Lecture on Windowmanagers - which ones shall I show?

[Potatohead]

Gang I'd like your input.

I am invited to give a guest lecture for industrial design students on WINDOW MANAGERS. The goal is to show them different approaches (WIMP versus keyboard driven; full featured versus minimalistic; etc.). Sort of "eye open lesson" for these design people. A lesson might be: one man's features is another man's bloat. Another lesson could be: always be critical of ergonomics, just because you are used to WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) does not mean that this is the only way!

I want to show them
- one full featured environment. You know, all the bells & whistles that *we* hate :-)
- two stacking windowmanagers
- two tiling windowmanagers
For the stackers & tilers I will use LinuxBBQ of course... :-)

What are your suggestions...
- for the full featured environment? I'm thinking Linux Mint/Cicnnamon or OpenSuse/KDE
- for stackers? I'd like to show OpenBox, I'm open for one more suggestion!
- for tilers? i3wm? musca? dwm?

THANKS FOR YOUR SUGGESTIONS.


My own background: My day job is teaching online marketing and digital business, and a bit of web-usability as well. I am a technical noob (however, learning everyday).

[GekkoP]

One question: KDE is a DE not a WM, are you going to consider that too in your lecture?
Stacker: cwm, of course.
Tilers: dwm and i3.

[Potatohead]

@GekkoP, thanks for the suggesions (and yes, I was sloppy with the words DE and WM, of course KDE is a DE. Thanks).

[GekkoP]

I'm not a die-hard wm-hopper (basically stuck in love with dwm at the moment), so it would be better for you to try Gangbang release and have a look at different WMs. Then, pick the ones you like the most.

[machinebacon]

add decorated and undecorated ones in categories, too. and the one with compositing (xfwm4), those with tabs on the side (wm2/flwm), and Openbox for the easy NLIMC customization.

[gutterslob]

Is compiz still in active development? If so, that might be a good example for a stacker. You can contrast compiz's fancy effects and mousey nature with something spartan and keybind-centric like cwm in the stackers category.

Whatever examples you compare, it's best to show the two attempting the same tasks.

For the full-featured environment, I recommend Awesome. You can start with, "..and now we configure it... in lua..... Wait, what?! lua? What do they expect me to do, draw a circle? Fuck this shit!! .... Kids, don't use any WM that requires lua.... cos it's queer!!"

[ivanovnegro]

As long as you show them at least one of them it should be ok. There are just too many to limit your decision.
E.g., a full featured DE like KDE/Cinnamon could be one option and for a minimal stacker, why not Openbox or as suggested cwm and similar, for a tiler, yeah, why not dwm or the now very popular i3 but sure there are more.
If I would do it I would take the ones I prefer.

[Potatohead]

Thanks, and keep 'm coming. regaring compiz, funny, I was thinking the same. Full featured could be the KDE DE, or Ubuntu w/ Compiz Fusion.

I myself have a love/hate affair with eye candy. When I see it, I think "wow, I want that!" but when I use it, it gets old *very* quick. Like, in 5 minutes. KDE drives me crazy......

[rhowaldt]

i have never looked at KDE and thought 'wow, i want that'. but maybe i am a weirdo.

good luck on the presentation thingy Potatoface! :)

[kexolino]

In the eye candy section I'd go with something like Mutter and KWin, because even in that category there are big differences between each one (Mutter doesn't really have any visible configuration options aside from the few in dconf-editor and can't be used outside of Gnome AFAIK, while KWin has a shitload of options and can be used outside of KDE pretty easily if you're willing to take all the KDE dependencies, etc).

[DebianJoe]

Gutterslob brings up a good point. The language that a wm is written in can greatly impact how it works, and how easy it is to make changes to. There are C-based wm's (cwm, dwm, and many others), lisp-based wm's (clfswm, stumpwm), C++ wm's (blackbox), python wm's (qtile, pywm), haskell wm's (Xmonad), and probably quite a few more that I don't recall.

If you wanted to really get down to some interesting differences, you could look at the various implementations of tinywm, because it's been rewritten in MANY different languages. The way to configure and modify any of them is going to depend on how they were written.

[wuxmedia]

compiz is default on the latest centos.

these are industrial design students, so they'll just be using PS and some 3D program, mostly?
for me most wms are the same (heretic!!) well the ones in my comfort zone,
xfwm4 tiles a bit,
i3 tiles, floats and stacks.
good to mention once you go windec-less it's nice, to feel the space. especially with a tiler, it's fairly obvious whats in the windows not like you need to grab the top to move them.

[Potatohead]

Thanks debianjoe, gekkop, gutterslob, ivanovnegro, kexolino, machinebacon, rhowald, wuxmedia. Lots of great points!

- I'll be a guest lecturer for those industrial design students. You know, hipsters who use 3D programs on their MacBooks... :-) Just kidding.... a colleague of mine works there, he teaches usability ("man machine interaction" or something like that) and he likes "out of the box" lessons for his students. He takes them to airports to look at the routing, they look micro wave ovens to see how the buttons and the menus are (from personal experience: Haskell is easier to master than the menus in my Brother microwave oven :-) ) and so on. (I myself work @ marketing studies, that colleague knew my love for all things geeky, linuxy & windowmangler-y.

So I won't go to deep into technical details, although the question "how do you modify it" is very relevant for them. Maybe good to show them different solutions (1. GUI (xfwm4), 2. editing a config file (openbox), 3. editing the code and recompiling (dwm) or sending commands to a client (herbst)) and talk about pros & cons of each..... I think this is basically the trade-off that web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has inntroduced: learnability versus efficiency. GUI is easy to learn but less efficient if you want to change lots of things fast.

- I'll do the same job in each of these WMs. Thanks for reminding!

- I'll take wms I know (easier, huh!) although this is a good opportunity to force myself to learn some new ones :-)

- Right now I'm thinking Compiz Fusion; OpenBox with decorations; JWM without decorations; and one or 2 tilers. For "newbies" I think most tilers look the same though... i3wm, awesome, spectrwm, dwm, bspwm and herbst are all nice. I'll put in some padding 'cause it looks nice :-)

Thanks. Still open for thoughts & suggestion so fire along.

[machinebacon]

JWM is pretty good, though I don't see a real 'big difference' to Openbox, visually - of course it is no derivative, but something like twm (the first ever window manager, even before Windows) would be a nice alternative.

I would also explain the term "root menu", by the way.

Compiz is a nice idea, though it is ugly by default and there are not many themes (metacity) available in the repos - I even think it is not maintained anymore.

[gutterslob]

from personal experience: Haskell is easier to master than the menus in my Brother microwave oven :-) ) and so on.

Screw Haskell. I can build a point-to-point Class A tube headphone amp from scratch, let it burn-in, and cook an egg on the tubes (while listening to music) faster than I can figure out how to even cook an egg on most microwaves. Microwaves are like some sort of esoteric ninja voodoo crap. You have like 400 modes, 20 types of reheat, and 4 types of "chicken" .... a clock that doesn't even tell the time!!... and now they're putting Android into microwaves, so you've got to worry some script kiddie's remote exploit decimating last night's leftovers.

[gutterslob]

Oh yeah, almost forgot.

Potatobrainz, whatever you're showing, it's best to practice your presentation beforehand, as best as you can. Have a set of tasks on hand. Figure out fastest way to launch/complete said tasks on all featured WMs. Put everything into context of the class. Treat all WMs with neutrality.

Also best to practice some stand-up comedy.... and comb your hair.

[rhowaldt]

^ if all else fails, consider just letting your dick hang out of your pants during the entire presentation. fun times ahead.

[Potatohead]

@rho - LOL.
@gutterz - yeah, the safest way of course would be to make a screencast....but that would be cheating.

[dkeg]

mostly concur with wha'ts been stated, but to feed off slob's point, doing a live presentation would be the best, but susceptible to unforeseen issues. Whether solving those issues would further engage the audience or lose them, you would have a better idea.

Please share beforehand for suggestions, afterwards for seeing the final product

[Potatohead]

@dkeg - I'll make a screencast, you have convinced me. I'll post the screencast before or after the class... I think we have all experienced problems like crashing apps, failing disks, missing cables, and so on during a live presentation. Murphy's Law....