Slashdot Mirror
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 :)
A shot of the Gnome 2.0 Desktop
w w.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2-apps.png
http://www.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2.png
http://w
apt-get install metacity: slashdot effect
"...They killed Garret's homepage!" "YOU BASTARDS!"
Google had the following cached:
I have left Sawfish in the dust. Having recently switched to Metacity, I have found that I am actually loving it.
It's great! Metacity has the least amount of crack of any usable window manager I've seen. It works; it's fast; and it uses GTK+. However, not everything is roses right now -- for instance, there is no graphical configuration unless you count using gconf-editor. The window manager is new and currently in development, so what do you expect? *smile* Still, I find that either passing a command line to change a variable or to use gconf-editor is easier than editing a text file in some esoteric format or hunting down one option with a funny name amongst 5,327 others also strangely (and inconsistantly) named.
For what it's worth, other people (hi Trae!) are switching away from Sawfish too.
Personally, I like the fact that it works right, "out of the box", supports some keybinding modification, has the ability to change to sloppy focus mode, and has all the advantages of using GTK+2 (internationalized and anti-aliased fonts, double-buffering, et cetera).
Anyway, it's a promising window manager and I think I like where it's going (and it's usable for me right now, too!). It's not on all my computers yet, but it's also development software at the moment (lumped in there with the Gnome2 stuff, which is also really nifty).
We often use this open source stuff without thanking the people that made it all happen. These people work tirelessly making advanced technology available to the community. I think they should be lauded as heros.
it seems ur are the stupidy guy. As you even don't know what really means hot swappable ... and we are definitly NOT talking about Hard Drives only. Ever tried to replace a CPU in a running System ? Linux ? Windows ??
mfg, gul
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I did the same as you. E wasn't even that pretty. Ultimately, I dumped it not because of the speed, but because you couldn't bind keys in enough ways. I'm a dvorak typist on a Kinesis keyboard. Without a significant facility to rebind keys, I'm a pretty unhappy camper. Sawfish lets me bind practically anything I want to whatever keys I want. Unless Metacity does something similar, I won't switch.
So therefore it's not hard to guess the cause of Red Hat / Raster split - Red Hat wanted a functioning, lightweight WM to put behind GNOME so it could sell it to businesses and normal users while Raster wanted to work on his kewl fx and ignore these basic fundamental requirements. It's no surprise that E was dumped.
I was extremely thankful when Sawfish turned up - it was about 1/10th the size and did exactly what it was supposed to.