My favorite window manager
Linux is spoilt for choice when it comes to desktops of window managers. You have too many to choose from. Most people think of
KDE
Gnome
XFCE
Compiz
I normally just stick to the default in my Ubuntu Linux these days. Then there are several login managers like gdm, kdm, wdm and so on.
If you have used FreeBSD or OpenBSD then you know these login managers are important to launch certain desktops.
So that said my favorite however is something called Windowmaker. It is similar to NextStep and it has a very different way of managing the desktop.
It requires no processing power or memory and is very light weight.
How many window managers do you know?
You may have heard of ion, i3, matchbox, ratpoison and many more. The screenshot above is from XFCE.
Some window managers are very light weight and some have too many menus and require the message bus daemon.
But that said there is no dearth of window managers in the Linux world. You must get comfortable with what suits your mentality.
Why is there no standard?
I dunno why there is no such thing as a standard window manager. Nowadays I think Gnome is becoming popular. Open source is all about chioce and Linux desktops have followed similar ideology.
Most servers however do not need to run any graphics and you can simply get by using ssh.
Why is terminal still my preferred launch tool?
I will tell you my preference. I run some graphics tool from time to time, and though there are text browsers like lynx, w3m, links and friends today all websites have JavaScript and you need a webkit browser like Chrome or Firefox.
Moreover you have images, CSS and so on. But that said, I prefer to run my favorite Linux commands from a terminal and not a mouse initiated menu tool.
I do not fancy drop downs and menu listings for starting commands. Moreover mplayer the multimedia tool of choice never has a GUI frontend. There are some projects but the official one still expects you to invoke from a terminal command line.
How can you speed up your machine?
If you run some resource hog window manager or desktop your machine may run slow. I have always found WindowMaker to be really resource efficient. It runs on very old hardware with very mininal hunger for memory or CPU cycles.
In fact if you do not want graphics at all then you can even shut down X server.
Can you run Linux without X?
Of course. The very point of Linux is to run server daemons that offer a service and Linux always had a heavy presence in backend server rooms.
Nowdays with cloud instances you access them using ssh which is purely text based. However if you run Linux on your desktop then a window manager maybe appropriate.
Conclusion
Linux gives you lot of window managers and X server configuration used to be a chore long ago. Nowadays I find that this process is really smooth. Linux users prefer to use keyboard more than mouse, particularly the Vim crowd.
With the explosion in window managers and desktop software Linux attempted to capture the imagination of people arriving at Linux from Mac or Windows.
Answer
How does sync work? Why does it matter? Why is disk space not freed despite running sync?
$ sync
This is the command that ensures that your inode file system linkedlist in memory are written to secondary storage. Once your disk space runs out you may run this command to flush main memory to secondary disk.
The problem in most cases of disk inodes not freed despite file deletion could be due to some process keeping the file open. Instead of reboot you can inspect the process and kill it. To find out which process is holding a file you can use fuser or lsof or something like that.
Question
What is the message bus daemon? Why is it used in XFCE?
Feedback
In case you want me to cover a topic of choice you are free to inform me and I shall feature it. You may also share this newsletter with friends and family.