Ancient Web: Suzanne Britton Saved Her Fvwm Desktop History

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most old desktop screenshots are saved because somebody thought their computer looked good. Suzanne Britton saved enough of hers to explain an entire change of mind about Linux window managers.

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The site is a personal collection of nature photographs, word games, small programs, and experiments. Its most time-specific exhibit is My Quest for the Perfect Window Manager, a detailed, funny account of trying to make the X Window System pleasant to use.

Britton begins with a strong dislike for Fvwm. Her early university workstations had unfriendly desktops; an installation of Red Hat Linux made matters worse with complicated configuration files, intrusive colors, and a badly behaved focus policy. She retreated to the terminal until KDE 1.1.2 showed her that a Linux desktop could feel comfortable.

The desktop as a personal construction project

The piece then follows a tour through KDE, GNOME, and Fvwm again. It mentions Red Hat 6.2, KDE 2.2.2, a PII 333 machine, and Slackware—very specific hardware and software details that place much of the narrative in the early 2000s.

After several experiments, she returned to Fvwm and tailored it into a personal desktop with tiny applets, wallpapers, and custom scripts. The page's succession of screenshots is more useful than a polished retrospective would be: it lets readers see the actual configurations changing as the author learns what she wants from a computer.

Britton added a note in June 2014 saying the article was already more than ten years old and that she still used Fvwm. The follow-up becomes another period document: the desktop survived, but individual little programs and hardware assumptions changed.

The related configuration archive still lists an Fvwm configuration file and Perl scripts for themes and desktop menus. Britton warns that these were personal tools, not tested software packages for current installations.

Elsewhere on the homepage, a Java Turing-machine simulator remains posted with instructions and source code. Britton explicitly says the old applets are kept for historical reasons even though contemporary browsers can no longer execute them normally.

That is unusually good preservation practice for a personal page: explain what still exists, acknowledge what no longer works, and leave the source where future tinkerers can examine it.

Read the illustrated window-manager memoir and browse the saved configs.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.