I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box.
Good memories, but I am glad to see that X11 is now well and thoroughly legacy. Wayland and Pipewire has been thoroughly amazing by just breaking clean with the past. iw has done the same to a large degree. While systemd has its short comings, systemd-networkd, journald, and so on are now providing a cohesive system that is well aligned, even if not perfectly aligned with ones' expectation, I don't have to tinker to make systemd-networkd to work with journactl or the likes.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
I don't think I'll switch to Wayland for a few years, until it's usable. They don't have a portable way to script it yet, like wmctrl or something. Can't get anything to work there.
I'm afraid you vastly underestimate what it takes to produce a competent GUI toolkit. Performance, portability, layout control, theming, keyboard control support, accessibility for things like screen readers, and, of course, a sane API.
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
Gnome has a history of not playing ball with the rest of the ecosystem. They often hold back very simple things hostage (server-side decorations as an example).
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
I just switched to IceWM after trying so many different versions of tiling window managers. The one that worked best for me was MangoWM, but in the end it also interfered more than helped with my work.
A simple floating wm like IceWM works best for the apps I use: basic tools like terminal and Thunar, Reaper, windows apps via wine.
Really happy I found out about it. It lets me concentrate on the things that matter.
I worked for a commercial Linux distribution in 2004-2005 (not existing anymore). Our default desktop user IceWM, but if I recall correctly, we used GNOME’s Nautilus to provide the desktop background/folders.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Gods, what a blast from the past! I used IceWM religiously back in the early 2000s, and it was one of the first projects I submitted patches to (long before PRs were a thing). It was always snappy, even on the lowest-end hardware.
Love how we had fancy glass transparency effects calculated in software (see also - enlightenment ) then shit got slow, and now we're back transparency stuff working again but instead of hand optimized assembly we're throwing a giant ass GPU at the problem.
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
That's always the excuse for sloppy programming: "Things are bigger now". The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
As you say, purely software rendering was almost certainly infeasible to scale as resolution and refresh rates went up, but we've had at least a decade of having stupidly powerful 2D GPU hardware in all our shit.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
Cosmic has sexy transparency effects but God the color schemes are so poorly thought through.
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
I don't understand why we couldn't just update x11 to address our current concerns, at the very least by deprecating unused stuff and enabling features like variable DPI.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833842
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.
Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.
Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.
Nothing is forcing you, but you may be surprised.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Great times!
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
Back of the envelope, for a 4k HDR ultra wide you'd need tens of gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth alone to do rendering all on the CPU.
There is a reason we offloaded to the GPU.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
sir, this is not an agentic window
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.