I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011.
I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
I use this on my desktop. Started out as a curiosity but stayed once I realized it brought back more familiar icons such as the notepad and terminal icons. Clean start menu design too.
I remember this being installed on the unix workstations in the undergraduate engineering computer labs. The default option was CDE, but CDE was slow. You could pick fvwm2 or fvwm95. I liked fvwm2 better and theme it however you liked. I remember people running xsnow this time of year.
This was a good one, but icewm was one better. FVWM2 went on to FVWM3, and FVWM95 was encouraged by power users and developers to stop being used in favor of FVWM3
fvwm is still one of the default graphical environments in Slackware (even in -current), and fvwm95 came packaged for some time, too. Now fvwm95 is no longer part of the basic Slackware distribution but there's a SlackBuild for it:
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
I have used a version of this called Qvwm, and even had branched it off at some point to fix some bugs... https://ahinea.com/en/tech/qvwm/
(I don't think github existed at the time or maybe I didn't know about it.)
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
I'm using KDE since 3.x days, and still use the same setup, same controls and same workflows in KDE 6.x. It's just more modern and hardware accelerated.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts.
Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
The fact that almost anybody could make a Window Manager on X lead to a tremendous amount of experimentation and variety. Almost all of them were half baked and faded to obscurity, but it was a lot of fun to try them out. Also, if your bar is "better than TWM" then it's a pretty easy target to hit. These days the level of effort to even get to the baseline is way higher, one dude in a weekend can't try out some crazy idea.
It's pretty visually accurate, fonts notwithstanding. It even reproduces the slight gap between maximize and close that existed all the way back to the earliest Win95 builds with the "new" window style
This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.
It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
I ran this at one time but it was a bit unstable. I remember corresponding with one of the authors who remarked that it was also attempting to emulate the stability of Windows 95. This was ... oh gawd ... back in 1997 or 1998 I think.
Does anyone remember MPX? It was a set of patches on top of X11 that let two people use one computer at the same time. Two mouse pointers for two mice, and two keyboards for input. It was super fun in a dorm environment (I was at Random hall at the time) to browse the Internet with friends. I wonder what it works take to revive it for Wayland.
It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.
I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window
There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)
This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop.
It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.
And the Windows 1.0 UI [1] looks really similar to Mac OS (especially dialogs and buttons), so apparently Microsoft pilfered their UI design from Steve Jobs's companies not only once but twice.
> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded.
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes very obvious when you open the app, and all of the Finder windows and desktop icons disappear.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
Amiga also had explicit close buttons very early, Mac-style (and also had full pre-emptive multitasking in its very earliest days, which happened in 1984). I've seen pre-release screenshots of revision 24.24 of Workbench that had them (for reference, v1.0 of WB was approximately revision 30, 24.24 was in the era of the Velvet prototype where the system couldn't fully bootstrap itself)
Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.
The thing that the earliest Macs lacked was multitasking (outside of desk accessories). It took until Hertzfeld created Switcher before you could run more than one full Mac app at a time, and even that required 512K RAM.
(I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.)
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
Early GEM allowed arbitrary window sizing and positioning at least within the file manager, and Apple thus sued them, because they felt they had exclusive rights to ideas that they stole from Xerox
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
And you will be perpetuating ridiculous flame wars from the 1980's until the day you die, as is the nature of such users. For sure Amiga nuts are the worst.
I guess I should give up. The point here, which everyone insists on ignoring, is that to the general computer using population, even the reasonably expert Linux one, "Window Management" was an oddball soup of mostly failed ideas and experiments until Microsoft Windows 95 showed us all how it should work. And we all absorbed those ideas instantly and continue to use them to this very day. And FVWM95 was very much of a piece with that moment.
I mean, there's a reason why the Linux community in the mid-90's didn't all flock around clones of DRI GEM or AmigaOS. You get that, right?
I didn't flame at all in my comment. I just recounted the history, as it's known to have happened.
Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.
GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
A Radius two page display was just not that expensive. Neither was a Mac II. By 1992, you could buy a Mac IIci for $2900 and a TPD for $900-1100. You couldn't buy it on your allowance but it was reasonably common.
> Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.
It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
Well, the standard window title bar still does. But with so many apps implementing their own borders, it's a bit of a crapshoot if it (or the window menu itself) will work with many apps. Even Microsoft apps sometimes forget, like Teams (of course...).
And that answer is precisely why (1) Windows 95 was such a revelation to the market and (2) nerds like us remain oblivious to that[1] even three decades on.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments?
You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
Glad to see it's still around.
Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517
The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
By then I was already into other window managers.
While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.
https://ice-wm.org/
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!
https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...
Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.
It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
You don't need to know Spanish, the screenshots speak from thelselves.
The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.
https://www.circlemud.org/
I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
Usage:
Test:It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
[1] https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/1.00/
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
And you will be perpetuating ridiculous flame wars from the 1980's until the day you die, as is the nature of such users. For sure Amiga nuts are the worst.
I guess I should give up. The point here, which everyone insists on ignoring, is that to the general computer using population, even the reasonably expert Linux one, "Window Management" was an oddball soup of mostly failed ideas and experiments until Microsoft Windows 95 showed us all how it should work. And we all absorbed those ideas instantly and continue to use them to this very day. And FVWM95 was very much of a piece with that moment.
I mean, there's a reason why the Linux community in the mid-90's didn't all flock around clones of DRI GEM or AmigaOS. You get that, right?
Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.
GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
The finder was always a multi-window interface.
I just don't know where your memory is from.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.