I begun to use computers with a 8088 PC, soon followed by an Amiga 2000. I liked the Amiga for its performances and its OS. At that time, the PCs was at the console and making bip-bip, the Max was in black and white and making bip-bip, when the Amiga was in color, with a sound of good quality for that time, able to provide fluid full screen animations and videos, that on top of a preemptive multitasking operative system.

As soon I get a 386 PC, I begun to use GNU/Linux on it. At that time, the most used desktop was fvwm. Many linux distributions was providing a decent fvwm configuration. My favorite distribution was Suse. KDE and Gnome appeared. I try other desktops and after 2 years using XFCE, all the customizations I made into its application menu was lost after a software upgrade. I begun to look for alternative and gave a try with fvwm-crystal.

I never looked back, and after contributing new functions to control alsaplayer, alsamixer and mplayer from fvwm-crystal, I became the main contributor of this software. From that time, I never lost a single desktop user customization. I added different functions, the most important being the ability to generate playlists for the media players, a full compatability of the application menu with the FreeDesktop specification, including its additional categories (it was the first linux desktop to provide that), new recipes, a native (fvwm based) desktop manager (icons on desktop) and last but not least, a recipe providing a modern look where its only button is fully user configurable and can be placed on any side of the desktop.

And yes, it is free software. You can download it here: fvwm-crystal download, Its website is here: fvwm-crystal homepage and its development is going on here: https://github.com/fvwm-crystal.