Windows-like. I will still use it for setting up a limited machine for someone just moving off Windows. It's more work to set up, but very stable.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a nice WM. This sounds like a good slogan. It's a n ice WM. It's an i ce WM.

Random off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there ar…

In linguistics, it's called rebracketing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

> Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite".

> Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above).

Other examples:

> The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French.

> Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#46
I was inspired by the Hackers movie to pimp my laptop in the late 90s, early 2000s.

IceWM was a great candidate but I don't remember using it as much as Fluxbox or IonWM.

Of course I also modified the boot splash in FreeBSD to display the Duke Nukem nuclear logo when the computer started.

That scene in Hackers where all the kids setup their laptop in a phone booth and each of them opens up a customized laptop really stuck in my mind.

It gave me a fantastic sense of pride and belonging to a sub-culture everytime someone saw my custom laptop. :)

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#47
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slackware.. my first Linux district. In 1995. Classic shell font. I miss those days, but modern Linux is amazing.

They say you never forget your first, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore as the combination of cloud VMs and graphical installers have reduced nearly all Linux installs to a couple mouse clicks.

This depends on which distro you are installing. There is still many CLI based installations. Arch Linux for example.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#48
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?

Same feeling. I used to prefer WindowMaker, but switched wm's in an almost weekly basis and definitely IceWM got its share.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#49
post #28

Funny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content. I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to t…

rxvt-unicode is what you want.

I moved fro black box to xfce as my WM About a decade ago for the wifi integration. I remain With it on my desktop as I like having the docked apps (pidgin, slack, teams, vlc and volume), and of course inertia. Like the rest of linux it just works and doesn’t get in my way.

However aside from Firefox, and screenshots, everything I launch is via alt-escape which pops upend a new rxvt-Unicode window.

Re: IceWM 2.0 – Ice Window Manager

#50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IceWM is everything I love about Linux from a ux perspective. IceWM is brutally fast and never crashes or loads. It handles multiple desktops light years better than Windows. Yet it's so simple and lightweight you'd assume it's barely doing anything at all. And it's awesome on old hardware.

Right! That's why I stumbled over it actually. Needed something for my dad's AMD K6-2-333 system, with 64MB ram and a 4GB HDD. Windows 95 was not that useable anymore and XP obviously not an option for that system. Thus the second Ubuntu release with IceWM it was, and when I later changed my own system to Linux I stuck to IceWM, since it worked great (and I already had learnt how to configure it).
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