Help with WM choice and some apps.

[sdfg]

Ok, here's the situation.

I've used Gentoo loads in the past, and my server is the most stable I've ever seen it after installing Gentoo on it (although I don't recommend SSHing in from uni and stupidly doing rm -r *.* from / - not fun.)

However, I have a new shiny laptop. I tried to put gentoo on it before, but it actually fell over and restarted when trying to compile X (which still confuses me). But I'm going to give it a go.

My questions are these:

What WM can I use that will allow me to have a Brushed Metal theme (from OS X - I know this is most of them, but keep reading) including the shadows, and anti-aliased text but without that stupid sodding menu bar at the top?

Are there any Docking programs that behave pretty much exactly like Object Dock? I hate seeing anything on my screen other than a few tiny icons for running programs, and the windows themselves. Everything else can hide off the screen till I want them.

Am I right in thinking that QT is theme-able? So the inside of windows and pop windows and things like that are themed as well? (This goes on from my hunt for a Brushed Metal look over everything


Before anyone shouts at me, I've spent all day yesterday and this morning searching through the packages tree and visiting the homepage for all compatible WMs, but nothing seems to mention what I need. I don't know much about QT (in fact, I don't even quite know exactly what it is!). Searching through the forums doesn't help either.

I used to run fluxbox, and it still seems to be the best bet, but I don't think it can do the shadows?

Meh. I just want the visual appearance of OS X, through any means. I can get it on Windows, but it's such a hog.

Specs:

Athlon 64 3200
512 DDR
Radeon 9000 Mobile

Thanks in advance - the sooner I can get rid of Windows completely, the happier I'll be.

[mark_alec]

Use KDE with the Baghira theme. For a dock, try KXDocker.

[Specialized]

To get the real OSX look you should take a look at XGL or AIGLX. But as the author said it is experimental-stadium.
The windowmanager to get the benefits is compiz.
If you just want the brushed theme, maybe baghira can be a possibility, use it with gnome and the starterbar-desklet and you've got a look that is quite close to Mac OSX. On [url]art.gnome.org[/url] are some Themes for Metacity to get Mac OsX look.
For Fluxbox there are also some brushed themes: http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/fluxaqua/ http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/lintherbrushed/
QT is a C++-Framework. KDE uses the QT-libs.
I hope this helps a bit.

[sdfg]

Yeah, thanks guys! I've been looking at this, and damn is that sexy! That's exactly the kind of look, and also bonus functionality I want (I've been dreaming of a decent 3d desktop for years).

Only thing though, is that all available for amd64? I can't find it anywhere in the packages tree.

[widremann]

If your graphics card supports EXA and COMPOSITE, you can use those along with a compositing manager (which is built in to KDE...to enable it go to Control Center -> Desktop -> Window Behavior -> Translucency tab) to get shadows and fading menus and windows. It's probably the easiest way to get that as setting up AIGLX or XGL on Gentoo will cause you nothing but pain.

[Specialized]

In Xorg-X11 7.1 AIGLX is integrated, the stable Version has been Released a few days ago.
You can give this one a try. I think it to get this working than XGL.

[sdfg]

How would I go about doing that? Just now I'm using KDE with X.org 7 something (not sure if it's .0 or .1).

Got the shadows and the skin sorted (at least for QT), but transparency slows things down alot - but, I'm fairly certain that's because I haven't setup hardware acceleration in X - enemy territory says it's not using hardware when I try to play it. If I get that I think it'll go zoom.