Desktop environment based on Fvwm

ABOUT

What is Fvwm-Nightshade?

First of all what is it not - it is not a new desktop and it is not a standalone application. So what is it then? It is a lightweight but feature rich and good looking configuration of Fvwm. It contains many useful things to make work and life easier with a flavor of a modern desktop.

Why we developing Fvwm-Nightshade

Fvwm is a fast, stable and highly configurable windowmanager, despite of his age it can keep up with younger desktop environments easily.

Unfortunately Fvwm has three problems, beginners become frightened to test it:

  1. Most distributions containing a too old version of Fvwm in their repositories (e.g. 2.5.27). Since release 2.6 older versions of Fvwm are no longer supported and therefore interested persons have to compile Fvwm from source.

  2. If this was successfully done and Fvwm is started, not much will be shown. Searching the web for better configurations than the default one discovers many results. There are good looking and feature rich configurations (e.g. FvwmForum - Screenshot & Configs, Box-Look.org - Fvwm Themes) but trying them to run ends up mostly in frustration to get them working (except FVWM Themes and FVWM-Crystal). People try to test some of them with more or less good results but at the end Fvwm is removed and replaced with Xfce, Lxde or Openbox because …

  3. Mostly of the configurations are too complicated/confusable. Or they’re made for one desktop resolution only. Some are too old or made for static systems. To adapt them means to become acquainted with Fvwm’s huge documentation, but RTFM isn’t that what normal users like. They want to install a desktop environment and then work with it, not experimenting many days to get it work.

This is why we developing Fvwm-Nightshade. We want to show

  • how easy it is to install

  • how good and modern looking Fvwm can be

  • how fine it is for daily work

  • that it can work out of the box

  • some specials other desktop haven’t

Ok, Fvwm-Nightshade isn’t complete (which environment is that …) but with the users help it will be in the future. Give it a try and tell us your impressions.

Your Fvwm-Nightshade team