5 Useful Desktop Managers for Linux
I earlier wrote about 10 Best Image Viewers for Linux, 17 Awesome Linux Applicaitons to Improve your Productivity, 23 Useful System Applications for Linux and Top 5 Gmail Notifiers for Linux. Today I’m going to write about some of the most useful alternative desktop managers you should consider using on your operating system. To start off I have
Xfce is a fast and a light desktop environment for unix like operating systems. It is specially desgined to improve your work productivity. It has the ability to load and execute applications really fast while conserving system resources.
It consists of a number of components that provide the full functionality one can expect of a modern desktop environment. They are packaged separately and you can pick among the available packages to create the optimal personal working environment.
Xfce can be installed on several UNIX platforms. It is known to compile on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin and MacOS X, on x86, PPC and more.
Download Xfce
Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment is an extremely faster, performing and energy saving desktop environment. It is maintained by an international community of developers and comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM. It is especially designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks, mobile devices (e.g. MIDs) or older computers.
LXDE can be installed with distributions like Ubuntu or Debian. It provides a fast desktop experience connecting easily with applications in the cloud. LXDE supports a wealth of programs, that can be installed with Linux systems locally. The source code of LXDE is licensed partly under the terms of the General Public License and partly under the LGPL.
Download LXDE
Fluxbox is a very well known Linux application that is considered a minimalist desktop manager as it has minimal graphical support with only a taskbar in the whole desktop. It is a Windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience. .
Download Fluxbox
Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.
It includes compatibility options which allow it to work with other popular desktop environments, namely GNOME and KDE, and comes with a powerful GUI configuration editor, called WPrefs, which removes the need to edit text-based config files by hand.
Key features include
- National language I18N support (over 11 locales)
- Built-in icon dithering with support for 4bpp and 8bpp displays
- Popup menus that support keyboard traversal, which can be “pinned” to the root window
- Support for GNUstep, GNOME, and KDE window hints to better integrate with those desktop environments
- Support for Motif[tm] and OPEN LOOK[tm] window hints to better interface with applications based on those toolkits
- Built-in GUI configuration utility that eliminates the need to hand edit config files
- Application Dock (similar to NEXTSTEP/MacOS X Dock) that can be configured using drag and drop
- Workspace Dock (aka Clip/Fiend) which is a workspace specific Dock extender
- Support for rudimentary session management
- Support for dockapps (equivalent of applets or epplets)
- Ability to change all preferences and menus on-the-fly without having to restart the window manager
- Support for multiple workspaces (aka “virtual desktops”)
Download Movie Maker
FVWM-Crystal is an easy to use and powerful desktop environment for Linux and Unix like operating system. It uses FVWM as a window manager and “main core”, ROX-Filer as file manager (manages icons on the desktop), xterm, aterm, mrxvt or urxvt as terminal emulators, MPD or XMMS as music players , and several other tools for different functions, like setting a wallpaper or making screen shots.
Key features include
- transparent elements of the interface: panels, menus, dialogs (pseudo-transparency, doesn’t show windows underneath)
- window decorations, panel/menu colorsets and desktop wallpaper changeable from the main menu; choice saved for next X sessions
- flexible window decorations: can have different titlebar buttons layout, pixmaps, button functions
- different “desktop layouts” (panel placement and functions, desktop functions, window icons/thumbnails), changeable from the menu
- advanced keyboard support: keybindings for controlling the desktop switching, window management (moving, resizing, focusing, basic operations like minimalization or closing) – nearly 100 different keybindings
- support for controlling music players, using the keyboard or panel buttons and menus; currently MPD, XMMS, XMMS2, Quod Libet, AlsaPlayer, mplayer, audacious, cmus, mocp and cdcd are supported
- advanced support of the terminal windows: special “QuakeConsole” terminal accessible by an Alt+` (grave) keystroke similar to the console found in FPP games; terminals can be opened using RMB on the desktop; terminal windows don’t release focus for newly opened windows (by default)
- a Python script for generating different panels and menus with installed applications – automatically finds programs in $PATH and creates specified menus and panels
- support for nearly 400 different applications – icons, menu/panel database entries, window styles
- different language support using gettext
Download FVWM-Crystal
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Comments
“In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP user interface.”
Look, I was a NeXT user for 7 years before I started using a Mac. I also contributed the GTK theme to the Windowmaker project, oh, 11 years ago or so. The above statement is not true, not even close.
As someone who I’m guessing probably never logged into an account on a NeXT box it’s ridiculous for you to say that. Window Maker is a nice window manager for X. In some ways it looks a little like NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP, but that’s comparing apples to oranges as the NeXT Mach OS’s gui was a sophisticated, integrated environment, and WM is a window manager for X. Big difference. They FEEL nothing alike.
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[...] 5 Useful Desktop Managers for Linux Today I’m going to write about some of the most useful alternative desktop managers you should consider using on your operating system. To start off I have [...]