Window Maker Live (Linux distro)

[jeffburg]

Oh! is this URL not you? Or is it you. If it's you, I will definitely donate! ko-fi.com/wmlive

[wmlive]

Oh! is this URL not you? Or is it you. If it's you, I will definitely donate! ko-fi.com/wmlive

You donated already by providing open source software to us mere mortals!

But yes, this is of course one of the two URL's to use for any donation.

[wmlive]

Some recent press coverage: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/microsoft_windows_maker_live_132/

It completely escapes me why that unrelated m-word is included in the URL...

As an aside note, it has finally been verified that both installation and operation of wmlive on the arm64-based PineBook Pro works as intended.

Compared to the many hoops needed to jump through years ago when trying to install a Debian on the PBP, this basically behaves like a normal Debian installation procedure as on other hardware platforms.
Of course, the actual merit for this is not mine but belongs to the Debian developers who managed to enable the debian-installer to finally do the right thing also on ARM based hardware like the PBP.

[Rhetorica]

I'm glad El Reg is still keen on your work! With Trixie dropping IA32 support it seems to me that WMlive has a bigger market than ever.  I'm wondering if there's a way we could get it showcased by someone on YouTube—there are a lot of channels that do 32-bit PC builds, and a low-demand distro that offers Pale Moon and WM's distinct aesthetic might hit the sweet spot for them.

[wmlive]

I'm glad El Reg is still keen on your work! With Trixie dropping IA32 support it seems to me that WMlive has a bigger market than ever. I'm wondering if there's a way we could get it showcased by someone on YouTube—there are a lot of channels that do 32-bit PC builds, and a low-demand distro that offers Pale Moon and WM's distinct aesthetic might hit the sweet spot for them.

To tell the truth, i made sure the author receives a free password for the 7z archives before he even pondered writing a follow up article for the one he already wrote in 2023.
The author is a well known NeXSTEP fan and an external advocate of the GNUstep project, while at the same time watched with caution by the latter's developer crowd due to irreconcilable differences regarding the perceived goals of the GNUstep project.  It is not easy to get the fantasizing theorists and the realist practitioners under one hat...

There have been videos about former wmlive releases on Youtube before and, quite frankly, most were more concerned with the theming capabilities and the "retro approach" of the desktop than the underlying technical features and merits. Nobody ever really bothered to have a discerning look under the hood to verify how wmlive stands as rescue and administration tool. So far, these videos were next to useless to get an informed overview and probably did more harm than good to kindle any interest.

Other than that it's probably just time to simply accept that there is no point in riding a dead horse anymore. As a Linux distribution, wmlive is simply too idiosyncratic to be ever of interest to the larger crowd of users, most of which born only after Linux started to blossom. Only very few have had the chance to experience the heterogeneous UNIX landscape before the ultimate rise of the mainstream business operating systems dominating the market. Among the majority of the younger ones there is no historic awareness of the evolution of operating systems and software that people like us are so fond of to retrace.
Most of the younger generation grew up with so many shiny choices, that out of human inertia to choose the path of least resistence (contradicting Robert Frost's approach) they grew accustomed to the more convenient offerings covering standard consumer needs. Most people don't want tools, they primarily want entertainment and convenience. Impossible to pique such people's curiosity.

The upstream development and maintenance of the Window Maker window manager has basically ceased and we should probably consider it being an abandoned project by now. With the advent of Wayland slowly becoming mainstream, the fate of Window Maker basically is already sealed and the Wayland based wlmaker simply is still not as capable as its role model. Riding a dead horse probably applies here too.

GNUstep is too slow moving due to the lack of capable developers and absence of any modernization efforts. For example, it is rather annoying that GWorkspace's nice Miller columns are restricted to an insufficient maximum width. By enlarging the main window to full screen size we don't get wider columns but just more of the same insufficiently wide columns added, instead. This directly sabotages the possibility of using long descriptive file names in Linux by making them inaccessible. The only file manager universally usable remains being console based Midnight Commander, IMHO.
The same applies to the standard file chooser dialog box which, to add insult to injury, usually can't even be resized and is stuck at a size destined for an ancient screen resolution of 1024x768, as if we were still in 1995, and that nobody uses anymore. Same also for the WINGs based widgets of Window Maker.
Then there is the shortcoming of GWorkspace being unable to just launch a standard Linux binary by double click. Instead, it just opens it in a text editor which just states "Can't load the file". To actually launch gimp, to use a popular example, it is required to create a cumbersome GNUstep compliant app-wrapper to enable launching it.
This is needlessly a complete backwards approach and GNUstep's GWorkspace would become magnitudes more useful if it had the capability to discern and launch non-GNUstep program formats. The way it is now, it just covers its own niche use case instead of becoming a more universal file manager.

Regarding donations, there is no way around having to acknowledge that human nature of end users doesn't lend itself to enable independent developers to ever make at least a minimum living of their work. We appear condemned to waste the scarce time of our live to earn a meager income by working for non-sharing money harvesting companies, leaving only our limited free time to work on anything more worthwhile than our awful day job. And on top of that we are expected to cover the unavoidable infrastructure costs ourselves.
To get an idea about what kind of user expectations contributes to this self-defeating support for open source software developers, feel free to read the exchange with the Puppet Linux people when recently introducing the wmlive project there.

To add more positive news, i am happy to report that the arm64 based wmlive finally is able to properly install and run on the Pinebook Pro ARM laptop. It is just great that the same operating system works almost the same on this platform as it does on my trusty old Thinkpads.

[wmlive]

Instead of waiting until the end of the year for the disclosure of the passphrase to unpack the encrypted 7z archives of the amd64 and arm64 variants of wmlive,  the Christmas holidays are probably the best time to enjoy playing with it already.

So here is the passphrase: ThanksForYourSupport

Downloads are available from  https://wmlive.sourceforge.net

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

[wmlive]

An new wmlive version matching Debian/Trixie point release 13.3 has been made available, this time without any donation requirements.

Check it out at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net

The former requirement for a donation has been dropped as it didn't generate any sufficient increase in donations, and rather resulted in wasting even more time with donator access management.