I'm currently running Blackbox WM. I like it, but whenever I see something prettier I think to myself "I want that" (remember, simplicity is beautiful). Bbox is great, suits what I want exactly, except for a few things. I've been looking at Openbox, and that might be more what I am looking for. There are a few others (fluxbox, etc) that I haven't found out much about aside from what's on the homepage. What do you guys prefer? What's a good WM for someone who likes blackbox but wants just a tiny bit more flavor (transparency in menus is a must, I gota show this to my friends to get them to switch).

Basically, what are the alternatives to blackbox while keeping the same general look and speed, and what are their upsides/downsides vs blackbox. Personal opinions are great too.

and dont try to sell me on a windows lookalike (kde, gnome, etc) ive tried em and dont like them too much.

DISCLAIMER: I HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT MY MINI-SIGNATURE MAY BE CONSIDERED STUPID. BY CONTINUING READING, YOU AGREE NOT TO FLAME ME FOR MY APPARENTLY FAILED ATTEMPT AT HUMOR.

-triffid, linux user of 2 weeks and l337er by the day.

basically i've found that the way it goes with blackbox rip offs... the prettier they are the less stable they are. e.g. fluxbox was based on blackbox 0.62.0 which had bugs in it. since then blackbox 0.65 came out with a million and one small stablising improvements and tweaks to make it more reliable et.c... fluxbox didn't benefit from these tweaks of course, and the developers on fb are apparently too busy adding pointless gimmicks to fluxbox to fix the bugs that bb irnoed out long ago.

and being a linux user doesn't make you l33t or anything, saying you're l33t does make you look dumb though.

Hi Chris,

just out of curiosity: which exact problems with Flux
did you encounter that it inherited from Blackbox?

I'm running flux 1.14 with the remember-patch (finally
made it! :D yay!!} now and am happy... no crashes, no
unexpected behaviour, nothing that would make me
think it's buggy...

Cheers,
Tink

lol, yea, take out that l33t stuff, sounds pretty dumb, but jsut out of curiousity how are your becoming "l337er by the day" ??....but for your question...i too use fluxbox and have never had any problems. Would recommend to anyone.

attn flamers:

-just a tongue-in-cheek flashback to my IRC days. I'm just having a bit of fun. Having a sense of humor helps when using Linux. You can laugh at your newbie mistakes instead of stressing over them. I agree with you that it sounded stupid, because I meant it to.

neway im currently usin blackbox .65, and I'll probably stick with it. clear menus are nice, but what's the point of em if you sacrifice stability?

-triffid

"I may be a linux newbie, but I ain't no forum newbie."

Haven't used BB. Never had any problems with flux.

/me says, with a head-shaking flashback to BBS and Fido-Net times:
"it's never been a good thing to mess with peoples minds..."

Agreed ... I don't even know whether flux *has* such feature.
I've started using flux (and preferring it over black) because
of the tabbing/grouping features ... and just for three days I've
really been enjoying the remember-patch which is rather
nice thing to have ... always getting the same things back to
the same desktop is neat. :}

Cheers,
Tink

P.S.: My fluxbox binary is about 40% bigger than blackbox, and
it loads just a fast :} ... memory usage is 2188K ;)