Re: Alternatives to Metacity?

On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 19:25, Kurt wrote:
> So far I have tried Red Hat 7.3 with Ximian gnome-smapshots, Red Hat
> Null, and Mandrake 9.0rc2 and while they look nice with the new icon
> sets they just aren't good enough yet to justify an upgrade.

If your just upgrading for the icons, you're missing the whole point of
Gnome-2.  Speed, greater consistency, anti-aliased text, accessibility
and a host of other features are what make Gnome-2 truely worth the
upgrade.

> Don't get me wrong, I like the theory behind the move to Gnome-2 and
> Metacity. I have almost always exclusively used Gnome for my desktop.
> However, the way it stands, right now, I think I would rather stick to
> Gnome-1.4 or even switch to a KDE desktop. Even Gnome
> http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/Metacity states of Metacity,
> "Originally an experiment, it's now turning out to be halfway usable..."
> Unfortunately it still seems to be still halfway usable.

Metacity isn't ever going to be the bloated mess that sawfish was.  I
stopped using Enlightenment because sawfish was light weight, and I've
stopped using sawfish because metacity has done the same.

The reason why you don't see sawfish in the packages is because support
for sawfish sucked and nothing was getting done.  The guy who maintains
sawfish clearly isn't that interested in maintaining sawfish, and the
code is so convoluted that it would be faster to rewrite than to
comprehend.

Metacity documentation could use some cleanup - things aren't as bad as
they seem.  On the plus side, Metacity uses GTK2 so it no only responds
to UI changes in Gnome-2, but it means that Accessibility and other
features are part of the Window Manager.

> I would sure like to see Gnome-2 support for other window managers
> besides Metacity, at least until Metacity is *much* more mature. If
> stuck with just Metacity I might sit out upgrading for a while.

Gnome-2 isn't Metacity dependent.  You can download sawfish from
elsewhere and use it, just don't expect any fixes any time soon.

You could also write you're own WM for Gnome-2, is you would like.

> I know Sun withdrew development help for Sawfish. What about other
> window managers besides Metacity? Anyone have any experience with
> Gnome-2 and Sawfish, Enlightenment, IceWM, Window Maker, etc.; either
> good or bad?

Sun withdrew developent help for sawfish because they needed a A11Y
compliant WM and sawfish couldn't cut it.  Metacity on the other hand
could and other features, like Xinerama, would be easy to add.

> Will Metacity be "finished" by the release of the current beta distros
> with Gnome-2?

Redhat seem to think it's ready enough.

Gnome has never been reliant on a single WM, or at least not for some
time.  Any WM can be made gnome compliant and there's no guarantee that
metacity will remain the default.  Time will tell.

> Anyone with profound insight to the Linux desktop wars please fill me
> in.

No profound insight, just a little time listening to chatter. ;-]


Rodd
-- 
Rodd Clarkson <[email protected]>
redfish bluefish [creative]


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