One thing you'll enjoy about Linux is the abundance of control over the look and feel of X Windows you have. This control is acquired through configuring your window manager. I'll discuss some of the popular ones and give you ideas on what to try and how to try it successfully.

FVWM is perhaps the most common window manager around that is currently shipped with Linux distributions. It is a much smaller and tighter version of twm, and in my opinion it looks a lot nicer too.

The basics of FVWM are configured in a text file that usually resides in your home directory called .fvwmrc. This file sets up the defaults for several modules, including the GoodStuff button bar, the popup menuing environment, the behavior of window buttons, and all related appearance minutia. Unless someone has already done it for you, you'll have to copy the system defaults from /etc/X11/system.fvwmrc to a .fvwmrc file yourself in your home directory. If you go through the file very carefully, you'll learn a great deal just by reading the notes. The file is very well documented.

I would practice altering your popup menus, because you'll need that customization first, and the easy success will inspire you to alter other aspects of the window manager. Next you could try altering the appearance of the GoodStuff button bar and change icons, swap programs, and even run scripts, such as your PPP or SLIP connection scripts to your ISP.

You can easily change the appearance of your title bars, the color of your desktop or your background image on your root window. You can have buttons on your windows like Windows 95, The Next Step OS, or even OS/2 Warp. Or you can create your own. There's no end to the creativity you can add to your environment.

One of the most popular window managers is called AfterStep, and it's based on the The Next Step OS by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. This WM attracts people because it is very pretty, highly configurable, and easy to customize. You can alter a file in your home directory, called .steprc, to achieve similar results as with FVWM, but you can also get really fancy. You can use the m4 macro package as a preprocessor to your .steprc file, so you can get very sophisticated in what happens when you type startx. Or you can keep it quite simple. AfterStep is very flexible.

This WM comes with a suite of very pretty 3-D icons--pixmaps under Unix X11--and it's mostly ready to run right out of the box. Or tarball, as the case may be. Version 1.0 was just released, and it's got some nifty features. For example, the button bar, called Wharf, can contain drawers of icons, and it can even launch multiple other button bars, if your're so inclined. The button bar disappears on command, which normal FVWM does not. You can run the WM in 8-bit mode if you desire, but it really looks great in 16-bit mode, though it consumes more resources that way. (If you're stingy on RAM, I'd modify AfterStep to run in 8-bit mode.) Additionally, you have all the configurability and more that you had in FVWM.

One WM that's been attracting a lot of attention lately is TheNextLevel that ships with Red Hat Software's Linux distribution. This package relies on fvwm2, fvwm95, and the m4 macro package as a preprocessor to its configuration files. It's probably the most sophisticated and most powerful of the window managers currently shipped with Linux distributions today, but it's also the most difficult to configure.

Instead of containing a single .fvwm95rc file in your home directory, it builds its configuration files from a suite of files in the /etc/X11/TheNextLevel directory. For example, the .fvwm2rc.defines file defines variables used by the m4 macros during the initialization of X Windows. The .fvwm2rc.programs and .fvwm2rc.hostmenus files define all the applications that can be launched from the applications popup menu. The .fvwm2rc.menus file defines what submenus appear on your main popup menu.

This WM takes more work than any of the others, but the default configuration already contains a lot of fancy customization. And it's already in the familiar Windows 95 interface with the ``start'' button and the taskbar at the bottom of the display. When you're ready to dig into customizing this environment, check out /usr/doc/TheNextLevel/fvwm-index.html in your distribution. This information will get you started modifying this powerful little WM.

There are lots of WMs for you to choose from. Your distribution probably comes with several. And there is no end in sight: GNU is working on the GNUStep Window environment, the ``teak'' desktop project, and many more WMs are in work from other quarters.

Whatever your choice in a WM finally turns out to be, it will probably only be temporary. Since the price is free, the urge to ``tweak'' and customize can usually only be held at bay for so long. Sooner or later you're bound to try out a different look than the one you're used to, and it will likely become an obsession. Now all we need is an alt.support.tweakers 12-step group on Usenet!