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

Screenshots? Just try it :)

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get install metacity

Glad to hear it

[Anonymous Coward]

Metacity is written from the ground up in GTK+ 2 and is FAST. Sawfish was both bloated and unmaintainable and dealing with GTK+ 1 and 2 makes it rough around the edges.

Re:Enlightenment

[MisterBlister]

Could someone please detail the current status of the Enlightenment window manager?

It still sucks.

Just more wasted effort and time

[StupidFodder]

The world needs one full-assed solution, not 400 half-assed solutions. That's the eternal problem with free software / open source development. Quit bickering about which one is better and which one to use; pick one, stick with it, and get it done. Christ.

Metacity screenshots, right here..

[Bowie J. Poag]

Enjoy.

Metacity Screenshots.... Yawn.

Cheers,

Re:While we're hanging the poster

[Teancom]

You just scored 5 bonus geek points for the Jonny Lingo reference :-)

MuHANa, you ugly...

Re:Reason for the switch.

[g4dget]

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.

I would have bought that argument B.P. ("Before Perl"). But Perl supports just about every concept that Lisp supports and Perl is a much, much more complex language. Given the number of Perl hackers out there, the problems people have with Lisp are not about inability to become proficient in it rapidly, they are psychological. In fact, except for the parentheses, Lisp is very close to Python.

When ? - A good desktop for Linux ? - ?

[bushboy]

So, when will there actually be some agreement on a default, stable, user friendly desktop for Linux ?

At the rate things are happening and judging by this article, Never.

Perhaps, sometimes, open source eats itself - it starts to defeat the object of it's very existence due to it's 'open' nature.

We need a 'facist' microsoft method to finally get a standardised, stable and useable desktop for Linux.

In my opinion (and screw the humble bit), desktops for Linux still suck badly - no matter which one - they all suck in thier own special way.

There's just no consistency between the desktop developers and software developers.

For christ sake, if you can't cut'n'paste from one app to another (which is a big problem with Linux desktops), there's a problem.

I still have faith, god knows why.

If Linux can repeat the success it's had on the webserver level with the desktop, well, there's finally an alternative to the much maligned win32.

So what are all you Linux developers doing out there ? - squabbling ?

So much for open source then - there needs to be a leader to push, heck, FORCE acceptance of a standard.

Microsoft know this and exploits it, to a lesser extent, Apple do the same.

For a desktop to succeed on Linux, it is going to have to be mostly 'closed source' 'propriety' software - that much is very clear to me.

And it's also going to have to be commercial.

I pay for many things and I'm prepared to pay for an alternative to M$

Are you ? - or are you still living in a dreamland that bombed the .coms ?