Wow... The theme suits unity very well Nice bro

Gonna reinstall gnome 3 and shock my own lappie XD

Global menus in KDE oh yeah!

Still buggy but at least it works for now.

guys, one noob question, so scrotwm is just another d.e like xfce, fluxbox and stuff right? correct me if i'm wrong

It's a window manager.

A desktop environment contains more than just a window manager. It includes panels and everything that's on it, and probably some more stuff such as bundled applications that comes with it.

A window manager is, well, the framework that draws window borders, and are included with a desktop environment. Without them it'll be a pain to organize programs that are running.

For more details ask Sifu G-17.

This post has been edited by FlameReaper: May 10 2011, 10:29 PM

Well, Xfce is indeed a DE:Desktop Environment, while Fluxbox is just a standalone WM:Window Manager.

Key difference; (I'm just adding a bit to FlameReaper's explanation)
WMs do exactly as their names imply; they manage windows. DEs, on the other hand, tend to want to do everything for you, meaning they provide status/task bars, systrays and (usually) an entire suite of apps to manage your themes, fonts, wallpapers, system load monitors, power management, file managers...etc. DEs also usually come with their own WM built in.

Here's an example for you;
Gnome, being a DE, gives you a panel and systray. It has it's own WM included (called Metacity) which manages your windows for you. There's also Nautilus which manages your files and helps you set wallpapers and desktop. Nautilus also interacts with Gnome's theme manager to set GTK and Metacity themes as well as font settings. There's Gnome-power-manager to help with your monitor brightness settings, screensavers and battery life notifications.
Now, if you used a standalone WM, like Openbox, you basically just get the ability to manage windows and the Openbox Menu and nothing else. You'll have to manually install and configure a panel/systray (like Tint2, BMpanel, etc), a File Manager (Thunar, PCManFM, Ranger, etc), your own app for setting wallpaper (either Feh, Nitrogen or a self-made script), your own .fonts.conf file for font settings (hinting, antialiasing), separate apps to control GTK themes (LXappearance) and Openbox themes (OBconf), a power management app (most people install Xfce4's power manager on other WMs, or just run cpufrequtils + powertop) to control cpu frequency scaling and battery info,..... etc.

WMs are usually lighter, and allow the user to fine-tune his/her installation to almost the finest detail. DEs are usually heavier (though Xfce and LXDE are obviously much lighter than KDE or Gnome) but offer more for the user out-of-the-box.

Now, with ScrotWM;
It's what you call a Tiling Window Manager, meaning it tiles your windows for you. Search Google or Wikipedia for an explanation of what Tiling WMs are, cos it's too long for me to type out here. TilingWMs (DWM, wmii, Xmonad, AwesomeWM, Musca, ScrotWM..etc) are really quite different from floating/stacking WMs (Fluxbox, Openbox, PekWM, CWM, BlackBox..etc). ScrotWM is perhaps one of the most minimalist WMs out there. It's won't really suit most people's needs unless they really, really know what they want in a window manager. For example, it only comes with a bar to show you tiling layouts, and nothing else. It has no support for systrays, so your applets for Empathy, Pidgin, Gwibber, Dropbox will have to be left out, forcing you to rely on manual or CLI intervention/alternatives. The benefit of being so minimalist is that it's extremely fast and light (ScrotWM on a minimal i686 install of Debian, Gentoo or Arch takes up less than 40MB of RAM at startup, a bit more if you have a lot of daemons running), but there are TilingWMs out there that offer you a bit more functionality like Xmonad and Awesome (systrays and widgets, for example)

Hope this helps.

Cheerz~!!



P.S: Is all this recent interest in ScrotWM (not just here, but other online forums as well) thanks to me?
I remember a time when only me, a friend and the BSD-community were using it and no one else was interested cos it was either "too simple" or "too ugly", but now there's suddenly so much interest, it's hilarious

More power to the Scrotum!!

This post has been edited by G-17: May 10 2011, 11:00 PM

thanks for the explanation FlameReaper and G-17, now that's something that i failed to find on the internet, quite a detailed explanation.
haha, quite interested since G-17's desktop screenshot always caught my attention
hope can do that one day.

This post has been edited by fJok3R: May 11 2011, 05:56 AM

For the more new users who're used to having a desktop environment before making the jump into having a Linux distribution installed on their computer, a DE is more suited for them because the majority just can't live without it. One thing great about the *NIX distributions of today (be it BSD, GNU/Linux etc) is the availability of choice (although there's also the argument this is the main problem why critics say that *NIX will never surpass Windows on the desktop) and users can choose what they want, but there's also this need of idiot-proof easy customization that can be done with one single tap of the mouse button instead of inserting new lines in a configuration file, and most new users who just transitioned from any other OS (say, Windows itself) would rather go clickety-click rather than go Ctrl+??? because they are more familiar with it - because people recognize things that they can do rather than recall what they could.

I had to agree with these uninterested people, though, because for some people, a vanilla ScrotWM (as how I see it) lacks the aesthetics they want to see. Which I can empathize with. But from what I deduce, ScrotWM really isn't for these people as well so I guess the choice is there, they can just pick another one they'll more interested in - which is why I'm ridiculed by the amount of hate for Unity, I guess they just didn't know choices other than Unity are always available, but no they just had to slam Linux in general to the ground and be so disappointed they went back to Windows. Derp!

I do have some little interest in trying to use ScrotWM in order to experiment with it (I do hope I won't end up having too many DEs/WMs installed just because I feel like it), but apparently I guess there's some self-configuration which needs to be done - by editing the configuration files as from what I know, which is quite the turn-off for me. Not that I can't do that, but if there's a way for me to skip doing that and get to running an application straight away with zero configuration (aka vanilla config), please do let me know, I might try again later. Then again I guess the aesthetics for ScrotWM is really isn't for me

Probably you'll expect more users to be more courageous to jump into using minimalist window managers when they're more experienced with the *NIX world

This post has been edited by FlameReaper: May 11 2011, 07:04 AM

Well, yeah. I'll have to agree with you there. Like I said, it's not really for everyone, though for the record, the uninterested people I referred to earlier were actually users of other tiling WMs like Awesome, DWM or Xmonad. It's too 'plain' even for them, it seems.

I must admit that ScrotWM is a bit too "lean" for my main workstation setup, since that machine tends to have a lot of graphic-related apps put through it (Gimp, PS under wine, Inkscape, Lightzone, Bibble Pro...etc) and a standard floating WM like OpenBox seems to suit my needs better there.

With regards to your question on configuration, I'm afraid there's no easy way to get an 'out-of-the-box' config, since most WMs (and tilers in particular) are pretty personalized. I did share a "template" config some time back, which (I hope) people like Acid_RuleZ and Farkinid found useful enough. ScrotWMs pretty easy, though. It comes with some of the most sensible defaults, plus it's coded in such an elegant way that you can just use regular, human-readable syntax and the underpinnings/framework takes care of the rest for you... you'd understand what I mean if you took a look at the source-code and comments in dev-channels and mailing lists. (it's actually a common feature among most BSD-derived projects .... Linux programmers tend to concentrate of functions, while BSD-guys tend to focus on design) First time I used it, I was like "Eh?... that's it?! ... and in plain English?... Whee!!" ..... What I can say without a doubt is that (provided you know what you want), ScrotWM is actually much faster to set up than other WMs people are more used to (OpenBox, Fluxbox, AwesomeWM).

_______________________________________________________________________________

Anyways, back on topic.

My setup on an old Pentium dual-core.



Distro: GRML / Kernel: 2.6.38-6.slh.1-aptosid / WM: ScrotWM / Shell: Zsh
Xdefaults: Custom Web-safe scheme / Font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Semicondensed-*-12-110-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
On Screen: ScrotWM Man Page, MPD+Ncmpcpp, Weechat-curses, Vim with custom theme showing my Zsh config file.

Edit1:
Sorry. Just noticed I got the thumbnail size wrong. Still within the forum rules, I think.

Edit2:
Still waiting for you to post your tiling setup, farkinid-chan!!

This post has been edited by G-17: May 13 2011, 03:38 AM

My Debian Squeeze amd64
On my aged Dell Latitude D620 notebook.

Simple ~ ~ Human theme,Human icon theme ~ ~ That's all I need

My Natty in Classic

Dumped unity a while coz its too solid and hard to customize



This post has been edited by cocooh: May 13 2011, 04:15 PM

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Sweet Purple

Courtesy of G-17, Acid_Rulez and whoever I may have overlooked. My lappy's look now.



Attached thumbnail(s)

Fedora 15 Beta with tint2 task switcher and some extra gnome-shell-extension plugins.



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Orenoimouto wallpaper behind.

Conky thingy on top. Many thanks to kagesenshi's guide for the conkyrc file.

This post has been edited by seatux: May 15 2011, 12:08 PM

KDE 4.6.2 on 11.04

Plasma theme: H20 with XBar installed

This one's my favourite of yours so far. I like the cool, metallic tones.
The other purple one is a bit too ... uhm ... metrosexual



Waah ... you're desktops are always so business-like/serious ... it's like you hunt down terrorists for the CIA with them O_O
What happened to piping conky to your scrotbar? ... any problems?
Also, you need some color in your life, girl!!... Pimp those .Xdefaults~!!

This post has been edited by G-17: May 16 2011, 09:53 PM

Yeah, I'm not keen on piping conky into my scrotbar. Still looking for a way to directly put my moc straight into my scrotbar. I got the theory right but its not working. I suspect Slim (yes, always the culprit) is the reason for this. But too busy to test any further now.

Colour? Rainbows? Unicorns? Then I shall switch to 'Hannah Montana Linux' (screenshots available on request)

Here's the occular rape farkind is talking about:

Hannah Montanna Linux

Great as a April's fool prank in the office.

This post has been edited by seatux: May 19 2011, 06:23 PM

I think I just had a seizure caused by the bright colors.