[gentoo-user] [Completely and totally OT] FVWM-Crystal...!!!

[Holly Bostick]

I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor.

I've been fighting with FVWM off and on for a while, and before I tried
to go toe-to-toe with the giant, I had installed FVWM-Crystal (I'm a
chicken). Which I thought was very pretty, but there was no config I
could find to edit and no help (in English), and so I tried going
toe-to-toe with the giant itself, which has never quite succeeded... ok,
it's never succeeded at all, despite years of managing Litestep .rc
files, which seem simple by comparison to fvwm2rc. And FVWM-Crystal,
while it worked, didn't really work that well, and then the site (which
had very little English help in the first place) tried to move to
Berlios but instead went totally down....

So today, I was doing the previously mentioned 'minor maintenance' and
emerge -uaDtv world wanted to reinstall python 2.3.5, which I didn't
want it to do, because I find that slotting Python only causes me grief,
and I want to just have 2.4.1 and migrate everything. So the reason was
that I needed to upgrade pyxml which I had not unmasked to unstable, and
in the course of checking what depended on pyxml that might also need to
be upgraded, I found that most of the stuff I could unmerge (gdesklets
and its desklets, which are also more trouble than they seem to be
worth, ultimately), but it was also a dependency of fvwm-crystal-- which
I didn't want to unmerge, and *had an unstable upgrade to 3.0-rc2*.

I upgraded and just now booted into it, which is why I'm sitting with my
jaw on the floor.

It works...!

It's gorgeous...!

The new site is up, and it's in English...! (no docs yet, though, as far
as I saw.)

I changed my layout to dock (which looks a lot like XFCE, but all
transparent), and when I click on one of the icons-- let's say the OO.o
icon, a menu that actually has all my word processing programs appears!
The Firefox icon menu shows all my 'interact with the web' apps, and the
thunderbird icon menu has all my 'communicate with others' programs.

OK, maybe not quite all of them, but almost. More than enough to get
along with and give me some choice (I have multiple alternatives
applications for some types of usage situations), and enough to see that
1) both KDE and GNOME menu listings are being read, and 2) applications
are being recognized and sorted reasonably appropriately. I probably
will want to customize it a bit further, but on the whole, I would say
it JustWorks-- it's certainly useable for me, as is, out of the box.
Which is unbelievable, for any variant of FVWM, imo.

This is a gigantic leap from the previous versions I've used, and I
think I've just switched WMs. Obviously there's been a huge shakeup
somewhere, but the site doesn't say anything about it, that I saw.

Does anybody happen to follow development of this and know what happened?

I'm just stunned (in a good way).

Holly
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