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 :)

Comments

Re:Reason for the switch.

[g4dget]

So there you have it! Before you start flaming back and forth about what's better, think about the logistics behind using a WM that's no longer being maintained.

Everybody has the source, and it is apparently quite usable since many people sue it. If someone like Sun additional features or bug fixes, they can make them and publish them. The fact that a single person has moved on to doing something else makes little difference for open source software.

Choosing Metacity may be the right thing for Sun to do anyway, but the departure of even the main developer of Sawfish would not be sufficient reason.

Re:Enlightenment

[DrXym]

I dumped Enlightenment in favour of Sawmill (as it was known then), simply because E was a big bloated monster that wanted to own the desktop whereas Sawfish knew its place - to be a window manager and nothing more. It was not hard to see why Red Hat dropped it - they needed a WM, not an entire desktop and the kitchen sink.

Frankly me and probably 99% of other GNOME users don't give a crap what WM they're running as long as it doesn't get in the way of GNOME. It should be as unobtrusive as possible and limit its features to window-manager-y things.

I suppose E would be a good fit if you didn't want to run GNOME, or could put up with the bloat, or wanted to run kewl gigeresque desktops with metal knobs and shit, but for the rest of who just want to run some GNOME apps, then Sawmill is a perfectly usable and functional WM.

Ultimately I'd like to NOT KNOW what WM I'm running. I don't really care that much as long as it moves windows around and is reasonably skinnable. If Metacity is a move in that direction then that fine by me. The sooner I don't need to know what WM is running the better.

There's a point to this

[hatless]

I think there's some missing the point going on here. From Sun's perspective (indeed, from a sysadmin's perspective), the lack of its own setup tools, relying on a command interface to change settings is a plus.

Metacity gives GNOME a chance to address one of its manageability flaws, the confilct between a desktop environment and the window manager. Which controls wallpaper? Screensavers? Why are there separate themes and theme settings interfaces for window chrome and the window contents?

It's because some power users high up in GNOME and window manager development--who usually aren't responsible for any machines beyond their own personal ones--like the flexibility of mixing and matching, and like pushing the bounds of what each component of their system can do. So overlapping--and conflicting--features get built.

This isn't the end of the world, but it does make a GNOME system more unwieldy than it has to be. KDE can run with several window managers, but it comes with one of its own that leaves configuration matters to KDE. GNOME hasn't had this yet. Enlightenment, sawmill and sawfish have been progressively better fits, but Sun and others who are moving to Metacity probably see it as a simpler route to getting a decent (GTK+ 2, anti-aliasing, multihead, accessibility-enabled) window manager seamlessly tied into GNOME than revamping Sawfish--and subsuming all of its configuration into GNOME--would be.

GNOME with Sawfish is a much tougher sell to a simplicity-minded CDE administrator than GNOME with Metacity will be, I suspect.

Re:translucent windows and other nonsense

[pthisis]

The window management in Windows is better than anything I've seen in Linux.

I'll agree that translucence and themability are fluff. I might be able to envision an actual use for translucence if I thought about it long enough, but it'd be a real corner case.

But...

Things that suck in Windows window management:

• Click to focus + focus autoraise. The latter is the biggest problem. I can't tell you how often I want to be typing into the window _behind_ another window, so I can see the contents of another window while I type. And click to focus is just annoying, why put another step in the way of my work? There are some hacks to get focus-follows-mouse, but a lot of apps don't work well with it.
• The task bar. This thing just blows, it's the first thing I turn off in Gnome/KDE. At most I want a couple of launch buttons and a clock, but I _don't_ need the entire bottom half of the screen real estate taken up by icons of every running app, and the thing is only usable if I have at most 8-10 windows open. Usually I have 4-5 times that. Give me alt-tab, windowshade, window groups (and raise/iconify/etc working on entire groups), virtual desktops, and restricted alt-tabs (meta-tab limited to xterm, control-tab limited to mozilla, etc) over that any day. In other words, real tools for managing the windows (which is what I want out of a window manager). Sawfish lets me do that. The groups, especially, are a godsend. Launch an editor, debugger, and GUI designer all in one group, then operate on that group as a whole when I need to. Which leads to...
• ...MDI or whatever it's called when the IDE/Word/whatever opens a bunch of subwindows inside its own window instead of just opening them as real windows. God this sucks. I already have a window manager, I don't want every application to _also_ have a window manager. Of course, if your IDE takes the approach of putting everything into one window rather than seperate windows which can be grouped together then you need something like this. Ugh.
• Clippy. Yeah, he's not related to window management but even now that he's dead he deserves to be kicked around.

Sumner