the corner office

Red Hat 8.0 came out with a common desktop theme called Bluecurve. The idea was fairly noble and sensible from a business perspective: they tried to make the Gnome and KDE environments look exactly alike. Bluecurve was commonly called Bluecurse and proponents of both desktop systems griped that in aiming for the common denominator stuff, Red Hat had left out the best parts of both systems. So almost everybody moaned about it.

The underlying issue was real though: one of the biggest turn-offs for a new Linux user is that they're bombarded with too much choice. I think that modern distros have tried to simplify things a bit, to make the experience less overwhelming for new users.

If you rewind back to 1999 or so, things were quite different. The coolest thing about a Red Hat or Mandrake install back then was that out the box, you could easily switch between and play with a whole heap of window managers and desktop environments, each with their own style and look and feel. Very often you had no idea what the hell you were doing, but things were so exotic and exciting after the blandness of the Windows world, that you spent more time buggering around with eye candy than getting anything important done.

On that note, there's an interesting article at Newsforge, listing four "alternative" window managers. As always, the comments and gripes and histrionics of some of the responses to the article are equally educational, and mention a whole heap of other window managers too. For a full listing of window managers, a visit to the comprehensive Xwinman.org is in order. The variety and choice is staggering. You could lose hours just looking at screen shots of themes for the most popular ones. I suspect the only crowd of people with a similarly obsessive approach to eye candy and customisability are the Winamp skin junkies.

Personally, I've used next to none of these window managers in anger, but I'm looking forward to playing with a few of them in the next couple of weeks. Especially given that my main PC is less than beastly these days. It's nice to know that there are still people out there whose main focus is building software that's blisteringly fast on years-old hardware. The fluxbox window manager, which I've been playing with, weighs in at less than 800Kb of source code. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Gates.