Crystal Clear
Over the years of using various Linux distributions I’ve come to enjoy GUI’s (Graphic User Interfaces) that are simple, responsive, and clean. If I can get some eyecandy to go along with that criteria then I will gladly give it a shot. To that end I found FVWM-Crystal.
I liked how the GUI would do some transparency effects without any noticeable performance loss and the drop down “Quake style” terminal was a definite plus since I use a terminal a great deal.
I won’t go into a great deal of detail about how to configure FVWM-Crystal in this post, but will instead just post up some screenshots that I took (almost a year ago) with it running on my Toshiba laptop.
with ROX Filer, XFCE4-Terminal, and minimized programs
Quake Terminal showing
Menu and Sonata
Currently there are no Compiz-Fusion effects for FVWM-Crystal, and that’s alright with me. FVWM-Crystal fits nicely on many systems with its’ small footprint, nice configuration options, and good speed. In fact it is the default environment on several older machines I use.
For many years Fluxbox was my fallback GUI environment, now it has been replaced and the reason should be… “Crystal” clear. 
Hello, thank you for your post. I tried all for getting the quake look transparent, but always appears with a black bg. It would be great for my eyes to see it as yours! Can you explain where exactly the color options are? I can set individually for aterm, pressing the launch makes it transparent in panel, but not in quake
… Any help would be great!
P.D.: Also I tried all possible things for getting ”autohide” to work, but it was also impossible for me… thank you.
Hey it’s me again! I just solved turning quake transparent as default. Helping in ”autohiding” function will be apreciated! Thanx again.