Distribution
Window Maker Live 12
Nate Drake revisits the glory days of Linux before we had those newfangled desktops – is Window Maker all you need?
IN BRIEF
With time and patience, it is possible to master the window manager. Setup is fairly simple and it’s very fast. Still, you’d probably struggle to juggle multiple applications with it.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz Mem: 1GB HDD: 10GB Builds: x86_64
I f you’re feeling nostalgic for the days before Gnome and Xfce, this distro may be for you. According to the site (a subdomain of SourceForge), Window Maker Live is based on Debian – in version 12.8’s case, v12 Bookworm – but it uses the Window Maker window manager in place of a traditional desktop. Upon downloading and booting the 3GB ISO into a virtual machine, we were offered a choice of booting into the live environment or installing the OS. Upon choosing the former, we noted a brief welcome screen discussing the latest features of WM Live. Unfortunately, this convenience didn’t extend to the setup process, because upon choosing the launch icon, we were told that we needed to restart the system, then choose the install mode. If you do this, you’ll see the setup assistant is almost identical to stock Debian. After choosing the correct drive and partition to install GRUB, setup completed in just over five minutes.