OpenBox is Great

I've grown disenfranchised with FluxBox. I'd been loyal, but I had some very strange issues with X/FluxBox going into a nasty freeze and the FB community was less-than-helpful.

I've tried Blackbox, and I have to say, it's too damned ugly. Admittedly, I never tried very hard at fixing that.

So today I tried OpenBox. It is a breath of fresh air. It is beautiful. It gets all my fonts right. And the more I learn about it, the better it seems. I think my first feeling of excitement came from reading the OpenBox "about" page:

Openbox works with your applications, and makes your desktop easier to manage. This is because the approach to its development was the opposite of what seems to be the general case for window managers. Openbox was written first to comply with standards and to work properly. Only when that was in place did the team turn to the visual interface.

Finally, a WM with it's head on straight.

The behavior is way more configurable than any WM I've seen before, because anything you can imagine is specifiable through an XML configuration file. While the difficulty of setting up a simple menu with XML is not easily overlooked, tools like denu greatly simplify the process.

One of the things that most impressed me was that they made a point of complying with freedesktop.org standards. If the post-fd.o world is really this well-done, the Free world will finally be a wonderful thing.