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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 :)
I do like the way metacity places dialog boxes though. They are placed horizontally centered and just below the top of their parent window, somewhat like a MacOS X dialog.
I just grokked this off of the gnome mailing list here.
> Btw: Why there has not been any updates for sawfish lately?
Rumor has it that John was employed by Apple and that as part of the employment contract he's no longer allowed to develop sawfish.
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.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It will be interesting to see which wins out, Metacity or Sawfish. Because this brings up a major issue. With all the corporate support in Linux these days, who carries a bigger voice in development, corporate sponsers with teams of programers or OS hackers with "carismatic" leaders?
I say given Sun's mixed history in OS they probably won't be able to sway GNOME development and will eventually switch back to the mainstream.
(then again, some say Miguel is easily swayed)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I started using metacity two weeks ago or so, and I'm fairly pleased. I really liked sawfish, but felt it was time to try something new.
Pro: easy to set up (not a whole lot of options to choose from, really), fast (much speedier than sawfish), and largely with sensible defaults for everything.
Con: I miss a few settings, like the ability to remember window size and position. Also, lazy focus only changes focus and does not raise the newly focused window.
On the whole, a good, solid windowmanager that really feels lean and efficient.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Another screenshot
Whats the name of the mp3 player in the screenshot?
A while back Slashdot started linking any potentially unfamilar terms to everything2, however this raised the ire of several who felt that this was an abuse of the Everything2 service (which didn't make an awful lot of sense as that's specifically what the service is for)
I don't want to get involved in any window manager wars, but you can do
this in sawfish; it just isn't in the default key bindings.
Either go into the sawfish configurator and select "Bindings" or choose
"Shortcuts" from the sawfish window manager menu. Click "Add", and add
C-Right bound to "Move viewport right"
C-Left bound to "Move viewport left"
C-Up bound to "Move viewport up"
C-Down bound to "Move viewport down"
I used to use that all the time in fvwm, but now I typically just use
M-TAB bound to "Cycle windows"
M-ISO_Left_Tab bound to "Cycle windows backwards"
and go from window to window (I don't have _too_ many windows, and I
tend to remember which one is where in the stacking order and can get
there quickly).
Typical slashdot moderation modin this down as a troll. He/She is 90% RIGHT!! One of the biggest problems open source development faces is mutiplication of effort towards the same goal which is one of the reasons that (and I know many will disagree ) IMO MS has a far superior desktop product.
One of the only reasons Open Source development has worked so far is that Linux supports modular development allowing some prity impressive applications to be put together; however in the case of desktop environments we are seeing the limitations of what can be accomplished with this approach. The XWindows desktop that I am using now, is NOT that much more superior to the one that I was using in 1994; Yes there are more apps, different apps and some better apps but compare 1994 XWindows desktop and a 1994 Windows desktop to a 2002 XWindows and Windows desktop.
Seriously it has been MS who have made the huge improvements whereas with XWindows you may just find yourself wondering what anyone has actually DONE in development terms over the last 8 years.
Yes but any XWindows implementation
including those with TWM window
managers are inherently superior
to the MS desktop. Basically in
enabling me to use the graphical
environment of any of my machines
from any of my other machines.
We had to install WIN2K in our lab
recently to perform some product tests
and all of a sudden I was tied to a
specific keyboard/mouse/monitor with
few options, and I have to sit in the
lab to do the tests.
You say use vnc or pcanywhere or ica,
I say that machine is CRAWLING already
even though it has almost 1GHz of
processor and a quarter gig of ram.
However, when it ran linux and XWindows
it was quite snappy.
MS desktop superior, I must not have
a sense of humor or something.
I really wish I could get someone from Sun and IBM and all other vendors who use CDE to look at XFce. XFce is better, stronger and faster than GNOME (and KDE, for that matter) and can easily look and feel just like CDE for those who want that. It can also look and feel like nothing else out there. The Muntihead capabilities are better than anything on the market (to include WinXX and OS X). The speed of this thing can only be matched by things like twm or IceWM get it is a full, complete desktop environment. It just seems like a complete waste of time and effort to try and build something that will, at best, only be a shadow of something that is already here.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
XML causes global warming.
I'm going to cop a karma hit for saying this, but this is the one thought that truely sticks out in my mind when I look at Rhythm Box. It is a direct rip-off of iTunes, and they don't even try to hide it. "Takes its inspiration from Apple's iTunes"? More like "steals all of it's ideas completely from Apple's iTunes". This is about as 'innovative' as Microsoft. This is open source innovation?
Honestly, how can someone look at Rhythm Box and then say with a straight face that the open source community has/does not steal ideas from closed companies?
I've spoken about Rhythm Box on IRC many times before expressing these feelings. I'm not some troll, look over what I've posted in the past. This has just been the first time I've seen RB mentioned on Slashdot somewhere, so I thought I'd rant. But honestly, Rhythm Box is the biggest copy job I've seen for quite some time.