For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the “classic” default window manager of twm. However, it’s been showing its age for a long time now.
In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features – the primary advantages are that it’s still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that’s much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.
The ctwm website has more information for those interested.
In my limited experience twm was weird and painful even 20 years ago. At the very least it uses desktop idioms that I haven’t seen anywhere else (motif, maybe?). It blows my minds that NetBSD was still defaulting to it until this year.
I’m not so surprised it was still default, but I am surprised they didn’t have a more useful default config.
twm is extremely flexible, and as a result, rather powerful, if you put the config work in. Searching for twmrc on Google provides a lot of cool and interesting examples. The standard Xorg default config isn’t very useful though.
In one place I worked, I used to like leaving it as the default WM for root. That way if ever any of the people wanted to login as root and do something silly like browse with it, it’d be painful and discorage them quickly. Worked rather well actually given a few people’s comments of “ahh stuff it.. going back to my desktop.”
The CTWM “themes” page is a treasure trove of the early 00s. The “Windows 98”-lookalike does not look very much like Windows 98 (compared to icewm, which is also a relict that has aged well). And there’s Netscape in the screenshots!