FVWM-Crystal

This is the look of FVWM-Crystal desktop after first startup. On top of the screen you can see a panel with available applications, pager, panel for minimized windows and systray (notification area) called "trayer". Panels on the bottom show currently visible windows. Right-click on the desktop will open new terminal window.

Because many elements on the desktop are transparent, wallpaper is very important. Crystal provides a menu from where you can select a wallpaper, either directly or randomly, from many places in your system. You can see also typical window deocration with "Close" buttons on both ends of the titlebar - click on one of them with RMB, and window will minimize.

With a little effort you can imitate different desktop environments, for example MS Windows. That way FVWM-Crystal can be easily used by both new and advanced Linux users. You can see here built-in MPD playlist editor and Crystal's Preferences menu which allows you to modifiy basic settings of your desktop. For visual quality, Crystal uses icons from Tango Desktop Project in the menus and application categories.

Crystal has specially configured terminal called "Quake Console". You can show or hide it by pressing Alt+` (grave). It's accessible on all desktops and can be resized, if neccessary. This "desktop recipe" is called Dock and resembles the look & feel of MacOS X Dock or XFCE panel. You can see here thumbnails of minimized windows, they are enabled in some of the recipes.

You can control various music players using built-in music control functions - dedicated menu, panel buttons and keybindings. Currently supported players are: MPD, XMMS, XMMS2, Quod Libet and cdcd, with different level of support depending on the commands available in the player. You can also select your preferred audio mixer - currently you can choose betweeen built-in control in your music player or aumix mixer.

NEMO has added GNOME menu to the Crystal's main menu, changed the icon theme from Tango to GNOME default, and created simple calendar (top right corner) with capabilities of taking and tracking TODO notes and fetching selected daily comic strips. He also modified gnome-panel to look&feel like FVWM-Crystal's panel and made some cosmetic changes to Defalut recipe.