kwm

When Matthias Ettrich proposed a coherent desktop for Unix in 1996, it needed a window manager that knew it was part of something larger. kwm, the KDE Window Manager, shipped with the first betas in 1997 and KDE 1.0 in 1998. The look was deliberately familiar: a title bar with minimise, maximise and close on the right, a taskbar in kpanel, Alt+Tab between windows and virtual desktops with buttons in the panel. Anyone arriving from Windows 95 felt at home, which was the whole point.

What lasted was the conversation with the rest of the desktop. kwm published properties such as KWM_WIN_ICON, KWM_WIN_STICKY and KWM_CURRENT_DESKTOP so that panel, icons and session management could keep up. GNOME soon wrote its own _WIN_ hints, and around 2000 the two were merged into freedesktop.org's EWMH under the _NET_WM_ prefix. In KDE 2.0 (2000) kwm was replaced by the newly written KWin, with pluggable decorations, and kwm was gone after three years.