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Sun Drops Sawfish for Metacity

Posted by timothy on from the sawfish-works-nicely-though dept.

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 :)

4 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. Multihead support? by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Funny, I thought the multihead support was relatively bad. I've got metacity installed on Debian unstable. It seems to map windows more or less at random, frequently split between my two monitors.

    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.

  2. Reason for the switch. by Hornsby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. I use it... by JanneM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Thank the submitter by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)