Window Maker Live: Cool Retro Look, Even Cooler Performance (2017)

https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/window-maker-live-cool-retro-look-even-cooler-performance-84768.html

by wmlive • 3 years ago

2 1 3 years ago

wmlive• 3 years ago

While this article is from 2017 and describes the authors impressions for an older release, it also applies to the current release.

There is a new release out since a few days, based on Debian/Bookworm, for which details can be found at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net .

The most interesting aspect of wmlive are not so much superficial features such as the GUI preferred here, but rather all the tools and utilities that are available under the hood.

Anybody feeling at home at the CLI will be positively surprised that many tools that usually have to be retroactively installed manually after installing other common distributions are already available.

As a sysadmin one should not have to worry about the existence of basic tools like mc, rsync, screen, tmux, ncdu, dd, parted, gdisk/fdisk/cfdisk, tcpdump, fstransform, nc/telnet, wget /curl, sshfs, vim, emacs and so much more. It all has to be already there and directly available.

What somewhat bothers me about common distributions is that flagship applications like libreoffice/chrome/gimp and a plethora of more or less obscure languages are usually dumped to the installation target, but the small tools that are relevant for a serious system administrator usually tend to be absent.

One of the main goals for wmlive has always been to produce an installable live medium that is as comprehensively equipped as possible and can serve as a versatile tool, for example when rescuing any file system type on external systems.

You can't tell from the supposedly nostalgic wmlive GUI that the right tools for serious jobs are available under the hood

Window Maker Live: Cool Retro Look, Even Cooler Performance (2017)

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