Openbox has just made it’s 3.4.6.1 version available for download. I thought this might be an appropriate time to give five reasons why I love me the Openbox Window Manager:

1. Minimal wasted screen real estate

While I’m sure you can get big, fat-bordered themes, complete with PlaySkool-type controls and grips for Openbox, it seems that a lot of Openbox people prefer to have smaller, more efficient window controls. While I’m currently rockin’ a 24” monitor at work, I have a 19” LCD at home and treasure every bit of screen real estate I can get. The lack of a top-of-screen menu bar doesn’t hurt screen real estate either.

2. The ability to make a window common across all desktops

While I’m a big fan of multiple desktops (and no, this wasn’t invented by Apple), I still find using them - even in Compiz - a little clunky. I think Openbox does this right. If you right click on an applications titlebar, you can send it to any of the desktops, and better still, you can send it to all desktops. This means you can open one terminal window and have it appear on all your desktops. And this isn’t four separate instances of gnome-terminal, it’s a single instance visible on all four. Nice!

3. Useful middle-click functionality

I also love the middle-click functionality in Openbox. If I middle-click anywhere on the desktop I get a list of all the open apps on each desktop and can instantly switch to whichever one I want. I can also add or remove virtual desktops from this menu too. So if I need an extra desktop, it’s just a middle-click away.

4. Speed and Lightness

I run a 3 yr old P4 desktop at home and run Linux in a VM at work under XP. So the performance of a window manager is important to me. And while I like Compiz (it is very pretty and sometimes useful), I prefer to funnel any extra performance into running my applications. With Openbox I get a pretty desktop, an extremely customized desktop and a very usable desktop without sacrificing too much performance. And using xcompmgr I even get things like nice window shading.

5. Obconf

Obconf is the Openbox Configuration Manager. With this tool you can select and install Openbox themes, changes appearance options like fonts, customize window behaviour, set window margins (see below) and much more. While it doesn’t eliminate the need for all configuration tweaks, it makes customizing many aspects of the window manager very simple and clean.

Caveats

Now I wouldn’t be a good, even-handed Canadian if I didn’t cover the problems.

Openbox does require a little tweaking if you want to get things truly customized for the way you work. That means that you’ll need to do things like run a 3rd party application called Menumaker if you want to automatically generate an Openbox right-click menu based on your current Gnome menu setup; Or if you want to add custom entries and functionality to the menus (like Alt-Tab switching that spans all desktops), you usually have to edit a text file or two. For me, that’s easy. Some users might find that a drawback. But I happen to like the fact that it’s based on XML menu files which are simple to understand and modify.

One more tip for those of you trying out Openbox. If you think finding an open piece of desktop on which to right-click might be annoying, you can use Obconf to limit the size of maximized windows. So on my desktop, I leave a 3px gap on the right and left sides of maximized windows. That means I’ll always have somewhere to right-click even if my app is maximized.

A couple of other useful sites:

Openbox:Community portal - where you’ll find a few useful related projects and utilities

Box-Look.org - lots of themes, wallpaper and the like for Openbox and other lightweight window managers

My buddy Earl Moore over at Meandering Passage wonders whether or not the recent buildup of “budget” computing devices running Linux is a positive path or not. I think it’s a really positive thing. Here are a few reasons why:

1. More Linux anywhere is a good thing in my books. Any chance of putting Linux into the vocabulary of more consumers can only be a good thing. The first step is making people realize that there actually is a choice. Apple is doing quite a good job of that right now too, albeit in the opposite end of the market.

2. While it’s great to have the experienced power users in your camp, the low end market shouldn’t be ignored. Surely some of those families who buy their first computers and find them to be stable, relatively secure, easy to use and good value for money might not be so quick to accept Windows as the defacto choice if and when they trade up.

3. Systems pre-installed with Linux will also put free and open source applications in front of people. Even if they don’t get the ideas of ‘software freedom’ or ‘open-source’, they might just realize that paying 300 or 400 bucks (the price of their whole computer remember) just to be able to create spreadsheets and wordprocessing documents is absolutely ridiculous.

4. The terms “Low End” and “High End” are rapidly moving targets. Many of today’s mid-range laptops can easily surpass the performance of a full desktop system only a couple of years old. You could easily and quite comfortably do all the stuff I do (graphics, photography, video editing, email, blogging, surfing etc.) on a relatively low spec desktop machine these days.

Of course it’s not all smiles and sunshine. There are definite hurdles. Things like the gaming market still have to improve. If little Johnny wants to play WOW, you have to let people know that it can be done before they buy the system. Pointing them to a forum post on how to do it isn’t enough. If things like this are easily achieved in Linux (many are) somehow we have to disseminate this information. Make it known that certain games or applications can be used on Linux.

Communication is key. Not to the tech world, to the mainstream. Shout from the mountaintops that Linux can do digital photography, web surfing, email, gaming, learning and all that stuff FOR FREE, WITHOUT STEALING ANYTHING!

Perhaps this is getting a little too evangelical. But with the steady stream of Linux-based products entering the market lately, I think things are really beginning to change.

Linux-based entry level PC’s? Hell Yeah!

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