Know of any more alternative desktop managers for Linux?

There are some guys I work with who use fluxbox and who use xmonad and they seem to prefer them.

fluxbox and xmonad are window managers, so they’d be alternatives to, say xfwm4 or Compiz/Emerald :)

Hmm, I need to do some research to learn the distinctions. I just use the Gnome defaults.

How would you classify enlightenment?

Also a window manager (it says on the home page as well: “Enlightenment is a window manager.”). When it draws window borders and positions the windows on the screen, it’s a window manager. When it manages your desktop (i.e. what you see between the panels), draws your wallpaper, icons on it, whateve, it’s a desktop manager (that term is almost never used… Probably because there are so few. In fact, GNOME let’s its file manager, Nautilus, handle the desktop. Xfce has a separate application for that so you could in theory use a different one, but if none is available…).

And yeah, all the terminology is confusing, but that’s mostly because you have a choice to use different applications to handle your window management (e.g. Compiz instead of GNOME’s Metacity) – in, say, Windows, I wouldn’t know what the window manager is because it’s not really considered a separate application in the first place, it’s just part of the black box that is your operating system ;-)

It was that second sentence, “Enlightenment is a desktop shell”, that I was curious about.

Come to think of it… It might be that Enlightenment did manage my desktop. In any case, I already tried that and most window managers some time in the past and didn’t really like it. I’d like to see some innovative use of the desktop :)