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Sun Drops Sawfish for Metacity
Cardhore writes: "According to this article, Sun's and Wipro's developers are now working on Metacity, instead of Sawfish. Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop, and Sun has decided to use Metacity over Sawfish for GNOME 2. This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility, maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the future." Here's a brief description of Garret LeSage's experience with Metacity, which is described here as a "boring window manager for the adult in you." Anyone with Metacity screenshots, please post below :)
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png
There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/
Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/
--sean
According to the garnome site, it's pronounced matacity like "opacity". That's cool.
The reason those are big in the screen shot is to show off the new SVG icon support in Gnome 2. That stands for Scalable Vector Graphics in case you are wondering, so they should be very easy to scale to any size you want :)
On the topic, and with the complaints of no GUI tool to configure Metacity, I just though I would point everyone to a piece of software that I wrote called Metacity-Setup. Im currently working on getting it a little more friendly (its flawed to be sure) but it does basic stuff nicely.
i ty -setup/
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metac
It's not Sun vs the GNOME community. Metacity is a WM that uses GTK2.0; it is also a lot smaller and faster than the LISPing bloat of Sawfish.
There's been a dissatisfaction with Sawfish and a considerable push to move to Metacity for ages - long before Sun even became involved in GNOME. I doubt you'll find much in the way of opposition to this.
Were you running xinerama? wm's need it for decent window placement w/ multiheads. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO.html , Specifically http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO-7.html . If you are, sorry for the condescension.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Um... at last count, sun is selling at least 17 (!) models of Sparc-based servers, and four different Sparc-based workstations. They have six products in the Cobalt line. I don't think you're quite right when you refer to Sun's Sparc-based systems as "its last products."
In other words, no.
from the sawfish-works-nicely-though dept.
HA! Two *serious* reasons why Sawfish doesn't really "work nicely":
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight.
2) Ever looked at the configuration dialogs for that beast!? They're INSANE. Let me give you an example. This is an actual preference in Sawfish: "Offset (%) from left window edge when warping pointer" Pardon my shouting, but WHO THE FSCK WANTS TO CONFIGURE THAT?! What's so wrong about just setting a sane default and leaving it at that? (ie: the way Metacity does it)
That said, for day to day use, Sawfish is ok, but it's got huge issues and it needs to *go*. While it'll throw things into some turmoil, I have to admit I'm pretty happy that Sun made this decision.
The Free desktop that Just Works
This is particularly a problem for sawfish; not only is it a complex, niche codebase involving fairly obscure stuff (X) that not as many people have experience with, it is also in Lisp, which narrows down the number of potential hackers even more. Nothing wrong with Lisp, mind you, just not as many proficient lisp hackers in the community as there are C hackers. And that does make a difference to community supported projects.
IAAL,BIANLY
sawfish has options to change this. i believe there's bunch of defaults (windows, motif, next, macos)
The next version of Enlightenment (DR17) is a complete rewrite which can do nifty stuff like use opengl to handle desktop geometry, alpha transparency/anti-aliasing, etc... It has been in development since a bit before devleopment ceased on DR16.
You'll have to wait a while still before the first public release, though.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Well, I'll just say it: Sawfish is, in my reasonably informed opinion, a well-designed, maintainable program. I read the documentation and looked at the code in order to make some changes of my own (which I never finished...), and I was generally impressed.
So, while I haven't seen enough evidence to be sure, I strongly suspect someone at Sun is afraid of Lisp.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Cool there boy. Lisp is already on the system...its also on your system. At least guile, probably umb-scheme, librep, and emacs.
Lisp rules. Get over it.