FreeBSD Screen Shots

Nah. :cool:
In my eyes this thread is more of "who posts the fanciest looking desktop" or sharing the proud "hey, look at my cool looking desktop",
which is mostly done by the wallpaper, translucent shells, and conky.
It's okay to me.
I barely find something inspiring me here.
I may called puristic (my current desktop I have posted somewhere page fortyidontknowanymore), but I learned about UI at university, and I'm very focused on the efficiency of usage.
So I don't use any pictures as wallpapers for ages, since they look cool only, but simply kill the clearness,
as translucent shells are the same.

But let the guys have their fun.
After all I see it as some kind of advertisment for FreeBSD, since it shows how individual FreeBSD can be tailored,
and fancy looking stuff sells.

To do an impudent joke at the end:
Maybe if one has problems with concentration anyway,
distracting things don't carry so much weight 😁
 
I barely find something inspiring me here.
Then we have a different opinion about what is inspiring. I find bspwm an interesting concept in several ways. It's minimalistic but it looks very polished in everyday use.
I think it's because of the gaps it leaves around all the windows.

I'm very focused on the efficiency of usage.
bspwm is the most efficient solution I've come across. If you configure the keybindings correctly, you can switch workspaces in a flash and you can also easily open new windows in the exact location you want. Not everything can be shown in a screenshot. bspwm feels very stable and reliable. It is more extensible than dwm. And I think it's also snappier than dwm, that's how it feels to me anyway. There are also other people who have experienced this:
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/bspwm/comments/m6jmau/after_2_days_on_i3_i_decided_to_switch_to_bspwm/
2. https://forum.manjaro.org/t/fresh-installation-some-parts-broken-after-the-update/22939/31
3. https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/share-your-desktop/91/3906
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/c.../?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/dwm/comments/ejixt4/bspwm_requires_a_bit_less_resources_than_dwm/

It feels to me that the underlying programming of the code is fairly unique in bspwm, making it snappier than just about any other window manager.
We're probably looking at the most productive desktop setup out there.

When I scroll up and down with the mouse, it sometimes goes too slow or too fast in some wms or desktop environments.
In bspwm it is exactly the speed it should be.

And then there's also something like input lag and mouse responsiveness.
This feels noticeably better in bspwm than everything else.
Perhaps someone with knowledge of the technology can explain why?
 
Then we have a different opinion about what is inspiring.
Seems so.

For someone who has not found his suiting wm/de yet, of course this thread is helpful and inspiring.
I knew it from myself:
You're searching for screenshots, because you don't want to install every wm/de just to get a first impression.

Years ago I decided for fvwm2 and am pretty satisfied with it.
For sure fvwm is neither the only one, nor may the single best one there is.
fvwm simply is a sophisticated one, one can be fully satisfied with,
if clearness and configurability has top priority,
and not modern, cool looks, or many preconfigured features.

Which of course is also personal taste completely,
and can be said about other WMs, too.

And I also speak for myself if I say, I'd prefer plain wallpapers.
Besides it's very individual taste if you use a ([pretty] manga) girl, a rocker, a motorcycle, or whatever,
since for me any picture simply kills clearness and distracts me from what I'm actually interested in:
how the window decorations look, which elements are there,...the structure...what can be done...

Under Windows I had app. >200 icons on my desktop.
So I grouped them.
I used a self painted wallpaper consisted of squares in different colors to have areas for the groups.

Since I don't have any icons anymore (don't need it, I'm using BSD, I have a shell 😁)
I simply has plain colored background.

And - as I already said twice - sometimes for some in this thread to me it seems the priority seems to be for showing off wallpapers.
Which - again - is no problem to me, since it's personal taste.
But to me I don't see no benefit in showing off nice pictures.

A new idea what to be placed on the desktop,
a new way how to arrange (terminal) windows,
something useful to be placed in the decoration...
would inspire me.

E.g. in my windows title bar on the top left I have selfmade buttons,
which send the window to another page.
Something like that would inspire me.

Unbenannt.png


But not seeing the same wm/de with different wallpapers, colorsettings, and conky (Which I also don't use anymore. As Rolls Royce formerly responded to the question of how many HP a car has - "sufficient" :cool: - I don't need to have an eye on my resources continously.)

Again:
At least not to me.
 
something useful to be placed in the decoration...
would inspire me.
For my use, all the most useful things are already there. What I find useful is that I can immediately see the news on the desktop, without having to open a browser, use a search engine to find a news site, open a news site. Same for the weather forecast. I also need to be able to see the time and I need to be able to control the volume via Polybar, which is currently the case. What I also find useful is that you can minimize/maximize/close apps with one simple mouse click. I can also do this via the extension that I use in Polybar. All the rest of the stuff, frankly, has next to zero impact on my overall productivity. I don't need desktop icons either, dmenu works very fast and it's really amazing how fast my workflow is with bspwm. You will not be able to speed this up significantly with any setup. A useful keybinding is the following:

super + Right
bspc desktop -f next

super + Left
bspc desktop -f prev

This way you can quickly change workspaces with the keyboard. (But this is also possible with the mouse and Polybar.)

E.g. in my windows title bar on the top left I have selfmade buttons,
which send the window to another page.
Something like that would inspire me.

You can easily configure and create these kinds of things in bspwm. To give an example:

# move focused window to the next workspace and then switch to that workspace
alt + shift + {Left,Right}
id=$(bspc query --nodes --node); bspc node --to-desktop {prev,next}; bspc desktop --focus next; bspc node --focus ${id}

In bspwm you can learn about some outstanding cool config variation about once every other day.
But this is not kind of a thing and frankly very simple to do in bspwm, it has next to no difficulty whatsoever.
I wouldn't call it particularly inspiring either.
 
Nah. :cool:
In my eyes this thread is more of "who posts the fanciest looking desktop" or sharing the proud "hey, look at my cool looking desktop",
which is mostly done by the wallpaper, translucent shells, and conky.
It's okay to me.
I barely find something inspiring me here.
I may called puristic (my current desktop I have posted somewhere page fortyidontknowanymore), but I learned about UI at university, and I'm very focused on the efficiency of usage.
So I don't use any pictures as wallpapers for ages, since they look cool only, but simply kill the clearness,
as translucent shells are the same.

But let the guys have their fun.
After all I see it as some kind of advertisment for FreeBSD, since it shows how individual FreeBSD can be tailored,
and fancy looking stuff sells.

To do an impudent joke at the end:
Maybe if one has problems with concentration anyway,
distracting things don't carry so much weight 😁

Nostalgic, and great Desktop, i love work in that. There's also that nostalgic vibe, if that appeals to you
Fair enough. But perhaps you missed my desktop "wallpaper" is a near real-time photo of the planet taken from a geostationary weather satellite. It gets updated every hour, from eumetsat in darmstadt. I find it interesting to check the cloud patterns and correlate those to weather on the ground. I used to run xearth, but now do it this way. It's also fun to think this would be the view if you were sitting out in geostationary orbit with a laptop :)
 
Fair enough. But perhaps you missed my desktop "wallpaper" is a near real-time photo of the planet taken from a geostationary weather satellite. It gets updated every hour, from eumetsat in darmstadt. I find it interesting to check the cloud patterns and correlate those to weather on the ground. I used to run xearth, but now do it this way. It's also fun to think this would be the view if you were sitting out in geostationary orbit with a laptop :)
Of course I cut out and zoom the part of the image I'm interested in. From 22000 miles out, what you will actually see is the whole disk.
 
E.g. in my windows title bar on the top left I have selfmade buttons,
which send the window to another page.
Something like that would inspire me.

View attachment 15903
You now have a duplicate title bar in Firefox. You can fix this by disabling the title bar with this option.
Untitled.png

Your font in Firefox is unusually large. But maybe you like it that way.

FVWM2 seems like one of the most obscure window managers. It has almost 0 users.

It will probably interest you that FVWM3 exists. But when I look up screenshots every screenshot of FVWM3 looks ugly and old.

bspwm is one of the best window managers in all criteria https://www.slant.co/topics/1902/~best-tiling-window-managers-for-linux
 
You now have a duplicate title bar in Firefox. You can fix this by disabling the title bar with this option.
View attachment 15908
Your font in Firefox is unusually large. But maybe you like it that way.

FVWM2 seems like one of the most obscure window managers. It has almost 0 users.

It will probably interest you that FVWM3 exists. But when I look up screenshots every screenshot of FVWM3 looks ugly and old.

bspwm is one of the best window managers in all criteria https://www.slant.co/topics/1902/~best-tiling-window-managers-for-linux
The settings of FVWM3 on the link it looks fantastic:
 
The picture I posted is not 1:1 but a cut out section, enlarged to make the buttons seen better.
I'm not 20 anymore but still below 10 dioptre

looks ugly and old
Since one can config (nearly) anything with fvwm,
one can make it look "modern and cool", too.
But of course I agree
if this is ones main target it would be less effort to chose a cool looking one in the first place.

It has almost 0 users.
Besides I don't know how many fvwm currently use,
I highly doubt it would be 0, since then 3 would not have been released.

If it suits me I buy.
If it doesn't I don't.
I don't give a sh... - not care for "what others also bought".


I get the impression you're one of the bspwm authors,
and now try to convince people to use it,
or not want to be alone to using it 😎.

However:
Good luck with that.
No, I really mean it.
Since I, too, dislike the popular ones (KDE, Gnome, LXDE, etc.)
and agree others should be seen more.

But I'm settled.
You will not sell me another WM.

I took a peek at bspwm's page,
and if my evaluation process would not be finished yet,
I'd gave it a try.

But my evaluation process for which DE/WM I use is closed.

It took me app. 5 years, and I tried many WM and DE,
to find out what I want, and even more, what I don't want.
And I found it.
I have all my desktop related needs fulfilled with fvwm2,
plus invested many hours to learn how to config it,
and to config it.
I do not miss anything, or wants it to be otherwise.
So since I'm pretty happy with my "old, ugly, boring" wm from the stone-ages,
I will not start all over again, unless there is a real need to do so.

All I'm trying to say here - when I say something in this thread - is:

Guys,
don't be too focused on cool looks.
It's nice, if things look cool, but not important.
It's so easy to lose track of important things,
if one is too focused on cool looks.

I am not trying to convince anyone to use fvwm.
All I'm saying is:
"Also consider to try a less bloated (old[looking], "ugly", or even "primitive") one.
Maybe there is the solution some seek.
I learned to me it was."


Peace out.

P.
 
Besides I don't know how many fvwm currently use,
I highly doubt it would be 0, since then 3 would not have been released.
If it has few developers and few users, then few people can notice security issues. I don't think FVWM2 is actively being developed anymore. Maybe in the past, but not anymore. I would use FVWM3 instead of FVWM2. But I wouldn't really trust FVWM3 because it has few developers and especially few users, so almost nobody is going to notice security problems in the code. Or is FVWM still the default WM in OpenBSD? What version of FVWM are they using? I haven't installed OpenBSD in a long time so I wouldn't know if FVWM is still default. I also don't know if that matters because the first thing 99% of OpenBSD users do is install another WM or desktop as soon as possible.

What I like about bspwm is that it is the tiling window manager that uses the least amount of RAM. It is extremely lightweight, and about as powerful in features as FVWM. FVWM has to lose in this area: https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops-part-2/
bspwm only uses 900kb so it uses 14.5 times less RAM. This also means that FVWM has a much larger attack surface.

Another advantage of bspwm is of course that it is a tiling window manager. Tiling window managers are popular for their productivity. But FVWM is not very productive out-of-the-box.

bspwm is easy to configure. FVWM is more difficult to configure.
I have been meaning for ages to get a FVWM setup going, but i simply can't get a handle on things.
But Fluxbox is easier to use and looks very nice while being very sleek.

It's easy to say what the problem is. For 99% of users, FVWM is far too complex and time consuming. If you like spending a lot of time with setting up and configuring your WM you could probably do that for a month straight with this window manager. And it's probably not going to be any more productive than bspwm is out-of-the-box.

FVWM's greatest asset is probably how scriptable it is, but StumpWM is significantly more powerful than FVWM in this area. So FVWM is surpassed by other WMs in all objective domains.
FVWM is so old, I would be afraid it’ll stop being maintained and just disappear for good.

And FVWM also sucks at decorating windows. So to summarize FVWM for most people:
I've tried fvwm...couldn't ever get it to look/function just right, and I could never put my finger on why.

I don't really see a good reason why anyone should start using FVWM.
 
Voltaire makes me wanna take another look at bspwm, but don't have time to start from scratch. Did you share your config? Which bar are you using?
What I'm trying to say is that it takes very little time to make bspwm into a functional desktop from scratch. Many people test bspwm. Then they probably see a completely empty desktop, they don't know the keybindings either, so they don't know how it works. And they think that bspwm is for the elite who fully configure a desktop themselves. But I already had a Polybar configuration that I used in other window managers. I just reused that and it worked perfectly in bspwm. bspwm is directly compatible with Polybar configurations. Then I just added a wallpaper, checked the files with the keybindings and added five things that I thought were necessary. I also noticed in the first few minutes that you can click on a tile, and then when you open an app, the tile is automatically split between the original app and the new app, which is very useful. Basically after 45 minutes of configuration I had a fully functional desktop in bspwm, which does all the most important things very efficiently and logically. I can open the apps I use and then click on recently opened files. Most apps open in less than a second from when I call up dmenu, so in about two or three seconds I've restored the thing I was working on. Via Polybar I can easily make apps disappear from the desktop and bring them back and close them with one mouse click. I usually don't see this in other Polybar configs, but it is very useful for productivity.

You can add things to your configuration along the way, but this is what I like. That you already have a very productive setup after 45 minutes of configuration.
It's pretty much as straight forward as it gets once you are into shell scripts.

The fact that bspwm is popular also means that you can easily find and reuse other configurations. I'm not going to give you my configuration because there are simply people out there who have been using it for a long time and have put together far more impressive things. Here are some examples.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_55HGnz422M
 
I don't think FVWM2 is actively being developed anymore.
It's not.
For many years.
That's one point I like about it.
It will not change.

few developers and few users, then few people can notice security issues.
Also fewer interest in attacking it.
Plus, the less complicated, the less attack surface.

However:
I don't really see a good reason why anyone should start using FVWM.
You simply fight against something that you only assume.
You obviously did not read me.
So again - the third time,
I quote myself:
I am not trying to convince anyone to use fvwm.
This can't be that hard to be understood.

I use fvwm.
I am satisfied with it.
I stick with it.
I will not change to another WM/DE.
I neither say it's better than [xyz],
nor [xyz] is worse,
nor to convince someone to use fvwm.
I don't care what others do or don't.
I want the same liberty to do what I chose.

I just want to have mentioned, only,
that cool looks are not the only point one may consider about a WM/DE.
That's pretty much the summery of all I wanted have said in this thread,
and thought I did so, pretty clearly, as I think.

I can't be more clear on that.
If this ain't be understood, now, after the 4th time,
I cannot help anymore.


I am really out of here, now.
Because this pigheaded ignoring, not willing to understand what others say,
but assuming something, and then blockheaded fight against that,
where there is no reason to fight in the first place,
is simply not my style of communication.

To me communication is about exchanging ideas,
and of course offer alternative ideas, and also opinions, too.
But not keep on nagging until other minds are brought to the own,
or even fight ideas, just because they differ from the own opinion.
Especially not if it's about anything without real worth.
That's religion to me,
not science.


Or, to put it the way, you may understand:

You won.
Congratulations.
bspwm is the one and only worth using.
Anything else is useless crap, from the stone ages,
not worth to be even remotely considered.
 
You won.
Congratulations.
bspwm is the one and only worth using.
Anything else is useless crap, from the stone ages,
not worth to be even remotely considered.
Of the things I tested, bspwm stood out above the rest I must admit. With all the other window managers I've found major flaws/bugs, but bspwm seems to be very polished all round with few or no major bugs. StumpWM is a window manager that might be as good as bspwm but in different areas.

FVWM is seen by many users as the most useless thing available:
My earliest introduction to the world of *nix Window Managers was Fvwm.
Ah, Fvwm.
The horror. The clunkiness. The ugliness. Oh, how I hated it.
It began at university. If a workstation wasn't running its own commercial desktop, it was invariably running some old, pre-installed, unconfigured version of Fvwm. Occasionally it was Fvwm95, a superficial imitation of Windows. But it was on my own freshly installed Red Hat Linux system that I truly learned to loathe Fvwm.
I remember Red Hat's Fvwm setup as a byzantine web of config files written in an indecipherable alien language--what I later learned to be M4 scripts. I have vague, nightmarish memories of hot-pink titlebars, fat blocky window borders, black and white load graphs, and garish pixmap buttons. And the puke-green emacs background (at this time, I was too naive to understand what Fvwm controlled and what Xdefaults controlled.) And the page-switch delay, just long enough to be annoying if you were trying to switch, and just short enough to be annoying if you weren't. And the insufferable sloppy focus.
My first timid attempts to tame this monstrosity were soundly squelched. Red Hat's Fvwm was controlled, as mentioned, by a web of system files: it paid no attention to any puny .fvwm2rc in the user's home directory. After a few weeks of flailing, I gave up. I retreated to the comfort of the console, returning to X only when a particularly insatiable Netscape-craving arose.
Fast-forward a year or so. I've gained a lot of confidence with the command line--I'm even doing a bit of *nix programming and scripting--but I still live in fear of Fvwm.


You can perfectly claim that it is the best WM that exists for you, but I completely lack any kind of substantiation. If you can only say that something is best for you but can't give any points in which it is better than other WMs then your explanation is of little use. The only thing FVWM is good for is flexibility, but StumpWM has similar or more fexibility that is faster to deploy. Correct?

There are even several WMs that outperform FVWM in this area:
IMHO the only WM to challenge Fvwm is sawfish. In fact, it is even more powerful because of Lisp.
Fvwm - standard, powerful, can be extremely good-looking, many example configs
Sawfish - no limits (if you know lisp)


Furthermore, there also seems to be disagreement about the extensibility of FVWM:

Fvwm is a very fast application, that has and does all you really need in a more or less intuitive way, without surprises or attempts at special effects. However, it looks the oldest, and is less extensible than its competitors.

For me, the question of whether FVWM is the most flexible desktop is answered by real-world results:

These results don't inspire me. I wouldn't really call it flexible that you have to read 5500 lines of a manual to achieve the same result that you can achieve on another WM in a few minutes. In the end, I don't see anything special in any of the results. Although FVWM is always said to be extremely powerful, I see a lack of power in (all) the results.

Based purely on the results I would say it is the least extensible/powerful WM of all the WMs out there.
 
If it has few developers and few users, then few people can notice security issues. I don't think FVWM2 is actively being developed anymore. Maybe in the past, but not anymore. I would use FVWM3 instead of FVWM2. But I wouldn't really trust FVWM3 because it has few developers and especially few users, so almost nobody is going to notice security problems in the code. Or is FVWM still the default WM in OpenBSD? What version of FVWM are they using? I haven't installed OpenBSD in a long time so I wouldn't know if FVWM is still default. I also don't know if that matters because the first thing 99% of OpenBSD users do is install another WM or desktop as soon as possible.

What I like about bspwm is that it is the tiling window manager that uses the least amount of RAM. It is extremely lightweight, and about as powerful in features as FVWM. FVWM has to lose in this area: https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops-part-2/
bspwm only uses 900kb so it uses 14.5 times less RAM. This also means that FVWM has a much larger attack surface.

Another advantage of bspwm is of course that it is a tiling window manager. Tiling window managers are popular for their productivity. But FVWM is not very productive out-of-the-box.

bspwm is easy to configure. FVWM is more difficult to configure.
I have been meaning for ages to get a FVWM setup going, but i simply can't get a handle on things.
But Fluxbox is easier to use and looks very nice while being very sleek.

It's easy to say what the problem is. For 99% of users, FVWM is far too complex and time consuming. If you like spending a lot of time with setting up and configuring your WM you could probably do that for a month straight with this window manager. And it's probably not going to be any more productive than bspwm is out-of-the-box.

FVWM's greatest asset is probably how scriptable it is, but StumpWM is significantly more powerful than FVWM in this area. So FVWM is surpassed by other WMs in all objective domains.
FVWM is so old, I would be afraid it’ll stop being maintained and just disappear for good.

And FVWM also sucks at decorating windows. So to summarize FVWM for most people:
I've tried fvwm...couldn't ever get it to look/function just right, and I could never put my finger on why.

I don't really see a good reason why anyone should start using FVWM.
IMHO OBSD should focus on cwm in that regard. It is a great WM and could be made in the same way Ratpoison is programmable, but floatting instead the manual tiling.
 
IMHO OBSD should focus on cwm in that regard. It is a great WM and could be made in the same way Ratpoison is programmable, but floatting instead the manual tiling.
I don't have any experience with cwm yet. I am satisfied with bspwm.

Yesterday I compared the performance of Xonotic between dwm and bspwm. I repeated each benchmark five times per WM to avoid individual fluctuations. The difference is super minimal but bspwm won in the low fps and average fps on average.

I just tested the performance in Chalkboard HTML5: https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/Performance/Chalkboard/Default.html

dwm failed to score lower than 7.04 seconds on my hardware in 12 consecutive tests. bspwm could, with Polybar off, frequently score under 7 seconds, sometimes with results like this:
2023-03-27-172811_1920x1080_scrot.png

Even with Polybar enabled, bspwm was consistently faster than dwm in this test.
 
Personally I'm really pleased that someone is still working on fvwm. I always liked it, and still use it when I want to spin up a nested x session in something like xephyr. It will be a sad day if and when the world switches over to wayland and these wm's are no longer able to be used. Wmaker is still my daily driver even now, although I do like plasma 5, but just for getting work done... its still wmaker for me.
 
I wonder how it looks with other stuff: I do get with firefox and x11 marco : 2.45
Firefox used to be much faster in this bench than Chromium on FreeBSD. Today I saw that Chromium became faster. What is your result with Chromium? Also nice to know: Chromium is slower on Linux and Firefox is faster on Linux. Firefox accepts patches for FreeBSD, Chromium doesn't. It's not logical for me.

bspwm uses XCB. XCB is much faster than the Xlib from dwm and fvwm. I think cwm also uses slow Xlib. VSIZE of cwm is more than double of VSIZE bspwm... bspwm is probably the fastest WM in the universe. Do you know a faster WM than bspwm?
 
bspwm uses XCB. XCB is much faster than the Xlib from dwm and fvwm. I think cwm also uses slow Xlib.

Honestly most of these window managers are so "bare bones" that XCB vs Xlib barely matters. At most they send ~20 messages to and from the Xserver during even the most invasive recapture.

Fvwm is likely slowest simply due to being a reparenting WM rather than the underlying toolkit.

However, if you measure them via the only metric worth considering...

Window ManagerLooks like Motif Window Manager?
cwmno
dwmno
fvwmyes
i3no
bspwmno
twmno
spectrwmno
openboxno
wmakerno

... you see a clear winner emerging.
 
Honestly most of these window managers are so "bare bones" that XCB vs Xlib barely matters. At most they send ~20 messages to and from the Xserver during even the most invasive recapture.
In the Chalkboard HTML5 benchmark I see that dwm is 5.5% slower than bspwm, on average after many tests.

You can also test CanvasMark. http://www.kevs3d.co.uk/dev/canvasmark/ In my experience, this is a stable benchmark that gives exactly the same result almost every run, or at least when you are not running any background activities/apps.

dwm gives the following result over and over again
2023-03-28-100811_1920x1080_scrot.png


bspwm gives the following result over and over again
2023-03-28-100336_1920x1080_scrot.png


You can see it's only 0.68% performance difference. But this is a difference that is present test after test and is exactly the same every time.
Guess what would happen if you made the canvas 4.5x bigger, and the graphics much more advanced?

I'm sure you'll see a minimum 5% performance difference between bspwm and dwm.
(Sorry for the bold text, it has a bug that I can't turn it off.)
 
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