What are the drawbacks of Unix window managers?
In fairness, there’s room for improvement in Unix window managers and in X11, the software layer that orchestrates what you see on the screen. • Not all aspects of the look and feel of graphic interfaces are consistent. This is because, unlike Windows and Macintosh, there is no single set of software development standards. In Unix, there are a number of toolkits for GUIs (eg. GTK) , about 20 different window managers (eg. CDE, KDE, OpenWindows) and no one company that calls the shots. Furthermore, most Unix window managers are highly configureable (eg. www.themes.org). The downside is that things don’t always work the same way from system to system. For example, X11 has a clipboard that holds the text result of a copy or cut. (The contents of the clipboard, containing the mostrecent piece of text, can be viewed using ‘xclipboard’.) However, it is up to the individual developer to decide how, or if the application program will use the clipboard. Applications that do use the clipboard al
