Window Maker a very fine window manager.

[Abarbarian]

Use the Window Maker desktop on Linux

Window Maker isn't a desktop environment; rather it's a window manager. It helps you arrange and manage windows. Its only bundled application is called WPrefs (or more commonly, Window Maker Preferences), a settings application that helps you configure commonly used settings, while the application menu provides access to other options, including themes.


The applications you run are entirely up to you. Within Window Maker, you can choose to run KDE applications, GNOME applications, and applications that are not considered part of any major desktop. Your work environment is yours to create, and you can manage it with Window Maker.

You just got to love stuff that works and never changes, makes life so much easier.

 

[Abarbarian]

Had a load of fun today installing wmArchUp. This is a natty dock app that informs you when there are updates available for your Arch install.The dock app has an Arch logo that is greyed out if there are no updates and turns Arch blue when updates are available. It checks for updates every 10 minutes and when the logo is blue left clicking on the dock app opens a terminal which runs pacman to update the system then closes.

There is no Arch package for wmArchUp but it is available here,

https://github.com/panosdim/wmArchUp

Also you have to install libdockapp available here for manual installs,

https://www.dockapps.net/libdockapp

http://www.dockapps.net/download/libdockapp-0.7.2.tar.gz

or there is a Arch package,

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libdockapp/#news

My description may not be very clear so I will do a screen capture video to show wmArchUp in action. I have just used wmArchUp so will have to wait for new updates before I can do this.

Window Maker still working well and being used more than 20 years after conception.

wmArchUp

Well I finally found time to make a short video of wmArchUp in action the link is above.

I started by opening up a terminal and having a dry run of "pacman -Syu" this was to show what a normal update would be and you can see what and how big the update would be.

Then I clicked on the wmArchUp dock app showing at the top left of screen. This ran the automatic update with the only intervention needed being a single click for the update to proceed. Everything looked to have completed ok.

Back to the normal terminal and I ran "pacman -Syu" again and it showed that there was nothing to do. I did this to double check that wmArchUp had worked properly.

As I have several AUR programs I them ran Pacaur to see if any of them needed an update. Seems like my Brave browser did, took an age to compress and instal so I terminated the video before it had finished.

The video is 68 MB in .mkv format, I could have trimmed the Brave update out and this would have made the video much shorter but I am lazy and bandwidth is pretty accessible these days.

Enjoy

 

[Abarbarian]

A few different ways of setting up a Window Maker desktop.

 

[Abarbarian]

WMAMIXER

Seems there are a few intelligent folk out there still using and developing new dockapps for Window Maker.

I chanced across this neat little dockapp and installed it to replace https://github.com/thinrope/AlsaMixer.app. AlsaMixer still works well on Window Maker but it has three sliders configured as default sources are 'Master', 'PCM' and 'CD' volume, naturally you can customise those to suit. As I only need sound control for one source I made the change to WMAMIXER.

Window Maker taking over the world one desktop at a time.

There are Arch packages for both dockapps.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/alsamixer.app

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/wmamixer/

 

[Abarbarian]

Why don’t you use Window Maker GNU Step to improve your computer interaction performance

A quirky article extolling the many fine attributes of Window Maker.

It looks as though the article was published in 2018.

 

[Abarbarian]

WindowMaker on PCLinuxOS - WindowMaker Internals Part 1 Patrick G Horneker (phorneker)

This article discusses command line utilities that WindowMaker uses to perform its magic on your desktop. In order to further explain WindowMaker's capabilities, it is necessary to explain the internal workings of the window manager. This will also help when it comes time to explain how to create themes for WindowMaker.

An excellent article from the super PCLinuxOS magazine that gives detailed information on how to fiddle around with Window Maker.

 

[Abarbarian]

THEMES for WINDOW MAKER

In the link above are a few themes for Window Maker that I have found around the net and also a few that I have cobbled together.

The folder is less than 50 MB.

I think I have tried all the themes and they should all work on the latest version of Window Maker. Some of them will not display the backgrounds correctly, they will display but some of the backgrounds are set up for old monitors and the backgrounds need resizing for modern monitors.

However there are plenty of themes that do work well so have fun trying them out.

To use them simply copy the contents of,

WindowMakerThemes

to your

~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Themes

Themes Galore

THEMES for WINDOW MAKER

If there are not enough themes for folks in the link above here are some links that are still available in 2021 to more themes,

https://www.cs.mun.ca/~gstarkes/wmaker/themes/

https://lonelymachines.org/windowmaker-themes/

https://www.gozer.org/window_maker/themes/

https://www.box-look.org/browse/cat/144/order/latest/

http://ftp.vim.org/os/Linux/distr/amigolinux/download/DeskTop/WinMgrs/WindowMaker/themes/

Three themes at this site

In the latest Window Maker it is pretty easy to make your own theme including your own wallpaper/background. What is a little more difficult is making fancy title bars and dock app backgrounds and such like. Which is why I have included as many Themes as I could find as some of them have some very fancy title bars and such like. For instance if you go to

https://unknownlamer.org/art/wmaker-themes.html

and download

https://unknownlamer.org/files/themes/niftybg.tar.gz

you will find an excellent example of just how fancy you can make a theme.

Now if you go to the Window Maker site they give some links to various theme downloads,

https://www.windowmaker.org/themes/#

However the "Jess Anderson " link takes you to the WaybackMachine site which shows hundreds of Joss Anderson themes. Unfortunately you can only download a small portion of them and you only find out which ones you can download by trying every theme. That can be pretty time consuming so I have done that and put all the Jess Anderson themes I could find in one folder and made them available from here,

Jess Anderson Themes for Window Maker

If you fancy making your own theme it is pretty easy to do and these links will be of help to you.

Window Maker Backgrounds and Themes

Explanation of colour gradients in title bars etc

Theming Window Maker Part 1;Styles


There are over 180 themes in the links above so there should be something to suit everyone in those links. If not make yer own.


enjoy

 

[Abarbarian]

I am thinking it is about time. I finally have some spare time coming up and will get around to installing Window Maker again.

Here are a few screenshots of Window Maker installs done by other folk. The first one is from way way back in the past.

A right mix of screenshots. Some of them are very modern looking. It just shows how versatile Window Maker can be.

 

[Abarbarian]

Back in the land of the living. Finally got around to installing windowmaker again. Looks like I have a ton of tweaking to do. this is just a bare install with a theme of my own which I call Old Reliable.


Paradise = Window maker running on Arch linux.

 

[Abarbarian]

As you can see I am making progress with this fresh install of Windowmaker. The theme is called Purple Balls made with one of my photos.

One problem I came across was a missing WPrefs.app.

This should be available from a middle click on the Dock. Nope it has gone walk about in this AUR offering. Quite an important app as you can customise WM very easily from it. Solving the problem took some investigating. Tried to find it in common places in the system files but was stumped. Took to searching the net and this post saved the day as it gave the location of the WPrefs.app exec.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/can't-change-windowmaker-options-4175695172/

I had posted the problem on the AUR page for WM so thinking I had solved the problem I posted what I thought was the solution.

Found the missing WPrefs.app it is located at

/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app

Add "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs" as the middle click command to the DOCK and your good to go.

;-)

However my delight in problem solving was premature. So more fiddling around was needed to gain a workable solution.


So I posted my revised solution at the AUR WM page.

Hmm not so simple.If you add "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs" or "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs %s" to the middle command section of the DOCK and then restart WM the commands disappear and you are back to square one. However if you add "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs" to the middle command of the DOCK and close the settings you can middle click on the DOCK you open WPrefs.app and get an icon which you can attach to the DOCK. This survives a WM restart but the commands on the DOCK still disappear. It is a bit cludgy but it gives you access to WPrefs. Whew good old WM still as quirky as ever. ;-)

If you have installed WM and are looking for the missing Wprefs.app then the answer is above. I will not be able to reply to the millions of users happy to have this solution as I am very busy customising WM.


Hope this helps folk to enjoy and use the best window manager ever invented.

Penguins forever.

 

[Abarbarian]

Missing WPrefs.app another solution

Open Wprefs.app by entering "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs" . Navigate to the MENU section as above. Left clik on "Configure Window Maker" and you will see that WPrefs shows up in the "Program to Run" box.


Change this to "/usr/lib64/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs" as shown below. Press ENTER and close WPrefs.app.

You should now be able to access Wprefs.app from the menu as originaly intende. I prefer to do this as after an initial set up I very rarely need to access the WPrefs.app and it is one less icon cluttering up the place.

 

[Abarbarian]

As part of my efforts to promote Window Maker for the good of the whole world I have started to post videos on You Tube.

The first four are only around ten seconds long and are well worth a looksee.

 

[Abarbarian]

gpu-screen-recorder-gtk --- low resource and fast screen recorder for Linux.​

https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder-gtk/about/

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gpu-screen-recorder-gtk-git

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gpu-screen-recorder-git

https://www.tromjaro.com/gpu-screen-recorder/ Selection of screenshots and information

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/...ke-high-performance-recording-tool-for-linux/

The last link is slightly out of date, however,

This gpu-screen-recorder keeps the window image on the GPU and sends it directly to the video encoding unit on the GPU by using CUDA. This means that CPU usage remains at around 0% when using this screen recorder.

In their own testing, they said they saw FPS drops from 30 to 7 with OBS Studio at 4K but with their tool they saw a solid 30FPS. This of course highly depends on your CPU but the point here, is that it uses the full power of your GPU, and seeing a performance loss with OBS on Linux is pretty common.

I tried the program out both with playing a modern quite demanding game and just for desktop use. Whilst gaming it made no difference at all, no stuttering loss of frame rate etc etc.Same result for desktop use where I had FF and Chrome running with You Tube videos, two mpv's running videos and htop.


The quality of the output was excellent and the sound was too. Very easy to use, there are various things you can choose in the set up which I have not had a look at. I just ran it as it came with its default settings. Am very impressed with the program indeed.