So during the 2020 lockdowns I started watching a bunch of 90s anime, and I briefly switched to Window Maker to larp like I was living in the 90s, completed with a Gunsmith Cats wallpaper.
Window Maker was my favorite when I first discovered Linux, back around the turn of the century. I didn't initially know the history; I was just trying a little of everything. Surprisingly, even after all the UI fashions that came and went since that time, Window Maker still looks great!
Sony offered a Linux distro for the PS2 so they could claim it as a personal computer instead of a game system and pay a smaller sales tax bracket in Japan. That's... pretty much the entire story.
My brain is hard wired to press the like button on anything that´s related to the world of 90´s UNIX. Now, can we please have a Brodie video on the worlds most configurable WM? I am of course talking about FVWM.
Window Maker was one of my first window managers. I don't remember how I stumbled upon it, I think it was a defaults or options on one of the SUSE or RedHat CDs that you could buy in a press kiosk years ago. It came with a magazine or a book and was the only viable way to get a Linux distro in the days of dial up and way too expensive CD writers. I loved it because it was so different that anything I knew before. Exciting times when even getting any GUI to boot on Linux was a multi hour or day challenge (for a kid in a country that never heard of IT education).
Yeah I must have been introduced to it as part of the install of something I tried back then, I mostly used Slackware, I wonder if it was an install option or in the documentation. In any case, WM was certainly one of the easiest windowmanagers to get working.
I ran Window Maker when I first began learning Linux with a Redhat 5 CD and book package from a local computer store. It was a steep learning curve, but worth the effort.
I hated the way Window Maker looked when I encountered it in the late nineties. It looked like something from the late eighties to me. What I went with was IceWM. I never understood what people liked about the giant UI elements that took up so much space on the low resolution screens of the time. I must have missed something.
I used WM for something like 10 years starting around 1999 or so, I doubt many people would disagree with you about the giant boxy window decorations. I wouldn't either lol. I used it because I hated big DE environments, and I had not yet been turned onto tiling WM's, in addition it was super lightweight, and I think just simply worked better than the competition (fluxbox, openbox). It's been awhile so my memory on this may not be perfect, and certainly only applies to how these things were at that time, however: In WM, by default the virtual desktop switching hotkeys are alt-1,2,3... you could grab a window with alt, then finish pressing 3 for example, and the window will come with you to the new desktop. Many don't work this way, requiring separate hotkeys to send a window to that desktop. For example in DWM I have to do alt-shift-3, which sends the window there, then alt-3 to switch to the desktop, I changed a bit of that in my version of dwm though. Secondly, when dragging windows off the monitor it flips to the next virtual desktop, that's not unusual, however on WM there's no "hitch" at the edge of the screen, it just smoothly moves over. On at least flux and openbox at the time, the way it worked is that you would have to hold the window on the edge of the screen for it to move, you could configure the time it took for this to trigger, but if you set it to 0 it would flip back and fourth. On top of all of that WM had a cool little graphical tool to adjust the menu and such. I also liked the *box ecosystem at the time because of the little dockapps.
WindowMaker is still fantastic, if you don't need fancy amenities like antialiasing. But I also happen incidentally to have NeXTStep 3.3 running on Sun Sparcstation 20, so there's that...
@@FranciscoMNeto Window Maker always struck me as a new and improved Afterstep. So I don't see the point in running Afterstep with Window Maker around. But perhaps there are people that want old and unimproved?
Window maker is in the official gentoo repository! If I had an x server installed I would definitely give this a try. Perhaps this weakened :) this looks awesome
When Gnome and KDE felt too heavy for my Pentium 233, I used WindowMaker for a while. There was a bunch of cool and novel DE on those Redhat CD at the time. Not shiny but kind of practical. I wonder if this would be nice with a touch-screen.
❤ This brings memories from late 90’s early 2000 😊 at the time it was very fast and efficient. Of course the fact that it did look like NEXT was a plus back then
WindowMaker was my primary desktop environment for many years. I still occasionally use it, although these days I prefer KDE. In the early days, it was a light environment that was gentle on slower hardware, and since I was mostly on a budget, this was an excellent way to get the most bang for buck.
Back in the late 1990s I had windowmaker running on a notebook. The Linux distro was probably Redhat (of the pre-enterprise days) replacing Windows 98. I found it pleasant and lightweight and preferred it over fvwm2 which I used before. Later I went on to Debian and other environments. But Windowmaker remains in a good place in my memory.
I used to run Window Maker back in the early to mid 2000s when I used to run Slackware. It was a lot of fun to toy around when I wasn't running KDE. I have some found memories of that. I didn't even know it was still "active". Interesting.
Personally, I think $2500 is still expensive for a modern computer, when you can get at least a decent gaming PC for much less, and a whole lot less for a very good PC that's not focused on gaming.
@@BrodieRobertson I picked out parts just now for probably a fairly solid mid-range just to check it out, not researching any particular thing but just picking out stuff, and I came up with a roughly $1200 build (a little under before sales tax), and I didn't even go really cheap on any of the parts I picked. This is just for the PC and not including the monitor, keyboard, or mouse or any other accessories, but including all parts needed for the PC itself. This was for a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7600X, Radeon RX 7600, 32 GB DDR5-6400, 2 TB SSD, and an 850W Seasonic brand power supply, complete with case and CPU cooler.
Window Maker is in the main repos for Void Linux, even just got this most recent update. I never used it personally, but I recall one of my online friends from back around 2010 was a big fan of it and (afaik) used it exclusively, that might've been my first time even learning about its existence.
i was already aware of most of the history of this next windowing system. being reminded wasn't bad. however it would have been nicer to have seen more actual examples and screen time given in the video to showing it off. rather than just a couple of quick screen flashes. ultimately you could have kept on talking over those b-roll for most of it. while giving us more of a chance to see what you were referring to. and take it all in properly. but instead we get just brief flashes. and that simply isn't long enough time to really comprehend what we are looking at.
On Mac pricing: the list prices were appalling, but there were very deep discounts offered to educational institutions. They were still expensive (especially as the very first model didn't have enough RAM and disk to run its own OS properly), but the interface was a big attraction, as the competition was MS-DOS 3.31 or thereabouts. Presumably the plan was to get people hooked on Mac when they were at university, and then they'd demand the same when they got jobs. Mac users could be very demanding.
Window Maker on Slackware was my env of choice for years. Although it's petty, one of the "last straws" that sent me back to Linux after being an OSX user for a time was when I could no longer put the dock in the upper left hand corner (where it d#mn well belongs!). It made me realize that I was no longer in charge of my own computer and would only be allowed to use it the way the developers decided I could.
I had the privilege of working on a NeXT cube that my company purchased for a simulation project back in 1990. I had been eagerly anticipating the NeXT cube. Jobs had made his usual promise that it would be cheap enough that any college student could afford it, but I found that it was way more than I could afford, so I was ecstatic when my company acquired one and allowed me to use it on the project. I loved the objective C and was also setting up a Sybase database for the project. I went to some NeXT user group meetings. The folks at the meetings mostly COULD afford to buy their own NeXT cubes! They seemed to be mostly in graphic arts. Unfortunately my company (a defense contractor) got hit with hard times and I was shipped off to another division which ended my NeXT experience.
I am crazy, I have been experimenting with Window Maker and toying with it. May be crazy, but I sort of like the old look, and the fun is when you run such an old desktop and you launch new fancy programs and games. I guess it gives the similar effect that a sleeper car gives you, looks like a stock old junker until you put your foot down and suddenly you outrun everything on the road. Window Maker gives you the same feel on the desktop, looks slow and outdated and unable to run the newer program, hiding the modern hardware powering it.
Its 2023 and here I am watching this video on my 2015 Macbook Pro running PopOS with WindowMaker and the GNUstep tools (GWorkspace/Project Center/Gorm). I do, however, wish a clone of Windowmaker was written in ObjC with GNUstep bindings for better interoperability with GNUstep apps. Maybe one day.
The biggest mistake was the random screen shot of a CDE desktop. Not sure what that had to do with anything NextSTEP. Note that macOS is basically still NextSTEP, there is a reason all the coca API calls all begin NS, all the have done is change the appearance of the graphical elements and switch from DisplayPostScriot to DisplayPDF.
Presumably the screenshot was included to serve as an example of what a typical Solaris desktop looked like in the time period when OpenStep-for-Solaris existed (i.e. the late '90s). However, the applications shown there -- namely the "File Manager" and "Help Viewer" utilities included with CDE -- aren't OpenStep apps, they're just normal Motif apps, AFAICT. For anyone who wants to see some screenshots of real OpenStep apps running natively on Solaris, look for a forum thread from 2019 about this topic on a site named WinWorld. One of them even shows the CDE Front Panel, the OpenStep Dock (with Sun's logo in place of the NeXT one), and OpenStep's "File Viewer" app all running on the same screen together (though not intentionally, according to the person who posted it; i.e. " _CDE is not suppose to be there all frankensteined with openstep_ ", but it showed up that way due to some sort of configuration problem).
Back when I first got introduced to Linux late 90s, computer class in our school had one machine, which was running debian with window maker. Brings back so many memories :D
Was my first window manager I set up on RedHat back on 2005 when a full install left you at nothing more than a console. Loved it then and at times come back to it to tinker. Wish it took off given its roots.
Memory is blurred a bit but I discovered Window Maker very early on. It might have been prior to their stable release. It was around the time when civilian ISPs started offering PPP/SLIP connections but before Win95 shipped. I remember the joy of a real TCP/IP stack on Linux, the only other was on OS/2. Windows 3.11 still had to rely upon Winsock which was pretty awful by comparison. I had trouble getting my Diamond video card to work with X-11. Finally they released enough detail for kernel dev's to write driver support for it. ATI ended up buying the FireGL division of Diamond. Then my motherboard cooked itself, "snap-crackle-pop, magic blue smoke and burnt trace line clear across the board" and I bought a Micron. I believe I was running Window Maker on the Micron 686.
Wmaker didn't come out until 1997. So well after Win95 came out. Only the most ancient Window Managers predate Win95. The Window Managers that end in WM. Such as TWM, FVWM and MWM.
I basicly stopped using Linux with GUI once using WindowMaker became difficult (aka Gnome and KDE were the only supported options), I loved how the virtual desktops worked, and the widgets were awesome. You could have CPU/MEM/etc widgets open for multiple servers, so while I worked, I could see in realtime how the servers reacted to my code. Perhaps I need to test how easily one could setup WindowMaker with modern distros.
I am surprised Windowmaker came from Japan. Back when I used it it didn't support UTF8 and shift-jis is also multibyte encoding. See also Ruby. I even remember patching their apprunner so I could use backspace to delete multibyte UTF characters. I didn't know of mbrlen or bits sequences in UTF so I deleted char by char in loop and calling function similar to mbcslen until it decreased. Bonus fact. Windows had its own version of NextStep inspired shell called litestep.
@@BrodieRobertson It was originally bought by the Art institute of Chicago, they upgraded not 3 years later and I got it through a freind that taught graphic arts there for a measly $600!! It quacks like a duck and everything! First "Home PC" with a GUI.
Names I haven't heard in a long time. Some time ago I noticed that our trusty old Icewm has also still had new version bumps. Naturally, now that you mentioned Window Maker, I had to go check Afterstep, but sadly the last release has been almost exactly ten years ago.
I used WM on Ubuntu until around 2010 on a couple of IBM Thinkpads as my main computing environment in a Windows office. I loved it. I use Fedora with Gnome now, which is probaby easier but I get nostalgic for WM and the exotic themes you could build.
In 1979 my Apple II Plus was $2000. In 1989 I had the choice between an Apple Iicx or a Next Cube. They were roughly the same price at around $10,000 kitted out. Also, keep in mind that the past was just different. A 21" CRT monitor? Thousands of dollars. In the early 90's my company budgeted $14,000 for a normal 386 workstation. with networking and a 21 inch monitor.
Damn I remember trying both Window Maker, Blackbox/Fluxbox and IceWM back in my first steps as a Linux newbie and being kinda surprised with how everything worked differently from what I was used to. Those were good, innocent times indeed.
Did I ever use Window Maker he asks… LOL Short answer is very yes. Good WM. There are a couple of things I'm afraid it just doesn't have that I need today but did not need 23 years ago. Mostly to do with font scaling on modern HiDPI screens.
WPrefs has a fonts tab. You can pick what font you want and what point size. The X server deals with overall DPI not your Window Manager. So you should do your adjusting there. There's information on the net about the topic. A query like, X Window DPI setting will get you started. Your problem is a common one with solutions.
It's still in Debian 12, packaged in the main free repos, along with a slew of DockApps. I was a WindowMaker user for probably a decade, in the early oughts. It was probably Wifi that forced me to switch to a full DE, as WM didn't have super-robust solutions for quickly changing Wifi settings as I made my way to new networks. I could probably switch back to it now after all this time.
Oooo, I need to spin this up on one of my boxes. Hilariously enough, my exposure to these was that I used one of these NextStep like "DE's" on my Windows 98 machine. Back when even Windows was happy to let you rip out and replace the DE. At the time I had no idea about the NextStep link, I was just annoyed with Windows UX and dialupped my way to find some replacements, and ended up with first the NextStep-lookalike for a while, and eventually some sort of OpenBox lookalike. I feel old now... :D
I always install WindowMaker on all my Linux desktops setups. In fact I installed it a couple of weeks ago when I put Debian 12 on my work laptop. Debian and by consequence Ubuntu always have packages available for it. WindowMaker is my ultimate fallback DE. It has no other package dependencies, it's super light and does not run any other processes other than itself. I use it whenever upgrading to a newer version of Debian / Ubuntu because it's not affected at all by the upgrade process. Other DEs may crash or hang because of core library version mismatches (think gtk). I also use it whenever my normal DE is broken. It always works and has not failed me once.
I remember using window maker around 2000\2001 as one of the window managers I tried out. The old window managers were a lot more interesting than what we have now. Not every step has been an improvement.
I loved WM and used it for a long time, but I don't know that I would agree, I think the efforts around tiling wm's today are very interesting, and conventional desktops certainly have gotten much better. If wayland can eventually fully sideline X then that will be a big deal as well.
Modern Desktop Environments are just too big and bloated. I just want a lightweight Window Manager and Window Maker does that for me. There's lighter but they lack some features I do like. Like a configuration utility. Wmaker has WPrefs.
@@entelin if X Window gets sidelined that would be a big deal for us long term users. People that have invested decades of their life into programs. I've been running X since 1995. That's a lot of time to just flush down the toilet. Thanks Wayland.
@@entelin gee, just what I always wanted. A compatibility layer! I love layers. It makes things clear as mud. I can just throw out my complete set of O'Reilly books about X Window now. Oh happy days. Get a clue.
I was nearly the on-campus rep for NeXT on the U of MN campus. They were utterly fantastic, and horrifically expensive. Because they were so expensive, and so hard to find, I didn't actually learn very much about them. I spent all of my time in the lab on Sun Sparc's or the HP workstation of the time. I more sort of hung around campus than I actually went to school in the normal sort of way. By the time OS X was a thing and it actually became affordable enough to get one and learn how to program it, I was a Linux user and a huge proponent of Open Source, and so uninterested. Also, I wasn't so interested in UI programming anymore. Another interesting fact, GNU Step was a reason that Objective C was a thing on gcc. And I suspect that's what led Apple to use gcc as it's compiler until they decided they would rather not deal with the GPL and went to LLVM. This also illustrates a reason I do not like using clang, I don't like using BSD licensed things when there's always the possibility that some company will make the 'default' version proprietary and so much better than the version with source that everybody starts using the proprietary version instead,
Brings back memories. I think I used twm, fvwm, fvwm2, afterstep, fluxbox, CDE on Solaris and briefly enlightenment. I had a look at window maker but it just didn’t appeal.
9:15 I'm not sure why he says it's rare to see wmaker in 1st party repositories. Pretty well every current distro has a wmaker package, same as any other popular DE. Debian and its derivatives (e.g., Ubuntu) call it "wmaker". Fedora and the Red Hat family call it "WindowMaker". Some distros push it more strongly. Slackware has it as a common installation option (though it pushes XFCE by default) and Window Maker Live is an actively-maintained distro that uses it as its default DE.
Back around 1990 NeXT machines and SparcStations seemed like sci-fi, light years ahead of the usual VT102 terminals with burnt phosphors on the CRT and hjkl for arrow keys. Even using TWM on X was cool by comparison. NeXT was interesting. It had these vibes about its windowed environment that were better than either Windows or OS/2. Not quite like the Amiga, but a different kind of cool. At least one model of NeXT machine somehow had the parallel port configured in such a way that printing made CPU throughput drop through the floor.
While I've only run Openbox as a sole WM before, it seems that most modern WMs are for managing Windows only and require additional tools to make a functional desktop. Since WindowMaker clones a project that attempted to provide a fully functional desktop in the form of NeXTSTEP, running bare WindowMaker goves you something much lighter than a full-on DE yet more featureful and "complete" than a bare WM. The paradigms are slightly behind the times, but it's a well thought out UI that you can get used to almost instantly.
Window Maker is available in the official Linux Mint repos, and at least until they started focusing on Snaps, the Ubuntu repos had it. I've played around with it and do have it installed, but find that things don't work as well for my use case. Still fun to play with.
NextStep was also the inspiration of a little know DE called Gnome. (The object-oriented networking pattern that is still part of the name, in particular). OO was the new cool thing in the 90s. Anyon remembers the initial CORBA based GNOME DE?
I ran Gnome 1. It always crashed. Every time Bug Buddy popped up I got a good laugh out of it. I also only would run Gnome when I was extremely drunk. Good times.
I remember compiling Window Maker from source (with dependences) for Solaris 2.6 and 8 around 2002-2004. I really loved Window Maker at the time but support was waning even back then.
It funny how *chance* has played a major role in most things we use today. Fun fact _Objective-C was ported along with Next and became the default programming language @Apple. Also, DOS was bought by Bill gates for $50,0000, as a last min hack to full-fill an IBM contract which they won because his mother knew some IBM board member._
Legend has it that the clowns from CP/M blew off their meeting with IBM to go flying instead just because they thought the weather was too nice. So that's why IBM decided to go with Microsoft. But Billy's mother's friend did get them the contact. Though not a contract.
I tried getting 0.96 to work but it just doesn't. The repo 0.95.9 works, but the new one I can't figure out. I suspect there's some setup step I'm missing when building from source.
I'm a big fan of Windowmaker. Due to being very hard up for cash at the time, the only way I could make my limited hardware usable was to go for Gentoo with twm, but then along came Windowmaker and I absolutely loved it, I now had the prettiest desktop and could still do the things I needed to do. I also used it on my dev box at work for a few years running on Fedora and wrote several dockapps that supported the control and monitoring of the services required for our dev environment and this was the subject of much interest from my colleagues, it was just perfect, so functional. I'm still a Gentoo user today but my desktop of choice is now KDE, on much more powerful hardware obviously, but I occasionally startup Windowmaker and use it for an afternoon, just for old times sake.
Your timeline seems a bit off to me. There were plenty of lightweight Window Managers around by the time Gentoo came to be. Gentoo didn't start until 2002.
@@1pcfred Yup, there were others available but to me they were all much of a muchness, none of them seemed to offer any real benefits over what I was already using. Things were different then, we were still using dial-up modems at that time in this country over a pretty shaky pstn so it's not like now where we download an iso and spin it up in a VM just to have a quick look, there was nothing quick about it, a world update on Gentoo often had to be accomplished over two weekends so there had to be a good reason to do it, and for me Windowmaker was a good enough reason.
I played about with Window Maker a bit when I first switched to Linux from Windows 98 in 1999. This must have been well past it's heyday, most the widgets were broken it didn't really feature much except the novelty of a sort of Nextish desktop.
Because the version code is just an arbitrary concept. I mean, even the Linux kernel had no special reason to move from 5.x to 6.0, other than "x is too big"
I've been using Window Maker since it first came out. Before Window Maker I ran Afterstep. Now I'm thinking I might have to upgrade to the new version. I'm on 0.95.9 now.
The Unarchiver (at least in Debian) is using GNUstep runtime which is because it was originally made for macOS. Also windowmaker is in Debian under the name wmaker.
The Next Cube etc we’re comparable to Unix workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI, so the price was reasonable, just a very niche market. And of course it lives on today in the form of Apple computers.
One thing about the first generation NeXT computer was that its base model didn't include a hard drive as standard equipment, only a magneto-optical (removable media) disk drive, which apparently got some bad publicity for slow reading and (especially) writing speeds. It also had only one of them, which seems like it must have been unsuitable for situations where a user had their data spread across multiple disks & needed to change disks frequently. (That's why early IBM-compatible PCs typically at least two disk drives, e.g. two floppy drives, or one hard drive plus one floppy drive.)
@@The_Lawnmower_Man Sure, but how does that compare to the competition? A lot of servers and high-end workstations these days don't come with storage, and generally it is a lot cheaper to buy your own, and also that way you get the one that best meets your requirements. The sorts of people who buy these things know how to do that, or they have someone in their staff who knows how to do it.
@@katrinabryce I suspect what it comes down to is that their competitors at the high end of the market -- e.g. older companies such as Sun, DEC, and IBM -- had the advantage of a head start, and maybe also had better hardware performance. Meanwhile, from 1986 (when Compaq began selling 386 PCs) onwards, x86 PCs were becoming powerful enough to pose a serious challenge to those more expensive computers. As for SGI: up until roughly the late 1990s, they were probably better than anyone else in the professional 3D graphics niche. (I'd written a longer comment about Sun being an early adopter of something similar to Active Directory, versus NeXT's original intention for the magneto-optical disks to act as "roaming profiles" *without* the need for a central server, which didn't work out so well for them... but seems like it got caught in the spam filter or something.)
Sure have on both counts. I installed NEXTSTEP on SUN and PC and tried Window Maker on Linux. I also installed a similar theme on Windows. While I like NEXT for what it represents and did back in the day, I didn't use Window Maker for very long. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like it, it's just that it wasn't an option and I just never went out of my way to use it. I also liked CDE/MOTIF (GeoWorks Ensemble, Solaris, Windows 3 🙂) , but I'm not going to hunt that down either.
I all ways find window maker and other de/wm of the 90s and 2000s more way usable and appealing than most "modern" de/wm with their hideous low contrast, themes that look dull and boring. Also Gnome and KDE are false dichotomy to my eyes
So during the 2020 lockdowns I started watching a bunch of 90s anime, and I briefly switched to Window Maker to larp like I was living in the 90s, completed with a Gunsmith Cats wallpaper.
Window Maker was my favorite when I first discovered Linux, back around the turn of the century. I didn't initially know the history; I was just trying a little of everything.
Surprisingly, even after all the UI fashions that came and went since that time, Window Maker still looks great!
PLEASE talk about that PS2 Linux, I NEED to hear that story!
Sony offered a Linux distro for the PS2 so they could claim it as a personal computer instead of a game system and pay a smaller sales tax bracket in Japan.
That's... pretty much the entire story.
Slackware comes with windowmaker in default install.
My brain is hard wired to press the like button on anything that´s related to the world of 90´s UNIX. Now, can we please have a Brodie video on the worlds most configurable WM? I am of course talking about FVWM.
Been using Window Maker exclusively for the last 5 years, by far my fave WM
Interesting. I think it has a cozy, beautiful aesthetic that reminds me of old hacker movies. I briefly used Window Maker in 2001.
@@MyAmazingUsername i just love that it has a ton of customizability while still being extremely light on CPU and RAM; also dockapps are fantastic!
How do you keep the look coherent?
@@kreuner11 I just use similar-looking gtk and qt themes, but I've never been too picky about that tbh
Window Maker is Roots as XFCE
Window Maker was one of my first window managers. I don't remember how I stumbled upon it, I think it was a defaults or options on one of the SUSE or RedHat CDs that you could buy in a press kiosk years ago. It came with a magazine or a book and was the only viable way to get a Linux distro in the days of dial up and way too expensive CD writers. I loved it because it was so different that anything I knew before. Exciting times when even getting any GUI to boot on Linux was a multi hour or day challenge (for a kid in a country that never heard of IT education).
Yeah, I vaguely remember using it on a Redhat live CD
I also used Window Maker at the time on RedHat 5.0 that I ordered from the Linux CD store (I think that was it's actual name). It came in 2 CDs.
Same! But I know where I found it - dude which introduced my to FreeBSD 4.6 was using it, so kinda by default for me
Yeah I must have been introduced to it as part of the install of something I tried back then, I mostly used Slackware, I wonder if it was an install option or in the documentation. In any case, WM was certainly one of the easiest windowmanagers to get working.
I ran Window Maker when I first began learning Linux with a Redhat 5 CD and book package from a local computer store. It was a steep learning curve, but worth the effort.
I hated the way Window Maker looked when I encountered it in the late nineties. It looked like something from the late eighties to me. What I went with was IceWM. I never understood what people liked about the giant UI elements that took up so much space on the low resolution screens of the time. I must have missed something.
I used WM for something like 10 years starting around 1999 or so, I doubt many people would disagree with you about the giant boxy window decorations. I wouldn't either lol. I used it because I hated big DE environments, and I had not yet been turned onto tiling WM's, in addition it was super lightweight, and I think just simply worked better than the competition (fluxbox, openbox). It's been awhile so my memory on this may not be perfect, and certainly only applies to how these things were at that time, however: In WM, by default the virtual desktop switching hotkeys are alt-1,2,3... you could grab a window with alt, then finish pressing 3 for example, and the window will come with you to the new desktop. Many don't work this way, requiring separate hotkeys to send a window to that desktop. For example in DWM I have to do alt-shift-3, which sends the window there, then alt-3 to switch to the desktop, I changed a bit of that in my version of dwm though. Secondly, when dragging windows off the monitor it flips to the next virtual desktop, that's not unusual, however on WM there's no "hitch" at the edge of the screen, it just smoothly moves over. On at least flux and openbox at the time, the way it worked is that you would have to hold the window on the edge of the screen for it to move, you could configure the time it took for this to trigger, but if you set it to 0 it would flip back and fourth. On top of all of that WM had a cool little graphical tool to adjust the menu and such. I also liked the *box ecosystem at the time because of the little dockapps.
IceWM was a classic! It was my daily driver for a while around that time.
I would probably still be running IceWM if I hadn't found Openbox.
WindowMaker is still fantastic, if you don't need fancy amenities like antialiasing. But I also happen incidentally to have NeXTStep 3.3 running on Sun Sparcstation 20, so there's that...
Window Maker is available in Debian repositories (and Ubuntu when I used it, but that was a few years ago.)
Afterstep is in there, too
Just ran apt search windowmaker on my kubuntu, and it seems to be there
@@FranciscoMNeto Window Maker always struck me as a new and improved Afterstep. So I don't see the point in running Afterstep with Window Maker around. But perhaps there are people that want old and unimproved?
Window maker is in the official gentoo repository! If I had an x server installed I would definitely give this a try. Perhaps this weakened :) this looks awesome
When Gnome and KDE felt too heavy for my Pentium 233, I used WindowMaker for a while. There was a bunch of cool and novel DE on those Redhat CD at the time.
Not shiny but kind of practical. I wonder if this would be nice with a touch-screen.
❤ This brings memories from late 90’s early 2000 😊 at the time it was very fast and efficient. Of course the fact that it did look like NEXT was a plus back then
WindowMaker was my primary desktop environment for many years. I still occasionally use it, although these days I prefer KDE. In the early days, it was a light environment that was gentle on slower hardware, and since I was mostly on a budget, this was an excellent way to get the most bang for buck.
Back in the late 1990s I had windowmaker running on a notebook. The Linux distro was probably Redhat (of the pre-enterprise days) replacing Windows 98. I found it pleasant and lightweight and preferred it over fvwm2 which I used before. Later I went on to Debian and other environments. But Windowmaker remains in a good place in my memory.
I used to run Window Maker back in the early to mid 2000s when I used to run Slackware. It was a lot of fun to toy around when I wasn't running KDE. I have some found memories of that.
I didn't even know it was still "active". Interesting.
Personally, I think $2500 is still expensive for a modern computer, when you can get at least a decent gaming PC for much less, and a whole lot less for a very good PC that's not focused on gaming.
What would a mid tier be going for now, I've just been sitting on what I own for a while except the recent GPU upgrade
@@BrodieRobertson I picked out parts just now for probably a fairly solid mid-range just to check it out, not researching any particular thing but just picking out stuff, and I came up with a roughly $1200 build (a little under before sales tax), and I didn't even go really cheap on any of the parts I picked. This is just for the PC and not including the monitor, keyboard, or mouse or any other accessories, but including all parts needed for the PC itself. This was for a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7600X, Radeon RX 7600, 32 GB DDR5-6400, 2 TB SSD, and an 850W Seasonic brand power supply, complete with case and CPU cooler.
Window Maker is in the main repos for Void Linux, even just got this most recent update. I never used it personally, but I recall one of my online friends from back around 2010 was a big fan of it and (afaik) used it exclusively, that might've been my first time even learning about its existence.
i was already aware of most of the history of this next windowing system. being reminded wasn't bad. however it would have been nicer to have seen more actual examples and screen time given in the video to showing it off. rather than just a couple of quick screen flashes.
ultimately you could have kept on talking over those b-roll for most of it. while giving us more of a chance to see what you were referring to. and take it all in properly. but instead we get just brief flashes. and that simply isn't long enough time to really comprehend what we are looking at.
On Mac pricing: the list prices were appalling, but there were very deep discounts offered to educational institutions. They were still expensive (especially as the very first model didn't have enough RAM and disk to run its own OS properly), but the interface was a big attraction, as the competition was MS-DOS 3.31 or thereabouts. Presumably the plan was to get people hooked on Mac when they were at university, and then they'd demand the same when they got jobs. Mac users could be very demanding.
Window Maker was an absolute banger of a window manager. Window Maker, GKrellm, XMMS, desktop of champions.
I'm not sure i'd ever use it today but it does have a very recognizable and unique look. Very retro!
Window Maker on Slackware was my env of choice for years. Although it's petty, one of the "last straws" that sent me back to Linux after being an OSX user for a time was when I could no longer put the dock in the upper left hand corner (where it d#mn well belongs!). It made me realize that I was no longer in charge of my own computer and would only be allowed to use it the way the developers decided I could.
9:31 debian has it, opensuse has it, and i believe fedora has it too. all in the main repos
Nix as well in nixpkgs
I had the privilege of working on a NeXT cube that my company purchased for a simulation project back in 1990. I had been eagerly anticipating the NeXT cube. Jobs had made his usual promise that it would be cheap enough that any college student could afford it, but I found that it was way more than I could afford, so I was ecstatic when my company acquired one and allowed me to use it on the project. I loved the objective C and was also setting up a Sybase database for the project. I went to some NeXT user group meetings. The folks at the meetings mostly COULD afford to buy their own NeXT cubes! They seemed to be mostly in graphic arts. Unfortunately my company (a defense contractor) got hit with hard times and I was shipped off to another division which ended my NeXT experience.
pop-shell on arch boom mind blown
I am crazy, I have been experimenting with Window Maker and toying with it.
May be crazy, but I sort of like the old look, and the fun is when you run such an old desktop and you launch new fancy programs and games.
I guess it gives the similar effect that a sleeper car gives you, looks like a stock old junker until you put your foot down and suddenly you outrun everything on the road.
Window Maker gives you the same feel on the desktop, looks slow and outdated and unable to run the newer program, hiding the modern hardware powering it.
Its 2023 and here I am watching this video on my 2015 Macbook Pro running PopOS with WindowMaker and the GNUstep tools (GWorkspace/Project Center/Gorm).
I do, however, wish a clone of Windowmaker was written in ObjC with GNUstep bindings for better interoperability with GNUstep apps. Maybe one day.
The biggest mistake was the random screen shot of a CDE desktop. Not sure what that had to do with anything NextSTEP. Note that macOS is basically still NextSTEP, there is a reason all the coca API calls all begin NS, all the have done is change the appearance of the graphical elements and switch from DisplayPostScriot to DisplayPDF.
Presumably the screenshot was included to serve as an example of what a typical Solaris desktop looked like in the time period when OpenStep-for-Solaris existed (i.e. the late '90s). However, the applications shown there -- namely the "File Manager" and "Help Viewer" utilities included with CDE -- aren't OpenStep apps, they're just normal Motif apps, AFAICT.
For anyone who wants to see some screenshots of real OpenStep apps running natively on Solaris, look for a forum thread from 2019 about this topic on a site named WinWorld. One of them even shows the CDE Front Panel, the OpenStep Dock (with Sun's logo in place of the NeXT one), and OpenStep's "File Viewer" app all running on the same screen together (though not intentionally, according to the person who posted it; i.e. " _CDE is not suppose to be there all frankensteined with openstep_ ", but it showed up that way due to some sort of configuration problem).
Back when I first got introduced to Linux late 90s, computer class in our school had one machine, which was running debian with window maker. Brings back so many memories :D
It somehow manages to look even more retro than a plain TTY
Was my first window manager I set up on RedHat back on 2005 when a full install left you at nothing more than a console. Loved it then and at times come back to it to tinker. Wish it took off given its roots.
Window Maker is available in the main Opensuse Repo. :D
Memory is blurred a bit but I discovered Window Maker very early on. It might have been prior to their stable release. It was around the time when civilian ISPs started offering PPP/SLIP connections but before Win95 shipped. I remember the joy of a real TCP/IP stack on Linux, the only other was on OS/2. Windows 3.11 still had to rely upon Winsock which was pretty awful by comparison. I had trouble getting my Diamond video card to work with X-11. Finally they released enough detail for kernel dev's to write driver support for it. ATI ended up buying the FireGL division of Diamond. Then my motherboard cooked itself, "snap-crackle-pop, magic blue smoke and burnt trace line clear across the board" and I bought a Micron. I believe I was running Window Maker on the Micron 686.
Wmaker didn't come out until 1997. So well after Win95 came out. Only the most ancient Window Managers predate Win95. The Window Managers that end in WM. Such as TWM, FVWM and MWM.
I basicly stopped using Linux with GUI once using WindowMaker became difficult (aka Gnome and KDE were the only supported options), I loved how the virtual desktops worked, and the widgets were awesome. You could have CPU/MEM/etc widgets open for multiple servers, so while I worked, I could see in realtime how the servers reacted to my code.
Perhaps I need to test how easily one could setup WindowMaker with modern distros.
Back in the day I was a hardcore Afterstep user. Good times!
I am surprised Windowmaker came from Japan. Back when I used it it didn't support UTF8 and shift-jis is also multibyte encoding. See also Ruby. I even remember patching their apprunner so I could use backspace to delete multibyte UTF characters. I didn't know of mbrlen or bits sequences in UTF so I deleted char by char in loop and calling function similar to mbcslen until it decreased.
Bonus fact. Windows had its own version of NextStep inspired shell called litestep.
Really enjoyed this ride back through history. Great video.
I played with wmaker in my early linux years and i just checked, it is still available in debian 12 main repository
Oooh, WindowMaker. I kept bouncing between WM and OpenStep back in the day.
NeXTSTEP's legacy lives on ❤
No Window Maker for Wayland though?
I still have my Macintosh Lisa! It was $5800 in 1985! That's $16,478 in today's money!
Was that bought new at the time or acquired later on?
@@BrodieRobertson It was originally bought by the Art institute of Chicago, they upgraded not 3 years later and I got it through a freind that taught graphic arts there for a measly $600!! It quacks like a duck and everything! First "Home PC" with a GUI.
It's in Fedora's first party repos
Fedora has a first party package called WindowMaker
Names I haven't heard in a long time. Some time ago I noticed that our trusty old Icewm has also still had new version bumps. Naturally, now that you mentioned Window Maker, I had to go check Afterstep, but sadly the last release has been almost exactly ten years ago.
I used WM on Ubuntu until around 2010 on a couple of IBM Thinkpads as my main computing environment in a Windows office. I loved it. I use Fedora with Gnome now, which is probaby easier but I get nostalgic for WM and the exotic themes you could build.
Oh wow I used to love window maker. I customized a whole bunch of crazy things with it.
source mage has windowmaker in official repositories and sorcerer had it too
If you put the dock on a Mac vertically on the right, instead of horizontally at the bottom, you’re most of the way back to NeXTSTEP!
In 1979 my Apple II Plus was $2000. In 1989 I had the choice between an Apple Iicx or a Next Cube. They were roughly the same price at around $10,000 kitted out.
Also, keep in mind that the past was just different. A 21" CRT monitor? Thousands of dollars. In the early 90's my company budgeted $14,000 for a normal 386 workstation. with networking and a 21 inch monitor.
Oh man, I vaguely remember this from my early forays into Linux
window maker is when someone copy+paste an well know essay without changing a word
Damn I remember trying both Window Maker, Blackbox/Fluxbox and IceWM back in my first steps as a Linux newbie and being kinda surprised with how everything worked differently from what I was used to. Those were good, innocent times indeed.
Did I ever use Window Maker he asks… LOL Short answer is very yes. Good WM. There are a couple of things I'm afraid it just doesn't have that I need today but did not need 23 years ago. Mostly to do with font scaling on modern HiDPI screens.
WPrefs has a fonts tab. You can pick what font you want and what point size. The X server deals with overall DPI not your Window Manager. So you should do your adjusting there. There's information on the net about the topic. A query like, X Window DPI setting will get you started. Your problem is a common one with solutions.
It's still in Debian 12, packaged in the main free repos, along with a slew of DockApps.
I was a WindowMaker user for probably a decade, in the early oughts. It was probably Wifi that forced me to switch to a full DE, as WM didn't have super-robust solutions for quickly changing Wifi settings as I made my way to new networks. I could probably switch back to it now after all this time.
Oooo, I need to spin this up on one of my boxes. Hilariously enough, my exposure to these was that I used one of these NextStep like "DE's" on my Windows 98 machine. Back when even Windows was happy to let you rip out and replace the DE. At the time I had no idea about the NextStep link, I was just annoyed with Windows UX and dialupped my way to find some replacements, and ended up with first the NextStep-lookalike for a while, and eventually some sort of OpenBox lookalike.
I feel old now... :D
Would love to try it out, but honestly, I have a terribly hard time trying to be productive on a non-tiling window manager...
window maker is suprisingly easy to use and configure
(also its in official repo of void, even including some alsa plugin thing)
I always install WindowMaker on all my Linux desktops setups. In fact I installed it a couple of weeks ago when I put Debian 12 on my work laptop. Debian and by consequence Ubuntu always have packages available for it. WindowMaker is my ultimate fallback DE. It has no other package dependencies, it's super light and does not run any other processes other than itself. I use it whenever upgrading to a newer version of Debian / Ubuntu because it's not affected at all by the upgrade process. Other DEs may crash or hang because of core library version mismatches (think gtk). I also use it whenever my normal DE is broken. It always works and has not failed me once.
I remember using window maker around 2000\2001 as one of the window managers I tried out. The old window managers were a lot more interesting than what we have now. Not every step has been an improvement.
I loved WM and used it for a long time, but I don't know that I would agree, I think the efforts around tiling wm's today are very interesting, and conventional desktops certainly have gotten much better. If wayland can eventually fully sideline X then that will be a big deal as well.
Modern Desktop Environments are just too big and bloated. I just want a lightweight Window Manager and Window Maker does that for me. There's lighter but they lack some features I do like. Like a configuration utility. Wmaker has WPrefs.
@@entelin if X Window gets sidelined that would be a big deal for us long term users. People that have invested decades of their life into programs. I've been running X since 1995. That's a lot of time to just flush down the toilet. Thanks Wayland.
@@1pcfred xwayland, obviously wayland couldn't go anywhere without an x compatibility layer. You're not losing anything.
@@entelin gee, just what I always wanted. A compatibility layer! I love layers. It makes things clear as mud. I can just throw out my complete set of O'Reilly books about X Window now. Oh happy days. Get a clue.
Window Maker is in the OpenSUSE repos!
I used to use Window Maker when I started with Linux, Slackware 3.2. It's just great! Reminds me NexT
I was nearly the on-campus rep for NeXT on the U of MN campus. They were utterly fantastic, and horrifically expensive. Because they were so expensive, and so hard to find, I didn't actually learn very much about them. I spent all of my time in the lab on Sun Sparc's or the HP workstation of the time.
I more sort of hung around campus than I actually went to school in the normal sort of way.
By the time OS X was a thing and it actually became affordable enough to get one and learn how to program it, I was a Linux user and a huge proponent of Open Source, and so uninterested. Also, I wasn't so interested in UI programming anymore.
Another interesting fact, GNU Step was a reason that Objective C was a thing on gcc. And I suspect that's what led Apple to use gcc as it's compiler until they decided they would rather not deal with the GPL and went to LLVM.
This also illustrates a reason I do not like using clang, I don't like using BSD licensed things when there's always the possibility that some company will make the 'default' version proprietary and so much better than the version with source that everybody starts using the proprietary version instead,
As always. Well informed and accurate. Thanks Brodie for documenting these things.
This video makesme want to check out their repo and install it :D
Brings back memories. I think I used twm, fvwm, fvwm2, afterstep, fluxbox, CDE on Solaris and briefly enlightenment. I had a look at window maker but it just didn’t appeal.
i love windowmaker
I used it as well back in the day. I really liked it a lot!
9:15 I'm not sure why he says it's rare to see wmaker in 1st party repositories. Pretty well every current distro has a wmaker package, same as any other popular DE. Debian and its derivatives (e.g., Ubuntu) call it "wmaker". Fedora and the Red Hat family call it "WindowMaker". Some distros push it more strongly. Slackware has it as a common installation option (though it pushes XFCE by default) and Window Maker Live is an actively-maintained distro that uses it as its default DE.
Back around 1990 NeXT machines and SparcStations seemed like sci-fi, light years ahead of the usual VT102 terminals with burnt phosphors on the CRT and hjkl for arrow keys. Even using TWM on X was cool by comparison. NeXT was interesting. It had these vibes about its windowed environment that were better than either Windows or OS/2. Not quite like the Amiga, but a different kind of cool. At least one model of NeXT machine somehow had the parallel port configured in such a way that printing made CPU throughput drop through the floor.
What sets it apart from more "modern" WMs? Is there more to it than nostalgia and *step interoperability?
While I've only run Openbox as a sole WM before, it seems that most modern WMs are for managing Windows only and require additional tools to make a functional desktop. Since WindowMaker clones a project that attempted to provide a fully functional desktop in the form of NeXTSTEP, running bare WindowMaker goves you something much lighter than a full-on DE yet more featureful and "complete" than a bare WM. The paradigms are slightly behind the times, but it's a well thought out UI that you can get used to almost instantly.
Window Maker is available in the official Linux Mint repos, and at least until they started focusing on Snaps, the Ubuntu repos had it.
I've played around with it and do have it installed, but find that things don't work as well for my use case. Still fun to play with.
NextStep was also the inspiration of a little know DE called Gnome. (The object-oriented networking pattern that is still part of the name, in particular). OO was the new cool thing in the 90s. Anyon remembers the initial CORBA based GNOME DE?
I ran Gnome 1. It always crashed. Every time Bug Buddy popped up I got a good laugh out of it. I also only would run Gnome when I was extremely drunk. Good times.
I remember compiling Window Maker from source (with dependences) for Solaris 2.6 and 8 around 2002-2004. I really loved Window Maker at the time but support was waning even back then.
If development has stopped because they are done, why are they not at version 1.0 or later?
It funny how *chance* has played a major role in most things we use today. Fun fact _Objective-C was ported along with Next and became the default programming language @Apple. Also, DOS was bought by Bill gates for $50,0000, as a last min hack to full-fill an IBM contract which they won because his mother knew some IBM board member._
Legend has it that the clowns from CP/M blew off their meeting with IBM to go flying instead just because they thought the weather was too nice. So that's why IBM decided to go with Microsoft. But Billy's mother's friend did get them the contact. Though not a contract.
I've been using Windowmaker since slackware 7 (around 2000). It is Highly configurable, stable, and lightweight.
Definately still available in Debian's main repos. Which makes it probably available in Ubuntu and Devuan as well, but I can't check at the moment.
I tried getting 0.96 to work but it just doesn't. The repo 0.95.9 works, but the new one I can't figure out. I suspect there's some setup step I'm missing when building from source.
I used WMaker exclusively as a young weirdo. It's fun.
I'm a big fan of Windowmaker. Due to being very hard up for cash at the time, the only way I could make my limited hardware usable was to go for Gentoo with twm, but then along came Windowmaker and I absolutely loved it, I now had the prettiest desktop and could still do the things I needed to do. I also used it on my dev box at work for a few years running on Fedora and wrote several dockapps that supported the control and monitoring of the services required for our dev environment and this was the subject of much interest from my colleagues, it was just perfect, so functional. I'm still a Gentoo user today but my desktop of choice is now KDE, on much more powerful hardware obviously, but I occasionally startup Windowmaker and use it for an afternoon, just for old times sake.
Your timeline seems a bit off to me. There were plenty of lightweight Window Managers around by the time Gentoo came to be. Gentoo didn't start until 2002.
@@1pcfred Yup, there were others available but to me they were all much of a muchness, none of them seemed to offer any real benefits over what I was already using. Things were different then, we were still using dial-up modems at that time in this country over a pretty shaky pstn so it's not like now where we download an iso and spin it up in a VM just to have a quick look, there was nothing quick about it, a world update on Gentoo often had to be accomplished over two weekends so there had to be a good reason to do it, and for me Windowmaker was a good enough reason.
I used WindowMaker on SuSE Linux in the early 2000s. I loved it back then.
I played about with Window Maker a bit when I first switched to Linux from Windows 98 in 1999. This must have been well past it's heyday, most the widgets were broken it didn't really feature much except the novelty of a sort of Nextish desktop.
i used windowmaker from 1998 (yes im old) to about 2002 as my primary Desktop. KDE 3.0 was then too tempting to pass up :)
I tried it about 10 years ago and even then it seemed to have an ancient look
If they reached the feature complete state, why they didn't named it as 1.0?
Because the version code is just an arbitrary concept. I mean, even the Linux kernel had no special reason to move from 5.x to 6.0, other than "x is too big"
@@guiorgy yeah, but like, it is weird, like, you would expect that a software with a version < 1.0 is closer to a beta than to a feature completeness
I remember Window Maker but hehe Enlightenment anyone?
thought i'd let you know that window maker is available in opensuse tumbleweed's default OSS repo.
I've been using Window Maker since it first came out. Before Window Maker I ran Afterstep. Now I'm thinking I might have to upgrade to the new version. I'm on 0.95.9 now.
Not Linux, but the BSD's have window maker in their prime repos
The Unarchiver (at least in Debian) is using GNUstep runtime which is because it was originally made for macOS. Also windowmaker is in Debian under the name wmaker.
I was using that desktop manager more than 10 years ago
will there ever be a windowmaker for wayland?
The Next Cube etc we’re comparable to Unix workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI, so the price was reasonable, just a very niche market. And of course it lives on today in the form of Apple computers.
However NeXT wanted it to see the success of the Apple II
One thing about the first generation NeXT computer was that its base model didn't include a hard drive as standard equipment, only a magneto-optical (removable media) disk drive, which apparently got some bad publicity for slow reading and (especially) writing speeds.
It also had only one of them, which seems like it must have been unsuitable for situations where a user had their data spread across multiple disks & needed to change disks frequently. (That's why early IBM-compatible PCs typically at least two disk drives, e.g. two floppy drives, or one hard drive plus one floppy drive.)
@@The_Lawnmower_Man Sure, but how does that compare to the competition?
A lot of servers and high-end workstations these days don't come with storage, and generally it is a lot cheaper to buy your own, and also that way you get the one that best meets your requirements. The sorts of people who buy these things know how to do that, or they have someone in their staff who knows how to do it.
@@katrinabryce I suspect what it comes down to is that their competitors at the high end of the market -- e.g. older companies such as Sun, DEC, and IBM -- had the advantage of a head start, and maybe also had better hardware performance. Meanwhile, from 1986 (when Compaq began selling 386 PCs) onwards, x86 PCs were becoming powerful enough to pose a serious challenge to those more expensive computers. As for SGI: up until roughly the late 1990s, they were probably better than anyone else in the professional 3D graphics niche.
(I'd written a longer comment about Sun being an early adopter of something similar to Active Directory, versus NeXT's original intention for the magneto-optical disks to act as "roaming profiles" *without* the need for a central server, which didn't work out so well for them... but seems like it got caught in the spam filter or something.)
I was a litestep user in win98 times 😄
Still nostalgic
So really would like to see some "followers" but with a twist of modern polish
Sure have on both counts. I installed NEXTSTEP on SUN and PC and tried Window Maker on Linux. I also installed a similar theme on Windows. While I like NEXT for what it represents and did back in the day, I didn't use Window Maker for very long. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like it, it's just that it wasn't an option and I just never went out of my way to use it. I also liked CDE/MOTIF (GeoWorks Ensemble, Solaris, Windows 3 🙂) , but I'm not going to hunt that down either.
I find it hard to call window maker looks "dated"
Window maker makes me remember NsCDE window manager
Cool window/semi-desktop manager, but its gui doesn't scale.
I all ways find window maker and other de/wm of the 90s and 2000s more way usable and appealing than most "modern" de/wm with their hideous low contrast, themes that look dull and boring. Also Gnome and KDE are false dichotomy to my eyes