Cycles

As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on….

Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to find a post to see what my Wordpress theme is called. (It’s called ramart) Wordpress 2.3 is out and they had a list of themes that were compatible, so I wanted to see if mine was, but I needed to know what it was called. (It isn’t compatible) I knew that I had changed to this theme early on so I was searching through my earliest articles.

I found this article. Well, it seems as though things have once again come full circle. Not only has Penguin Pete again been t alking about Ubuntu being Linux for tyros, but I’m back to Fluxbox as my Window Manager.

“But I thought he was using KDE.” I hear those of you who have been following along. Yes, I was using KDE, but it just felt SO sluggish compared to Gnome. And random programs kept crashing all the time. (Mostly Konqueror, but sometimes Amarok) So I went back to Gnome, but, despite installing some updates, I still cannot log out with Compiz enabled. Not only that, but turning off Compiz freezes things up too! I tried fvwm-crystal again for a little while, but then I remembered why I had stopped using it - it has a problem with Blender. If Blender is launched with the -w argument it opens up in a window that can be moved and resized. Otherwise, it just takes up your whole screen. This would not be a problem except that I have dual screen and so I have an annoying cut through my image as fvwm-crystal causes Blender to take up both screens.

So I went back to good, old trusty Fluxbox. There’s still an unresolved bug for me with setting the background, but I’ll get around to fixing that soon enough. It used to work back in ‘05 and I’m sure if I spend enough time I can make it work now too. For now it provides me with what I need: a nice, stable Window Manager which does not crash and which lets me log out. It’s also pretty fast since it isn’t taking up too many resources. Fluxbox development, while slow, continues and therer are some new cosmetic features compared to last time around. For example, it seems to now be trivial to combine windows into tabbed windows. Also, I’m sure a lot of stuff is going on in the background.

I’m hoping to get back to Gnome in Fedora 8 when they move (hopefully) to Compiz-Fusion. And I’d like to check out KDE again when KDE 4 comes out. It’s supposed to have a lot of fixes and optimizations to make it run a little speedier. So, who knows, perhaps I’ll be back in Fluxbox in a couple of years too!