Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

computing, Ion is a

tiling Tiling may refer to: *The physical act of laying tiles * Tessellations Computing *The compiler optimization of loop tiling *Tiled rendering, the process of subdividing an image by regular grid *Tiling window manager People *Heinrich Sylvester T ...

and tabbing

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunctio ...

for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

. It is designed such that it is possible to manage

windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

using only a

keyboard Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

, without needing a mouse. It is the successor of PWM and is written by the same author, Tuomo Valkonen. Since the first release of Ion in the summer 2000, similar alternative window management ideas have begun to show in other new window managers: Larswm, ratpoison,

StumpWM StumpWM is a tiling window manager that was created when developer Shawn Betts found ratpoison growing increasingly large and " lispy". Intended as a successor to ratpoison, StumpWM is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license. ...

wmii In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlap ...

xmonad xmonad is a dynamic window manager (tiling) for the X Window System, noted for being written in the functional programming language Haskell. Window manager Begun in March 2007, version 0.1 was announced in April 2007 as 500 lines of Haskell ...

and

dwm dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally mu ...

. First versions of Ion were released under the

Artistic License Artistic license (alongside more contextually-specific derivative terms such as poetic license, historical license, dramatic license, and narrative license) refers to deviation from fact or form for artistic purposes. It can include the alterat ...

, Ion2 and the development versions of Ion3 were released under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL). However, the first release candidate of Ion3 included a license change to a custom license based on the LGPL (specifically modified versions must not use the name ion). Since version 2, Ion has been scriptable in

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

. As of September 17, 2009, Valkonen states he is unlikely to continue development of Ion by himself. The official home page went off-line in early 2010. A fork, Notion (Not-ion), is being maintained.

Alternatives

The Notion (Not-ion) fork is actively maintained with packages available for the Linux distributions gentoo, Debian, Arch, SUSE and Fedora as well as NetBSD and Solaris (Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana). Window managers similar to ion include awesome,

, i3, larswm, and

Controversy

Tuomo Valkonen, the author of Ion, has been at the center of several controversies concerning the licensing and distribution of his software, in particular the proclivity of major

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

distributions of making outdated development versions of Ion3 (the current unstable development branch) available as part of "frozen" software repositories. Often, such versions will include patches, such as for

Xinerama Xinerama is an extension to the X Window System that enables X applications and window managers to use two or more physical displays as one large virtual display. Developed under the name ''PanoramiX'' by Madeline T. Asmus of the Digital Equipme ...

or Xft support, both of which Valkonen disapproves on professional and personal grounds and has had removed from the main source tree. Yet, such distribution would seem to imply that the patched version is the official Ion3 package maintained by Valkonen himself, which he sees as unacceptable. Valkonen has even recently become an outspoken critic of the entire

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and open-source movement (the "FOSS herd", as he refers to it) due to his perceived mistreatment at the hands of several major distributions, including

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

, Debian,

pkgsrc pkgsrc (''package source'') is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 19 ...

( NetBSD,

DragonflyBSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in ...

), and FreeBSD. On April 28, 2007, Valkonen warned the Arch Linux maintainers of possible legal action because the (unofficial) Arch User Repository contained scripts to install Ion3 with patches he did not approve of. Later on he did the same with the

maintainer of the NetBSD project and the ports maintainer of the FreeBSD project. As of December 12, 2007, the development branch of Ion, along with other software by Valkonen, was pulled from the

FreeBSD ports The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the FreeBSD operating system, providing an easy and consistent way of installing software packages. As of February 2020, there are over 38,487 ports available in the collection. It has ...

tree, after the author filed a complaint about outdated development releases still being available. Any version of Ion may still be installed from source code on any Unix system with proper libraries and dependencies. Valkonen has implied in several mailing lists that he has become completely disillusioned with, if not openly hostile toward, the free software community in general. He plans to switch to developing strictly closed-source software for the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

platform in the future. As of 2018, the author claims to have "found more worthwhile hobbies" than programming for the "Free Software movement", opining that it amounts to "bug-ridden clone ... with a centralised software distribution mechanism". Borgend, Valkonen's latest published program as of 2018, remains open-source and is compatible with Unix-like systems, including Macintosh OS X, his present operating system of choice.

References

External links

* * * (ion3 fork)
Notion web site
{{X desktop environments and window managers Lua (programming language)-scriptable software Tiling window managers X window managers

Alternatives

Controversy

See also

References

Further reading

External links