FVWM The King Of The Window Manager Forks

[@ThomasAdam22]

Hey Brodie. Thomas here, the poor sod deciding that fvwm3 is worth it after all this time. You’re mostly right about about some of the things you’ve mentioned in your video. However, Redhat 5 used AnotherLevel, an M4 configuration syntax on top of fvwm. That’s M4 of sendmail fame, which in fvwm2 was a separate module. I’ve since retired it. Despite you being a Wayland Shill, ahem, I’m amazed by the number of fvwm users still. NcCDE helps.

[@6SRChannel]

Thank you for maintaining it! Running NsCDE has been great, and I am currently trying to further modify it

[@today273]

Wow!! I'm so glad the original author for the software this video is based on is in the comments! Your software is legendary and has changed how millions/billions interact with computers. BTW: Is fvwm3 installable on modern linux from package repos (in my case, Arch btw), or do you have a public git repo that can be used to install and test it?

[@ThomasAdam22]

@@today273It is packaged downstream. I maintain the fvwm3 package in the AUR. There’s also a fvwm3-git package (not maintained by me). But, yes, fvwm3 can also be compiled from source via GitHub. Google is your friend here.

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

Hi Thomas and thank you for your effort with maintaining FVWM. I think it's the nicest one out there. Makes me wonder about FVWM2, OpenBSD still has it as their default WM, and therefore it's my primary WM. Do you know if they forked it and maintaining it themselves? And I always thought M4 was a part of FVWM. Is FVWM3 gonna need re-learning when tinkering with the config?

[@stuaxo]

I remember using Redhat back then, I had no idea AnotherLevel was an FVWM fork, or any of the others mentioned - really good info in all this.

[@JEM_Tank]

It's kind of crazy what stuff happens when you let nerds go hogwild with code

[@1Iljo1]

Brodie could you perhaps make a "History of window managers" video, where you just talk about all the prominent window manager, and their forks, starting when X was released. I think this could be very interesting

[@DidNotThinkThisThrough]

I'd find this very interesting, especially if there were a deeper dive in the capabilities and intricacies of the different wms. There are so many forgotten by semiactive projects still around that many people have completely forgotten, like icewm, sawfish and whatever else most people have already forgotten. I had forgotten that scwm even exists, but obviously it still matter to the developer himself, since there has been some git activity as late as 2020. I'd be very interested in a series of videos about interesting or influential but nearly forgotten wms that are still perfectly usable today or even still being maintained.

[@SlkoshkaCh]

0:40 Brodie, you made the same mistake again. The original X came out in 1984, X11 was released three years later in 1987.

[@freedomgoddess]

minor mistake, X11 and X mean basically the same thing unless you're actually talking about version differences

[@ToyKeeper]

X11 was 21 years old when Wayland was created to replace it. Now Wayland is 16 years old and still isn't suitable as a replacement for X11, largely because the people behind it _still_ refuse to admit that some of X11's core features are not only useful, but essential... so they've excluded those features and categorically reject any attempts to add them. While most of computing has moved more and more toward network transparency, Wayland strives to go in the opposite direction... and that's why, despite massive efforts by large corporations, it still hasn't been adopted as the standard unix graphics system. It's held back by its inability to do standard, mundane stuff people have relied on since the 1980s.

[@Rakitzch]

​@@ToyKeeper Saying that X follows UNIX design better than Wayland while criticising Wayland for being just a standardised protocol is wild. Neither have anything directly to do with network transparency. The most impact assumed is that vulnerability of buffering displays from X would be mitigated by Wayland, though these issues have been addressed [...ported over from BSD...] over the bug troubleshooting years past.

[@ToyKeeper]

@@Rakitzch Did you mean to tag someone else? I didn't say the stuff you're responding to.

[@computerlensesprimusoptical]

one more historical nugget: Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the Zenbleed vulnerability, was a very prolific FVWM hacker back in the day. he made a QNX-like config that is still the best example of how far you can bend FVWM to your will.

[@SlinkyD]

XFCE, XFCE. When I'm computin that's the WM for me. Peckin at the keyboard smokin a tree XFCE. XFCE.

[@computerlensesprimusoptical]

if you really, really want to go down a rabbit hole of window manager genealogy, look into 9wm. it was originally designed to mimic the 8 1/2 window system from Plan 9 (which was replaced with rio, which itself may or may not have been influenced by 9wm). the original author sadly passed away in 2003, but his legacy is everywhere in X window managers. 9wm begat w9wm (which added workspaces) and aewm among others, but the big one is larswm, which as far as i can tell was the first modern tiling window manager. larswm influenced dwm and wmii. wmii begat i3, and you can see where this is going. this is a bold-ish claim, but i think almost all window managers can trace their lineage back to twm or 9wm

[@ToyKeeper]

I used TWM briefly, before upgrading to FVWM, FVWM95, and FVWM2. Then Enlightenment, then Sawfish... and I've been really happy with Sawfish ever since. It's basically the Emacs of window managers, with the ability to rewrite its code at runtime without restarting, and I have a big pile of custom lisp now, full of features which simply don't exist anywhere else. I've tried a ton of others, but always come back to Sawfish. Anything else feels like trying to cook with one hand tied behind my back.

[@DVRC]

Can you upload code at run-time/write applications entirely in Sawfish LISP, more or less like Sun NeWS (the window system that used a PostScript superset as a protocol and extension language)?

[@ToyKeeper]

@@DVRC Yes, if you like, that's very possible. But I mostly limit my window manager to window management, and write applications separately. X11 allows applications to do cool things which aren't possible in Wayland.

[@DVRC]

@@ToyKeeper Can you make some examples of things Wayland can't do? BTW, I've got a copy of the NeWS 1.1 source code and a clone called RBuss, I'm working on making it running again. The difficult part for NeWS 1.1 is porting PixRect (needed by CScript) and make it write onto a framebuffer, also due to the insane macros for the RasterOp. RBuss is missing a graphic library, it got only stubs, but I could make the interpreter interface some graphic library (maybe Cairo + PixMan?)

[@ToyKeeper]

@@DVRC For example, I use a program with functionality sort of similar to Windows Recall, where I track my activity in great detail for my own use. I also rely a lot on network transparency, freely mixing and matching input devices, screens, and computing devices, using many computers from whichever keyboard is near me. Wayland doesn't allow these things.

[@blendernoob64]

These Unix history videos are my favorite

[@damouze]

I used to manage the IT infrastructure of a scouting group in my (then) hometown. We had an entire LTS (Linux Terminal Services) setup with a central server running SuSE and KDE, and with thin client / workstations made up of old hardware. These would all be dualboot: one could boot it off the network and get the entire LTS stack on the client or boot from a local HDD and run a limited set of programs. The window manager of choice for the local installation was fvwm95, because it was relatively light weight and most of the users would be familiar with the Win95 look and feel. Deployment was relatively easy as well. We would boot a new thin client off a floppy disk or CD-ROM and the rest happened automatically.

[@Babk0ck]

Good job Brodie. Your videos are always interesting.

[@pennyandrews3292]

It is really nice to have you highlight FVWM and its forks, as it is an excellent example of what is going to be lost very soon. An entire ecosystem of FVWM forks that do a very good job of simulating earlier interfaces that a lot of older people find they work more efficiently with than something like, say, GNOME 45 or KDE 6 because it's a lot more like what they're used to. Yes, Wayland will get new compositors with window management built in. Probably one of them will be as influential as FVWM and have a lot of forks. But those forks aren't likely to be things like NsCDE or FVWM95, etc. As you can see, up to now, Linux users have been spoiled for choice as to what their desktop looks like, and they were accustomed to having a lot of freedom to have radically modern as well as archaic ideas in play. I'm not idealistic enough to think all of this can be saved, Red Hat and the team maintaining Xorg are rolling out their transition plans already, but I think there's a lot of value in documenting what is being lost and why some people care about it. Thank you for talking about this stuff during what is probably the twilight of its existence.

[@deadadam666]

video quality is utterly gimped by youtube , 1080p looks like 480i , please upload in 4k to get round this (video doesnt need to be shot at 4k)

[@Vekstar]

As a person who uses a FVWM port (NsCDE) this was a great history lesson, and some nice validation that users like us still exist.

[@CristianMolina]

Full of nostalgia. I used FVWM95 with Redhat 5 a lot. Then Window Maker a lot more, for about 6 years. It's beutiful, simple and fast.

[@billeterk]

Fvwm was fun. Encouraged me to change my MS Windows shell to be similar :-)

[@billeterk]

The *step family didn’t really appeal much but I spent a couple of years with fluxbox

[@gianmarcogg03]

Make a video about the Trinity Desktop Environment, the continuation of KDE 3.5.

[@BloodyCactus]

olwm was my drug of choice back in the early x era. memories...

[@MarkRidgwell]

fvwm95 was the 1st window manager I used - was installed on the linux machines at uni that year

[@LanHikari90]

"What desktop do you run?" After using Arch Linux with GNOME for over 12 years, I finally decided to "settle" a little and switch over to Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Did that yesterday. So far, pretty good, I must say.

[@sprinklednights]

Ain't no way... You betrayed the Archbtw community!

[@felixfourcolor]

you're supposed to graduate to arch, not move away from it 💀

[@xerox13ster]

@@sprinklednights They, like I, will be back. The arch based distro/rice I picked up when I initially got sick of trying to configure my environment stopped being maintained and fell apart on an -Syu and I had too much going on to try to rescue it. I did a full backup and then installed mint and it assimilated my home folder without issue. After a couple months of using it daily, Cinnamon started crashing ANY time I changed the volume and if I was lucky I would be able to restart cinnamon, I usually couldn't get to another tty so I'd have to reboot. I'm now back on arch and building my environment up from a plain Hyprland install.

[@LanHikari90]

@@xerox13ster The thing is: Nothing bothered me with Arch. Actually, I absolutely love it, still. However, I work in IT and I also run a homelab. I got enough things to fiddle with and even though Arch has been rock solid, it does invite you to fiddle with it. So I decided to hand over the inner configuration of my system to someone else (at least for the most part) by installing an "easy" distro like Mint.

[@sprinklednights]

@@xerox13ster Void Linux better.

[@leonkernan]

Far out, I’d forgotten how many of these I’d actually used. And yes, I remember Redhat 5.0 coming out. I seem to recall it being a pretty big deal at the time.

[@dmiracle74]

Back then I used fvwm95 on Slackware. Then went to E16 for a while. Got tired of waiting for e17 to be released and tried Mandrake with kde. Then Debian with Xfce. These days I'm using Solus Budgie.

[@guss77]

fvwm95 was my alternative window manager when I got too frustrated by Enlightenment 0.13

[@Marc42]

I kinda like the idea of Matisse table mode! It is something which could actually run well and deliver on the original vision in the modern day.

[@haplozetetic9519]

I started with Redhat 5, but I don't remember the default window manager. I do remember using Window Maker for some time after trying a number of others, but ended up on Icewm for a long time.

[@chrismcgowan3938]

I used twm! for years I used fvwm for years in the 90's working on sun systems. I used it on Linux for a while way back when.

[@stuaxo]

Scheme controlled window manager reminded me of using Sawfish which has scheme (or lisp? probably guile?) behind it. in a level of customisation GNOME has long moved away from you could theme each window seperately; it was fun having a Windows 3.1 style Window, and another couple of differently themed ones.

[@olafschluter706]

I used twm and later fvwm all through the 90s. twm had a feature that appears to be much needed these days with Wayland: when anything was opening a window, that window became just a shape following the mouse to start and opened when it was placed by the user. As the window managers have trouble to store window positions in Wayland, maybe it is time for this feature to come back? After all, most desktops these days aren't that much smarter than the user in placing windows on the desktop.

[@anidnmeno]

fvwm95 still holds a place in my heart

[@antoniopala8135]

FVWM was the first window manager I used in the late 90s, when I first installed Slackware Linux. And right now I'm using the NsCDE desktop (based on FVWM) on one of my work computers. (The other runs Window... for now.) Whenever I install Linux on an old PC or a VM and don't want to put a full desktop on it, I use FVWM.

[@devnull73]

I sooooo wanted E to flourish back in the day. It was just so damn pretty at the time. Then rasterman kinda just concentrated on weird libs, and it all fell away.

[@marcofixit]

Ahh, shout out to RedHat 5 my first introduction to Linux. I remember Jurassic Park was doing the rounds back then so of course I had the building like file browser installed .

[@thelanavishnuorchestra]

I remember TWM, and FVWM. And RXVT as well. Used all of them at one time. I use Xfce btw.

[@mostrealtutu]

Can we get a "whilst" counter (overlay thingy) up and running from next episode onwards? :)

[@tylerdean980]

Not even a mention for NsCDE? :(

[@torspedia]

When I've played with a few of the more mainstream WMs, I'd love to explore some of these obscure ones... though only ones that are still being developed/maintained.

[@edvonrattlehead2135]

would have been nice if you showed enlightenment and mentioned the fact that enlightenment was the window manager for gnome before a dedicated window manager, metacity, was written for gnome and later down the line metacity was combined with integrated with clutter to create mutter.

[@Cstar64]

despite enlightenment (e16) being a 20 year old wm it still looks good and very usable to this day

[@cameronbosch1213]

Correct, although Sawfish was used in GNOME 1.4 & 2.0. Metacity was only ready in 2.2.

[@mattelder1971]

On the subject of desktop environments, I'd love to see you do a deep dive into the history of CDE. For people my age, that was the de facto face of UNIX.

[@iamjustaclone]

Hi Brodie! interesting topic :-) nice to see how things evolved with window managers :)

[@johnsavard7583]

I remember fvwm. To get it to work normally, at reasonable speed, I had to expand my computer to 16 megabytes of RAM.

[@SecurityDivision]

Who remembers Fresco, that was like a X alternative with it's own window manager which could rotate windows etc?

[@robmckennie4203]

Imagine in the 80s talking about virtual desktops "more desktops? Why? Who could ever run enough programs to need that?"

Nice. Thanks!

[@GafftheHorse]

I remember most of the wms mentioned. Only ever actually used (or tried to use) some of them. FVWM I mostly failed to get a working config of. Now settled on i3 mostly.

[@jamesb2877]

I was aware of a lot of those, especially stuff for Next Step and some of the other ones you didn't touch on, but not all of them, others a few of them might not familiar with.

[@UnderEu]

What desktop do I use? MATE, because GNOME 2 back in the day fitted more than perfect to me and what became GNOME Shell after 3.x release, I hated and still hate. Maybe, when COSMIC releases and it adds support for Global Menus, I might consider it but, until then, I’ll enjoy my Compiz-enabled wobbly windows because I can :)

[@ShantanuAryan67]

I run KDE Plasma. What's wrong with its virtual desktops though?

[@rjawiygvozd]

it doesn't support separate virtual desktops per monitor, so for instance you can't go to another virtual desktop while keeping the same window open on your second screen

[@ShantanuAryan67]

@@rjawiygvozd oh that's bad. I don't have a second monitor so I never knew...

[@red5355dragon]

@@rjawiygvozd you can switch desktops while keeping the same window open by setting the window to show on more than one desktop. imo seperate virtual desktops per monitor is unnecessary and doesn't make sense. you wouldn't take a door off a car and still call the door a car, so why would you split a desktop and then call the piece a desktop.

[@rjawiygvozd]

@@red5355dragon not sure I even understand your analogy but no, it makes total sense, for example you may want to have an entire workspace dedicated to messaging apps that you always want to see on one of your screens, while others are constantly switching, and you want them all to be real workspaces so you don't have to make any weird window rules. If you're used to the way it's always been in KDE I guess you can be fine with it, but if you move to KDE from window managers or even gnome to a lesser extent, not having this can ruin your entire workflow

[@enemixius]

​@@red5355dragonVirtual desktops is one of the few things that Gnome actually does better than KDE imo. Having an option to only use virtual desktops on the primary monitor is a thing KDE should look into implementing, and also the dynamic creation/deletion of desktops.

[@juanmacias5922]

2.5D desktop sounds cool, but I feel like you'd just end up using it as a regular desktop with transparencies.

[@Chalisque]

I loved Windowmaker back in the day. Before that I used fvwm (and rxvt). Later on, for a while, I used Enlightenment, Sawfish, then I'm not sure next. I took a break from Linux for a bit: ran Win2k for a couple of years, then Red Hat (pre RHEL), then mac only for a few years before I discovered Ubuntu.

[@knghtbrd]

I suspect for Wayland we'll find a couple compositors being the equivalents of fvwm. And I'll bet they're going to be based on wlroots.

[@MonochromeWench]

Entire Window Managers dedicated to replicating the look of another OS, seems strange but I guess I'm just used to more modern window managers supporting skinning and skins being made to look like any known OS imaginable (and that is just one reason to want server side decorations)

[@AndrewErwin73]

I have been pretty happy with i3 for a long time.. .I have a build of dwm that I load up sometimes, but i3 does everything I need.

[@byronservies4043]

In the mid-80s, only admins could use emacs. The rest of us had to use either jove or vi due to memory constraints on our VAX 11/750. I chose vi, and learned the keystrokes by playing larn, because nethack was also too memory intensive.

[@lKrauzer]

I run both GNOME and KDE, dual-boot Arch Linux with KDE on one drive, and GNOME on a secondary drive

[@gr33nDestiny]

Amiga WM was the best for a long time

[@schemage2210]

XFCE FOR THE WIN!!!

[@jello3456543]

I'm one of those crazies that still runs FVWM, and I probably will until either some stacking WM does per-monitor desktop switching, or distros stop shipping X11. Sadly, I'm not able to run FVWM3 due to some showstopper (for me) bugs that got closed as wontfix.

[@rjawiygvozd]

Thinking of old desktops, I still wish somebody would make a modern version of Bluecurve theme from old redhat/fedora, to me it's as classic as win2k theme, and it's probably usable even though it's a light theme. Technically it probably still works with gtk2 and maybe 3, and icons also work, but it's missing too many icons that are used on modern systems to look nice

[@stephanhuebner4931]

2:17: What should be wrong with the virtual desktops on KDE? They are perfectly fine and work quite well.

[@wvrlow]

10:24 WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

[@lainwired3946]

Its not a real full WM obviously, just an extension for gnome, but have you ever come across PaperWM my dude? It basically turns gnome into an infinite tiling WM. Ive been using it now about 3 months and I totally love it, ive not used a tiler before. I know you love tiled WMs so id love to know what you think of it.

[@Dennis-Earl-Smiley]

I run cinnamon

[@nikbl4k]

rant incoming... fvwm/Fvwm95 is okay, but its trying to do things in the way old desktops do. People dont need a fancy gtk-like desktop to play games and stuff... you dont need a start menu, those are like, old ideas that add too much emphasis to one single space on the canvas. the way to do WM on linux is to make it tiled-dynamic, for each term emulator to open in, and that very first window can be where the desktop is. or the browsers homepage can be a version of the desktop background, and then whether you want a file manager-that can be a separate entity. So anyway, thats my opinion. Explore that space, which means starting with those windows that tile-that are like dwm (w/ main/transient windows that open..)

[@JensVanBroeckhoven]

We need more real WM/Compositors like Fvwm for Wayland. I don't like those modern tilled WM/Compositors (shoot me) and just want something normal with all Fvwm functionality without the modern tilling stuff.

[@ZombieJig]

💯

[@JosDehaes]

I used fvwm95 back in the day

[@rjawiygvozd]

I wanted to make a funny joke about Red Hat Linux 95, but guess what, current RHEL version is 9.4 so it's probably actually just around the corner

[@MrDowntemp0]

I miss openbox. Too bad its not getting updated for wayland

[@stefanalecu9532]

There's waybox, give that a try

[@DCM777.]

And when you configured everything you might as well installed a Desktop!

[@cameronbosch1213]

What about Wayfire?

[@mariogutierrez4989]

labwc is close, but not all features are implemented nor do they plan to replicate it 100%

[@JamesLewis]

LOL, I used fwm, Xrooms, and vtwm on SunOS 4.1.3 in 1992/3 before I discovered Linux...

[@linuxforpunks]

I've been a serial-monogamist of window managers. I started with GEM in 1988, went over to Win95 then XP then XFWM then JWM and now Awesome. GEM was the best user-experience because you could only do the only two things you wanted to do: click a file or double-click it. And the windows were always big enough for how many files you had. And you only ever had two of them (one for the floppy disk and one for the other floppy disk). Win95 ruined that - with the insidious idea that mad stuff like your LAN driver should be in a window. JWM is plain but has thought about all the little details, like where it puts the cursor while you're renaming a file. And Awesome looks nicer but I've reached a point where I can't carry on customising it. Here's hoping Elon Musk can show me what window I'm thinking about, rather me than having to manage them.

[@patpopov]

Metisse looks like Wayfire's grandad.

[@stefanalecu9532]

Or Compiz in an alternate timeline

[@TheExileFox]

KDE doing virtual desktops wrong? - care to elaborate? Personally there doesn't seem much you can do different other than keybard shortcuts, so what are you talking about? (No i do not find virtual desktops or workspaces useful, i just have multiple monitors)

[@BernardoHenriquez]

Compiz still rulez

[@MiukuMac]

AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

[@za0za_0]

hey Brodie what's a Manger

[@BrodieRobertson]

Oops

[@billeterk]

@@za0za_0 there’s a famous song about one. Sung near the end of the year.

[@wysteria7917]

Why don't we have any of Metisse's features in 2024

[@JornaJemi-c6r]

Hernandez Donna Garcia Jennifer Wilson Maria

[@tranthien3932]

Inb4 the bots raid

[@tranthien3932]

Also first?

[@cameronbosch1213]

​@@tranthien3932You made it 1 minute before the ass bots! Congratulations! 😂

[@АкулинаСемерикова]

Martinez Barbara Hernandez John Hernandez William

[@sprinklednights]

Brodie Robertson The King Of The Wayland Shills

[@JanelleWilliams-i2d]

Martinez Brenda Jackson Donna Walker Christopher

[@DavidLee-b9k]

Walker Linda Anderson Betty Garcia Richard

[@FluidRotor]

Lopez Christopher Robinson Betty Brown William

[@SarahGomx]

Gonzalez Melissa Thompson Laura Lewis Jennifer

[@doigt6590]

I know you thought you were funny for throwing shade at KDE and I'm sorry, but KDE is the only DE doing anything right these days

[@EffToyz]

Disappointed, no StumpWM mentioned

[@FreemanEleanore-b1v]

Williams Ronald White Cynthia Robinson Steven

[@BirdLopers]

Xfce

[@UnderEu]

What desktop do I use? MATE, because GNOME 2 back in the day fitted more than perfect to me and what became GNOME Shell after 3.x release, I hated and still hate. Maybe, when COSMIC releases and it adds support for Global Menus, I might consider it but, until then, I’ll enjoy my Compiz-enabled wobbly windows because I can :)