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My first 3-4 years with Linux was using WindowMaker and it'll always have a special place in my heart. Eventually I compiled from scratch KDE v0.4 and never really went back. I should give this a go though, even just for Retro's sake.
I remember with great fondness using a NeXTStation Mono Turbo for about 8 months as my desktop many years ago. It was a great experience and the simple color scheme avoided "color poisoning" even when I later upgraded to a Color Turbo, and still looked elegant.

I had worked with NEXTSPACE under a VM, which is a Centos7 with custom GNUStep , it was nice, not quite as nice as original NS but still very nice. The problem is that getting that last 2% of full integration in terms of graphics, fonts, etc. is still not done.

Will definitely check this out.

I think I used window maker exclusively from maybe 2000-2008 but in the end it felt outdated. How is it holding up these days?
Wish they actually reviewed the desktop, as in, actual app changes, improvements, instead of just discussing the distro only.
“The Window Maker Live ISO is a hefty two and three-quarter gigabytes in size. We feel that its maintainers need to learn to exercise a great deal more discretion, and how to perform the unpleasant task of pruning.”

Is it just me or is this a delusional criticism?

Did you read the rest of the article? Much of it is a criticism of the distribution including multiple application launchers, file managers, etc. that don't necessarily work well together, and contrasting that with Ubuntu distributions which tend to give you one of each category (and are thus smaller).
Perhaps… but even there, I could see that being useful for a more offline-only experience. Otherwise, as they say, why not AntiX?
Agreed. If it was a small download they’d instead be complaining that it didn’t come with enough software to be usable.

WMaker is by far my favorite X11 wm and I’m happy to see it get any press at all though :)

You misquoted
Why does a tool that is called Window Maker have windows and icons that have the looks from previous century? It almost reminds me of my Atari ST with GEM or maybe I'm exaggerating, let's say windows3.11 of the nineties. Yes I know this is Linux, but still.
I find it refreshing. At least it's not preinstalled candy crush, advertisement in the start menu, forced updates, unresponsive and bloated software, and constant prompts to collect more telemetry.
That's the other extreme that frankly you only get if you click 'continue' or 'okay' everywhere and don't bother to do any tweaking. I must say, I most liked the win98 times when things got more stable and a lot less bloated than today (sollitaire and pinball were quite okay).

Would you say refreshing is the right word? I would say barebones.

Windows 98 was many things, but stable was not one of them. The os would crash if you left it running for too long
> That's the other extreme that frankly you only get if you click 'continue' or 'okay' everywhere and don't bother to do any tweaking.

No, that's the default on Windows 10/11. Much of which cannot be opted out of without tweaking.

It's supposed to look like NextStep in it 3.x versions. If you look at screenshots of that operating system it will be very clear.
Last century they still made windows as opposed to rectangular areas on screen of different gray shades, where the poor user has to try to see if is there any function associated with them.
Looks nice to me. Also it's very lightweight and fast. I ran WindowMaker on a 500mb RAM machine back in the early 2000s and it was very snappy.
Off topic, but do you play chess with Death?
I play on Lichess, so yes, you could say that. Too bad this name was taken by someone else on Lichess. Love Bergman, by the way.