Having a very Obi-Wan "that's a name I've not heard in a long time" moment. I can't remember ever settling on IceWM at any point - in my early forays into Linux I always just used Blackbox, before using KDE until it got weird, and then just settling on Xfce and Wxfm because my needs are simple. I'd be interested to hear what it excels at?
If you have a thing for obscure window managers, are looking for massive configurability and have time to sink, check out Fvwm2[1]. Fully configurable using text files[2][3] that can be version controlled.<p>Edit: apparently it has been revived as Fvwm3[4].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fvwm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fvwm.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://satyanash.net/software/2011/12/25/my-fvwm2-desktop.html" rel="nofollow">https://satyanash.net/software/2011/12/25/my-fvwm2-desktop.h...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://satyanash.net/software/2012/12/04/fvwm2-explained.html" rel="nofollow">https://satyanash.net/software/2012/12/04/fvwm2-explained.ht...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3</a>
I use IceWM as my daily driver since it has all the features I need and is very lightweight.<p>The maintainer is super nice too: I had a feature request in mind, raised an issue on GH, and the he eventually implemented it.<p>It may be appropriate to link to the donation page of the author: <a href="https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://gijsbers.github.io/donate/</a><p>Thanks for IceWM!
We changed the url from <a href="https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/2.0.0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/2.0.0</a> to the project home page, since this project doesn't appear to have been discussed on HN before.
Funny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content.<p>I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode.<p>So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.
IceWM used to be the fallback window manager in some OpenSUSE installations (haven't made any for a while, so no idea whether that is still the case). If you configured your desktop environment to death or your machine was very short on memory you could still get a simple graphical session. I don't think I needed it more twice over 5-10 years.<p>Reading the FAQ looks like a jump 15-25 years back. They mention Windows95, xmodmap instead of XKB for example. No mentioning of 4K displays or multiple monitors. Whether that's a good or bad thing? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...<p>Seems very configurable without getting a resource hog. If you enjoy tweaking things on your old 1GB RAM laptop this might be for you.<p>I did not see that it competes to replace my i3 (tiling only), so I stay with the latter for now.
I’ve always used IceWM because it was the default or forced upon me (flashbacks to my high school, which took CentOS 6 and replaced all the logos with the school’s mascot and changed the background picture so they could brand it as their custom Linux distro). Does anyone actually use it because they prefer it? If so, why?
I remember it as one of my stepping stones into nix systems. I tried a huge number of window managers, DEs, all sorts of arrangements. IceWM stuck around on my computer for a bit but since I was a teenager it just didn’t look hackery enough. I wanted something more so I ended up with openbox, so minimalistic it’s all in lower case. I think it’s fun to experiment with how your environment works but eventually you need to get actual work done and the fun of setting up different environment fades a bit. Still, I am grateful to all those projects for getting me to mess around with my computer in yet another way.
I used to use icewm, it's okay. It's not particularly inspired, but there isn't anything wrong with it either. Right now I use cwm which I absolutely love, but have also heard very good things about i3.
I was inspired by the Hackers movie to pimp my laptop in the late 90s, early 2000s.<p>IceWM was a great candidate but I don't remember using it as much as Fluxbox or IonWM.<p>Of course I also modified the boot splash in FreeBSD to display the Duke Nukem nuclear logo when the computer started.<p>That scene in Hackers where all the kids setup their laptop in a phone booth and each of them opens up a customized laptop really stuck in my mind.<p>It gave me a fantastic sense of pride and belonging to a sub-culture everytime someone saw my custom laptop. :)
My first interaction with IceWM was in 2008 with Puppy Linux. It still amazes me how they were able to provide a full desktop in such a minimalist way.