X window manager

Standardized protocols exist to allow normal clients to communicate with the window manager.

The original one is Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) but this has been superseded by the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH).

This results in the appearance familiar to many users in which windows act a little bit like pieces of paper on a desktop, which can be moved around and allowed to overlap.

In contrast to compositing window managers (see below), the lack of separate off-screen buffers can mean increased efficiency, but effects such as translucency are not possible.

Tiling window managers include awesome, dwm, ion, larswm, ratpoison, Stumpwm, wmii, i3, xmonad, and XWEM.

For this reason, some window managers for X do not support compositing by default, such as Openbox.Compositing in Lubuntu Historically, the Amiga in 1985, OSX in 2001, Java Looking Glass in 2003, and the Windows Longhorn demo in 2003 (delayed until Vista in 2007) preceded compositing efforts under X11.

A number of virtual window managers have been made, including FVWM, Tvtwm, HaZe[2] and others.