// the take
Window Maker is an X11 window manager that recreates the NEXTSTEP look and feel, built as the reference WM for the GNUstep desktop environment. It's for people who want a lightweight, visually distinct X11 setup (dock, clip, drawers) rather than a modern tiling WM or a GNOME/KDE session.
Genuinely obsessive about resource usage — the README's performance tuning section (disable icon cache via RIMAGE_CACHE, solid textures, DisableAnimations) reflects real engineering tradeoffs rather than marketing. Supports both Motif and NETWM hints, so it works as a drop-in replacement under GNOME/KDE sessions without losing their window hinting. WINGs is a standalone NEXTSTEP-style widget toolkit shipped alongside the WM, usable independently for other GNUstep apps. Decades-old, stable codebase with a dedicated config GUI (WPrefs.app) rather than just dotfiles.
This GitHub repo is explicitly a read-only mirror — real development happens on repo.or.cz and patches go through a Google Groups mailing list, so GitHub's issue/PR tooling, stars-based activity signals, and contribution workflow don't apply here. X11-only with no Wayland path, which is an increasingly hard ceiling as distros drop X11 defaults. GNUstep tie-in means you're pulling in a fairly dormant object-oriented desktop framework as a dependency chain, not just a window manager. Pure C with manual memory management across a large, old surface area (WINGs, wrlib, core WM) is a real maintenance and security-review burden for anyone wanting to patch it themselves.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →