
The Antidesktop (2002) - yankcrime
http://web.archive.org/web/20021201230839/http://palm.freshmeat.net/articles/view/581/
======
zafiro17
This is parenthetical to the discussion, but reading this article made me
deeply nostalgic for 15 years ago, when we still had Freshmeat and Slashdot
was decent and Mozilla was fresh and the web was largely full of information,
not javascript.

Back on topic, I wrote this back in 2006: "What's old is new again, the quest
for distraction-free writing"
([http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-
is-...](http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/181-Whats-Old-is-New-Again-
the-Quest-for-Distraction-Free-Writing.html)). The topic remains relevant, and
maybe more relevant than ever. It's super hard to arrange time and materials
and commitments so that you can concentrate deeply on the task before you. We
are perhaps not making much progress.

~~~
Yetanfou
Back then there was Freshmeat, now there is Github (et al). In that respect I
think things actually improved, especially given the ease with which git
allows others to fork repositories, safeguarding against site disappearance.
Given the distributed nature of git even the eventual disappearance - or total
sellout - of Github (et al) will not diminish this as those who want can host
their own repositories in a few minutes using the likes of Gogs/Gitea or
Gitlab.

Slashdot was fun while it lasted, there have been several attempts at a
restart of similar communities (Soylent News etc.) but as far as I know none
have managed to create the same 'feel of community'. Maybe that is because
there is no real community?

Anyway, with more and more people getting access to true broadband the
possibilities of decentralised hosting only increase so I still have some
hopes for the future when it comes to building something interesting outside
of the walled-and-fenced big-data farms so popular nowadays.

------
xelxebar
My setup is remarkably similar: Xmonad and tmux.

I only reluctantly leave the command line and feel like I only have X so I can
have a reasonable browser.

And I kind of loathe all the popular browsers because I feel crippled without
my cli tools and ability to script up solutions to my problems. Uzbl is the
only browser that feels like I'm still in the cli but just happen to also have
a window that renders the web.

~~~
davidbanham
I used to be a heavy tmux user on OSX but stopped since I started using
xmonad. I was mostly using it to organise terminal windows and that was now
xmonad's job. (I run everything locally on my laptop. I prefer not having to
worry about maintaining multiple machines)

May I ask what you find yourself using tmux for within xmonad? I'm curious
what I may be missing out on.

~~~
xenihn
How do you use xmonad on OSX? From what I've seen, most people use native
clients that re-create the functionality of xmonad.

~~~
davidbanham
Oh, I don't. I switched back to Linux.

~~~
giggles_giggles
story of my life

------
vidarh
That's quite similar. I use i3wm, and usually keep most applications
maximized. I have a bunch of keybindings to start Chrome, start new terminals
etc., including some that start ssh sessions to specific servers and attached
to a suitable screen session (my home server has several screen sessions with
different configs and different coloured status lines running for different
projects).

Every now and again I split the screen, but rarely in more than two.

With screen sessions running on my home server for most of my projects, I can
also detach and close them and/or reboot my laptop and not lose state, so e.g.
at the moment I just have one Chrome window and one screen session open (on
separate virtual desktops).

I have a shortcut to bring up Nautilus to manage files, but I use it so rarely
I often forget the shortcut (I've got a keybinding to bring up a help file).

~~~
djsumdog
I started using i3 back around 2012 I think. I had tried a couple of other
tiling window managers (awesome, xmonad, etc).

I occasionally try new ones every couple of months if I start using a new
machine or laptop, but I keep coming back to i3. It feels like it's the
easiest to use/deal with and I like the tree/stack way it handles windows.

Having used a tiling window manager for years, I don't ever want to go back to
overlapping windows. Even when I have to use my Windows machine, I tend to
keep everything full screen in each workspace.

~~~
vidarh
Yeah, I used Ion for a year or so around 2000, but then went back to a more
normal setup because I felt there were too many limitations (e.g. things like
Gimp was a nightmare), but what has happened since is that I use fewer and
fewer native apps, so I'm now down to mostly browser windows and terminals and
that has made it a lot easier to get a tiling setup that works great, and now
I don't want to give it up.

When I started using i3wm it was after a couple of years of realising I was
running everything maximised anyway.

------
sedachv
I started using EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager, a few weeks ago, and it is
by far my favorite window manager yet. It is the ultimate anti-desktop: all
windows just become Emacs buffers. Since terminal windows are just Emacs
buffers, managing terminal windows is exactly like managing X windows.

After almost 20 years of: Enlightenment, Blackbox, Window Maker, StumpWM (only
tiling window manager I could stand to use until EXWM), too much twm, Openbox
most recently, and a few others I forget, EXWM feels really refreshing.

[https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm](https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm)

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
There's an Emacs WM, but not a decent text editor yet?

~~~
zamalek
Linus has more polishing yet to do.

~~~
kobeya
You mean RMS?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Possibly a reference to microEmacs, of which Linus maintains his own fork
(though the last commit was in 2014) [1].

[1]
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/editors/uemacs/uemacs.git/)

------
shubb
I tried this a while ago - its okay so long as you are doing specific, limited
activities.

If you need to explore beyond the things that you have already figured out for
to do it slows you down. Websites you need don't work in lynx, Android dev is
slower to pick up console first, etc. People expect you to see the pictures
and word docs on your mail, or contact you via WhatsApp.

You figure your way round these one by one, or give up after an hour and use
the normal tool. And then onto tomorrows new distraction.

Eventually this is a time sink.

~~~
bitwize
Um.

He's running X with a minimalist tiling wm with only one window at a time, not
trying to live through a VT100.

Of course, some Hackernews is now going to tell me about how this setup falls
down hard when you need to do _real_ work and how sensible people just use KDE
or GNOME -- or Windows.

~~~
dsr_
It's probably a little difficult running GIMP for photo editing. GIMP wants a
half-dozen windows open at the same time to get much done.

Personally, I like having a few widgets on-screen all the time - a clock, a
volume control - and I enjoy having two or three things open on-screen: a
terminal and a browser, for instance, or two terminals ssh'ing to different
machines. Having lots of display area helps. Pretty much every window manager
can handle this, and it's just a matter of figuring out which one gets out of
my way fastest.

~~~
rhblake
Many tiling WMs (e.g. i3, xmonad) support floating windows. Also, GIMP
supports single-window mode these days.

~~~
milesrout
Even dwm supports floating windows.

------
VA3FXP
I'll chime in with a "met too!".

i3 + tmux (it's the only sane way to manage servers.)

I'm a sysadmin (not a developer like most of the HN crowd) so I usually have
10+ terminal windows open (depending on what project(s) I am working on.

I think it would make for an interesting poll to see what the demographics are
like for the 'power-user' crowd that exists here.

~~~
jclulow
I'm a software engineer, and I have many terminals open as well. I've been
using iTerm2 (with splits) on OS X, but with the awful new Macbooks I'm
finally looking at heading back to xterm and dwm on Linux -- I miss it dearly!

------
lvh
After ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is
actively developed. [1]

Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window
managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path;
Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager)
does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane
endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing,
popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2]

I'll miss hacking the good hack.

[1]: [https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm](https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm)
[2]: [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway)

~~~
suvelx
One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM is
actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver.

So if you want to use Sway, you better get used to configuring your displays
in a config file.

What about applications that need to set environment variables (e.g. gpg-
agent, gnome-keyring) how do you launch them if your compositor doesn't launch
and export them for you? (That said, I still can't work out where gnome-shell
decides to launch gnome-keyring-daemon on login)

Ideally, I'd like a DE that provides display/audio/power/menu management, but
with a (manual) tiling compositor that supports window stacking/tabbing (like
i3/sway). And bonus points if it has a sloppy floating-desktop mode.

Shelltile kinda works, but shits the bed when applications set window size
hints, and there's no window stacking/tabbing.

~~~
bitwize
> One thing I've noticed (and irritates me) about Wayland is how now your WM
> is actually effectively now your DE and your Xserver.

A deliberate design decision intended to keep context switches off the hot
path.

It's one of those "just trust me; this way really is better" things. You're
sacrificing very little to get an improved graphics stack.

~~~
rrix2
You're sacrificing composability, one of the biggest things that makes
GNU/Linux so powerful in my mind. Right now, I'm running AwesomeWM embedded in
a KDE session. As a result, I have a lean tiling window manager which I can
configure to my liking, and a bunch of shit that I don't care about to that
same level "just works" and is integrated in to the session like display
management, network connectivity, even notifications daemon are a problem on
other minimalist desktops that would have to be fully reimplemented for each
Wayland WM.

------
zeveb
I'm similar, but with StumpWM instead of ratpoison (it was written by
ratpoison's creator), tmux instead of screen, and st instead of gnome-
terminal.

I will never, _ever_ go back to a windowed desktop. This just works way too
well for me. I feel like I can focus, and I never, ever have to drag a window.

It's pretty awesome.

------
krupan
So using screen or tmux means your non-gui apps keep running when you
disconnect from your server, but what about X apps? I've been using xpra for
the past few months for tmux-like functionality with GUI apps. It's /pretty/
good, but rough around the edges.

~~~
fest
Thanks for mentioning xpra. I have always wanted something like that but
hadn't ever thought about searching for "screen for X11".

~~~
vidarh
It's great, but it's basically "VNC for individual windows" and suffers many
of the same issues - window updates happens according to the redraw algorithm
of XPRA, rather than in the sequence carried out by the application, and the
application doesn't wait on the rendering. That said I've been able to play
back full screen full HD video on my several years old laptop via XPRA with
minimal jerking or tearing, so it's not a major problem.

------
kakwa_
I think we are a lot here using "minimal" tilling window managers.

At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are using
minimal setups (not so representative I know).

Personally I use dwm with some shell scripts: [https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-
desktop](https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop)

It fits my need well and I adapt it to new version once in a while, not a lot
of time spent maintaining my configuration.

By the way, I love suckless projects
([http://suckless.org/](http://suckless.org/)), one of my favorites is dmenu,
so simple yet so efficient.

I also like surf, but I'm a bit too lazy to switch from chromium.

~~~
kentt
> At least in the representative sample of 5 linux users around me, 3 are
> using minimal setups (not so representative I know).

Agreed, but I know of precious few WM users who went back to a DE. It feels
like it would be 100 more effort to do DE->WM then it was to do WM->DE.

------
haddr
The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most
open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if
this still have the same spirit.

~~~
rsync
"but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is
advertised now on www.openhub.net"

I don't understand this comment ...

First, my experience is that most open source software is now on github.

Second, I feel that github is infinitely better in every way than freshmeat
was.

~~~
djsumdog
Github is nice, but it's not quite the same. Freshmeat was more about new
releases and discovery. It was the daily list of new ideas (some terrible ..)
and software updates in the open source world. Today Github alone doesn't do
that. It's more like GitHub + Hackernews or Reddit or some other aggregation
site to show you what's new and neat or updated.

There was a lot of dreaming during that time (late 90s/early 2000s) of what we
could accomplish in the OSS communities. Slowly community projects became part
of foundations or startup/corporate controlled. Gimp never took the place of
Photoshop, and many of the lofty ideas about open source really started to
fade:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-
source-...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-
community-and-enterprise-software/)

------
chc4
I've been using a tiling WM for a while now, and it's pretty great. Most of
the programs I use are in the terminal (urxvt with a pretty color scheme and
font, unlike the OP), switching workspaces for different programs is just nice
to use, and everything is minimal. I'd encourage everyone to check out
/r/unixporn at least once.

I use a fairly boring WM, too. spectrwm doesn't have a lot of config, it Just
Werks, and lately I've been using a WM in wrote myself in Rust.

------
partycoder
Some less popular alternatives not seen in this thread yet:

\- twin, vwm (curses based window manager)

\- dvtm (similar to tmux)

There is plenty of stuff you can do without X. Some of them:

\- Web browsing (e.g: lynx, links, etc)

\- music (e.g: mp3blaster)

\- videos, surprisingly (e.g: mplayer + aalib)

~~~
icebraining
aalib is amazing, but you can also use fbdev, which gives you regular video
playback:
[https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m](https://youtu.be/WgFfKpGK2Pg?t=7m)

~~~
partycoder
Yes but this can be used in the context of terminals (e.g: inside a tmux pane)

------
cracoucax
There are currently 2 usable OSx tiling window managers :

\- KWM
[https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm](https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm) \-
Amethyst [https://ianyh.com/amethyst/](https://ianyh.com/amethyst/)

I stopped using Linux on the desktop before tiling WMs were a thing, and was
kinda fascinated by what i read about them, as i've always seen the
overlapping windows GUI idea as somewhat broken. (what's the use of a window
if it's even partially hidden, appart from clutter ??)

Well those 2 projets really bring tiling to osx, not just as in "resize
windows with a shortcut" like spectacles, etc, but as the real i3/xmonad deal
: windows are mostly managed for you, using a BSP for kwm.

I use kwm, it's beta quality, it has a few issues and i spent a few evenings
tinkering to wrap my head about the concepts but ... it works, and it rocks !

Suddenly I can have 10 usable windows on my dual screen setup, focus follow
mouse, etc. It feels so much peaceful having everything on your screen that
being searching for windows all the time...

------
GuB-42
Minimalist window managers are cool but unless you have a very specific
workflow it tends to create more problems than it solves.

X11 apps are usually designed with a typical, windows-like environment in mind
and tweaks may be required to accommodate for an unusual desktop environment,
if at all possible.

Typical problems can be :

\- The title bar isn't visible, and there is important information in it

\- No system tray, which can mean no menu and no notifications

\- Normally small windows displaying full screen (ex : GIMP)

\- Key binding conflicts between the window manager and the app in use

------
owenversteeg
Wow, I had a surprisingly similar setup almost exactly ten years after the
author posted that - even down to the gnome-terminal. Recently though I've
switched to i3 and xterm, because for some reason gnome-terminal has broken on
my system.

For anyone who's reading this, I highly encourage you to try i3 (a tiling wm
similar to that in the article.) It even gives you a guide on keystrokes on
first setup, and it's by far the most efficient for me.

------
michaelbuckbee
Reading this it makes sense as a highly productive system for a time when the
screen size was small monitor.

I keep wanting an Apple/Windows/Linux manager that really embraces the
flexibility and size of a giant 4k screen (I'm using a 55" 4k TV as a monitor
that's cheap in both current and real dollars than the 21" monitor I had in
2002).

I've hacked together a system that works well for me on OS X with Divvy, but
it still feels non optimal.

~~~
jeromenerf
Tiling window managers on X11 are great on all sizes and number of monitors.
They just allow to conveniently arrange windows on a grid, in a manual or
dynamic fashion, with some handy functions to access and manage those windows.

You can try using one for terminals on xquartz for osx. There is nothing close
for non-X windows. The hardest part is to pick one ;)

------
rrdharan
Surprised that no one has pointed out this is nearly exactly the experience
you get with a tablet + keyboard - and in fact the viewable screen/real estate
probably lines up quite well with what a desktop gave you in 2002.

That having been said, I tried using an iPad+bluetooth keyboard for a little
while as a "workstation" and the inability to switch or launch apps from the
keyboard doomed it for me.

~~~
ashark
You can use search (which is what I use to launch apps even on the desktop)
and switch apps from a keyboard on the iPad. Could you not do it at the time
you tried? Even my iPhone can do most of what I need—if only it had mouse
support for Remote Desktop sessions my 7plus, at a native resolution of 1080p
and with an hdmi adapter, would make a decent workstation (supported by remote
Linux boxes, of course). They crippled keyboard support on it so I can't
switch apps like an iPad can, but even so Search is a semi-serviceable app
switcher.

------
jim-jim-jim
I remember reading this back in the day and eventually winding up using a wm
called ion3 instead of ratpoison. There wasn't much that set it apart from the
other tiling wms and I forget why I liked it the best.

Apparently the dev had a bad experience with open source and refused to
continue working on it or something like that. I don't think it's around
anymore.

~~~
wowtip
Iirc ion3 was one of few tiling WMs at the time, that handled multi window
applications, such as GIMP in a usable way.

------
transitorykris
Full size split screen in MacOS is where I spend my time doing dev work.
Visual Studio Code with the terminal extension and Chrome (I only wish I could
do something like the author shows to get iTerm2 in there). I find this keeps
me focused and productive without things getting in the way or unnecessary
windows causing a distraction.

------
davidgerard
I ran an all-macho desktop with twm for a while. I rapidly went back to full-
service KDE 3.

~~~
kentt
Why?

~~~
davidgerard
'Cos it got to be a nuisance, and once I added another 512MB to the box full-
service KDE 3.0 (this was 2002) wasn't an eternity of thrashing :-)

What I ask of a desktop is not to annoy me while I'm doing stuff. Presently
very happy with Xfce and desperately hoping they don't fall prey to the awful
concept of "desktop innovation".

------
zelos
I remember being at my most productive on a similar setup - ratpoison on a
SparcStation 5. No distractions, no notifications and paging the web browser
back in took about a minute, so no quickly checking Slashdot.

------
soufron
Basically, he's using only full screen apps... hence the "window" manager is
more of a "focus" manager. It's the perfect setup.

------
signa11
ah the desktop/wm wars. sometime ago (> 15 years) i got fvmw working just so,
and haven't looked back. though i have tried almost everything under the sun,
including (but not limited to) afterstep, window-maker, litestep, cde, kde,
gnome etc. etc.

i just keep coming back to fvwm again and again. the hobbit within me would
say "there and back again" ;)

~~~
bitwize
Unfortunately, X is headed for the shitpile of history and fvwm has no Wayland
equivalent.

~~~
signa11
this conversation in fvwm forum in 2k13 seems relevant:
[http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010](http://www.fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3010)

seems like even with wayland, X will not be ripped out, and window-managers
can run alongsides (ref:
[https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4))

~~~
bitwize
This info is old. Right now the goal is to deprecate X and move everybody to
Wayland, except for legacy Motif apps and the like which can't be migrated.
The major modern toolkits -- GTK and Qt -- will remove X11 support some time
in the future.

~~~
signa11
hmm, have you looked at this:
[https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html)
, where they talk about running _any_ Xclient on wayland ?

~~~
bitwize
XWayland is only a stopgap/transition tool. Maintainers want to maintain as
few code paths as possible; ideally one per platform. For toolkits that will
be Wayland, not X11, once Wayland reaches critical mass.

X11 is deprecated.

------
druuu
I use dwm for window manager, st(simple terminal) as terminal. They are more
light weight than gnome-terminal and ratpoison.

------
Ajedi32
> there is an element of obscurity to the system that can protect from a
> friend who wants to play a practical joke when I walk away. I keep xlock on
> "^O x", but even if I step away from the keyboard without locking it,
> someone stepping in tends to be confused by a screen that shows no "close"
> buttons and a keyboard set to Dvorak.

Kinda reminds me of [https://xkcd.com/1806/](https://xkcd.com/1806/)

~~~
milesrout
Yeah. Mildly funny story: a friend of mine and I installed dwm on our Linux
users on the computers at university. Nobody else had a clue how to access
them. We would constantly edit each others' PATH and bashrc in various
prankish ways, which culminated in him accidentally locking himself entirely
out of his own profile in an attempt to stop me from accessing it. Every
command he tried, everything he tried to do, just got the rather succinct
message 'Fuck off'. He had fun explaining that one to the sysadmins.

One of the nice things about Linux is that you can do this. Download and
compile dwm, put it in $HOME/bin, edit ~/.xinitrc to run it, and Bob's your
uncle.

Oh and the university also had xauth open on every computer, which meant that
you could ssh into any other machine in the room and simply run 'DISPLAY=:0
firefox lemonparty.com' whenever someone turned their head away from their
computer for a second. I wonder if they've ever fixed that.

------
shocks
awesome + tmux, spacemacs, and ff with vimperator. I can go hours without
touching the mouse.

~~~
mrkgnao
s/awesome\\(.*\\)perator/xmonad\1fx/ for me.

------
fiatjaf
"Copyright notice: All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the
property and responsibility of its author; for reprint rights, please contact
the author directly."

Why would anyone care to print this out on the top of the page, right after
the first sentence, destroying the text formatting?

------
redsummer
A lot of dev folks should (in theory) be able to get away with just having a
browser on one side of the screen and a CLI terminal with tmux on the other.
Both windows with tabs, and fixed in position.

What kind of setup should be used for this? I know I can do this with split
screens on the Mac. But is there a minimal Linux setup which provides this
kind of experience?

~~~
betenoire
I work almost exclusively with this setup: Dual split screens, shell on left,
browser on right.

The reason I comment is to share what took me too long to realize. If you want
to resize the two full screen apps, the experience is much smoother if your
browser is in focus first. Click browser, then drag to resize.

Something to do with the terminal trying to keep to character-width bounds, I
think.

~~~
redsummer
Are you using mac or Linux? If Linux, what window manager?

~~~
ooqr
Cinnamon is a nice desktop environment. I figure if you like Mac window
management, why not try Cinnamon? You get keyboard shortcuts for pushing
windows around.

~~~
betenoire
Someday I'll be back on Linux. Inertia keeps me where I am right now.

------
redsummer
I'm drawn to this kind of setup, but I'm aware that there is an element of
techno-machoism to it. It can seem more aspirational than useful.

~~~
vidarh
If you want to avoid the techno-machoism (did you mean machoism or masochism?
I thought you meant the latter, but realised it works either way though with
different implications), find a tiling window manager that supports making
windows floating, as that's really the one thing that is sometimes painful
with some of them - if you e.g. start an application that opens tons of small
windows (gimp used to be one of the great test cases for this - though now you
can run gimp with few windows if you want).

But for me I picked a setup liked this because I was simulating it with a
regular WM anyway by running almost everything maximised because that's how I
liked it. I was happy to squint at tiny text when I was younger, and I used to
care more about having a desktop that looked cool, and spent endless time on
themes etc., but I got tired of it, and now I want functional. I still care
that it looks good, but with less window-chrome there's less effort involved:
I have a background image that's part visible behind my terminals; I have a
theme I like for Chrome etc., and that's about it.

If you meant machoism: This kind of set up is far less flashy and in your
face. If you mean masochism: For me at least this setup has removed friction
and lowered the effort of managing windows, not increased it. I'm not using
this setup to make this unnecessarily austere and minimal, but to remove stuff
that got in my way.

I can understand the feeling though: It _used_ to be painful to run these kind
of setups. When the article was written there was definitively more
applications that worked poorly with that generation of tiling window managers
etc.

~~~
redsummer
I meant macho - as in a hairy-chested man hunting for animals with a simple
spear (shell, tmux). Versus getting a microwave meal from the supermarket and
slobbing out on the sofa (GUI). Such things are on my mind after I posted a
couple of things about what approach was best:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890342)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13919186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13919186)

I'm starting to believe more in 'no pain, no gain'

~~~
vidarh
See, the thing is I don't see the shell/tmux/screen/tiling window manager as
the tough option. It's not depriving you of anything any more. There's no
pain.

If I wanted pain, I'd use a desktop environment.

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jlebrech
why not directfb?

