X11 WINDOWING ENVIRONMENT

• Twm is the ugliest, most rudimentary window manager, but is the least likely to change. So if you are looking for stability and are not interested in having many useful features, this is your best choice.
• Mwm is the buggiest, slowest, least configurable, and which takes up the most memory on the machine. We recommend against it, especially since fvwm can be configured to provide the same look&feel.
• OpenWindows is the Sun product that implements an OpenLook look-and-feel. It was very good looking, and much better to work with than Motif, although still pretty heavy on memory usage. However, you should avoid it since it is being discontinued by Sun.
• FVWM and FVWM95 are two public domain window managers which are very stable, fast, featureful and at the same time have a relatively small memory footprint. Which one you choose is a matter of personal taste, since they both have the same core functionality and features (and share more than 95% of the code). FVWM95 has a few more bells and whistles, as it tries to provide the look & feel of a certain popular PC windowing environment.

  If you will be working on an Xterminal or a workstation you should look at the man pages for xinit and X. The best way to set up your environment is to speak to other users and find out what they prefer, then read other users' configuration files for tips.