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FVWM-95 (2001)

fvwm95.sourceforge.net

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#71
post #6

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was sti…

NeXTStep and MacOS already had a CLOSE button. Stop trying to spread bullshit.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#72
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#73

That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to https://www.circlemud.org/ I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.

It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP. This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write,…

Dreamweaver was extremely popular with amateurs too - they just didn't pay for it

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"closing the window ≠ quitting the application" See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.

It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes v…

The comparison to modern browsers is odd and IMO plays into GP's point. You can't get a modern browser to be a single process so it is like your examples and bad for it.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#76

This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3 https://ice-wm.org/

Depends on if you like to make heavy use of virtual desktops. That's not really IceWMs department. FVWM is still king there. Otherwise, yes, (recent) IceWM is good. But so is (recent) Plasma/KDE, if you can spare the RAM.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP. This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write,…

Dreamweaver was extremely popular with amateurs too - they just didn't pay for it

lol maybe it just wasn't popular in my neck of the woods. I never knew anyone who even bothered with it. Now Flash, on the other hand...

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#78
post #11

I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011. You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-theme…

I switched over to using it because (I think) it was much lighter on memory than the window manager I was using. I remember it being very responsive, and looking quite nice for the time.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#80

fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/ I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Sc…

To each his own. I had a phase of emulating the classic W2K look, but like W95/98/ME all of this it feels too dark, dirty greyish for me now. Still in times of late KDE3 I then switched to https://store.kde.org/p/1100735/ but with different more colorful (soft pastel) icons which I can't remember the name of anymore, later then to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve , but not like the ugly default depicted there. It could be customized to a mix of that Reinhardt style and Microsofts 'dot.net' style, still using the forgotten soft pastel icons. Which would then be applied to apps for other toolkits as well. Very consistent. I like consistency.

Meanwhile, Plasmas Breeze (light) does all of that for me, again. One could maybe depart from the breeze window decorations, and exchange them for 'Klassy', they can 'fit', there is much to change, chose from. I'm trying them out at the moment. The thing with Breeze is, many other apps have presets for that also, like LibreOffice, which leads to even more visual consistency :-)

My desktop is blank, a mix between soft pastel yellow and 'manila' paper. No icons, widgets, clocks, weather. I don't care about CPU or Network speed there. I wouldn't see them anyway, since I tend to have windows maximized. If something would be wrong Kget or Ktorrent would make themselves known, which they won't ;-> CPU speeds suffice, even if mostly clocked down to 800Mhz :-)

My 'taskbar' is at the top, only 24px high. I switch between 3 by 3 virtual desktops by either using that too small (for that arrangement, it should grow a little when hovering the pointer over it) widget in the taskbar, or by jamming the mousepointer into one of the four corners, which makes that 'expose'-like thing appear.

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