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 :)
Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop
/., where potentially-unfamiliar terms are defined. Time after time I've encountered some unexplained reference in an article and wondered, "Am I the only person who doesn't know what this is?"
Thanks for explaining, and I hope this is the start of a new policy on
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
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.
Work on e17 certainly hasn't stopped. It's just always slow because they're a bunch of people working in their spare time for free, yadda yadda.
I tested it out about a month ago and it was freakin' incredible. If what I poked around with is any indication, it's going to have the best themeability of the lot (and a great theme-writing program, too!). It has a lot of great things going for it. But it's quite a ways off, I wouldn't expect even a beta this year.
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!
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png
You are reading what the submitter wrote, not what one of the Slashdot editors put in. If you want some definitions, you might try something like this: Sawfish@Everything2.com.
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.
Yanno, I used to think Sun was stupid, over-priced crap of a unix machine -- but then I have now seen their high-end boxen in a production enviroment and they are damned nifty. Hot-swappable drives and all; maybe not the best unix around, and maybe not cheap, but their not overly bad.
There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/
Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/
--sean
I want to be able to do almost nothing, but FAST!
You are not the customer.
According to the garnome site, it's pronounced matacity like "opacity". That's cool.
"...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).
Odd, isn't that what many people said about sawfish when it first came out and they were comparing it to Enlightenment?
Nathan's blog
I hope that there's a way to scale down those icons. Personally, I can't stand having a desktop that looks like it was drawn with crayola crayons.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
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.
I have used sawfish for a good year now and i can't really complain about anything. Stable and it gets the job done. It's fairly customizable also. So my question is, why metacity? (i have read very little about metacity, so perhaps some links would be nice also. )
Okay, I know the Linux/slashbot response to this is, "how dare they?" and "I want my eye candy!" Well, I was right with you for a while.
But now I'm thinking: for Linux and OSS to succeed on the desktop and in a high-impact profit-oriented enterprise environment, we need a sober, powerful, stable desktop.
I'm an admin at a Fortune 500 company in the gourmet cereals industry. We have a daily need for responsive and robust desktop software, and Metacity has repeatedly stepped up to the plate and delivered where inferior technology such as Gnome and Sawfish could not.
Metacity saved our business. Maybe it will save slashdot, too.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The reason those are big in the screen shot is to show off the new SVG icon support in Gnome 2. That stands for Scalable Vector Graphics in case you are wondering, so they should be very easy to scale to any size you want :)
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'm still waiting for a window manager (besides FVWM and OLVWM) to include a FVWM-style virtual desktop switcher (or "Pager"). I have my desktop set up with a 3x3 virtual desktop switcher. I can use Ctrl+an_arrow_key to switch between desktops (two-dimensionally; I can go up, down, left, or right) without using the mouse. If I put xterms in the same spot in each desktop, I can switch between them very quickly, using only the keyboard. It sure would be nice to see this elsewhere.
Chris
Blasphemy! If it's not cartoonish, it's not a viable alternative to a Windows desktop.
On the topic, and with the complaints of no GUI tool to configure Metacity, I just though I would point everyone to a piece of software that I wrote called Metacity-Setup. Im currently working on getting it a little more friendly (its flawed to be sure) but it does basic stuff nicely.
i ty -setup/
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metac
What does this mean for Ximian, what with their contract with Sun?
Let's string him up for failing to mention the other very important wm that runs with Gnome.
What is your Slash Rating?
I have used both window managers frequently for about 4 or 5 months now (sawfish2 and metacity that is) and find both of them fast, stable, and great products overall from a user perspective.
.. until then sawfish rulez!
Configurability is easily in favor of sawfish right now but that is only because there is not a gui configurator for metacity currently afaik. However, i knew how to make the modifications I wanted and everything works identically to sawfish so no big worries there.
Port over Crux to metacity and you will have another convert
The BIGGEST factor keeping me from using metacity full time is that the Crux theme has not been ported over to it and I cannot figure out how to make metacity themes (or sawfish themes for that matter) and I really hate the look of the default metacity theme when combined with the Crux gtk and gtk2 themes.
I remember downloading Metacity from Havoc Pennington's homepage awhile ago when I wanted to learn how XLib works. I emailed him with a couple idiot questions and to my suprise, almost immediately got friendly, helpful replies. I remember he mentioned that it was really just a learning project for him at the time and possibly not the best thing for someone like me to learn from.
What's wrong with Sawfish? It's light. It's configurable. It's themable. It gets the job done without bells and whistles. Let's face it: this is a window manager; this is not a killer app. Sawfish has good placement algorithms, good community support, good stability, so what's the @!$#ing point of starting over from scratch with a whole new development process? The people Sun's paying to do this stuff are some of the few paid people working on the GNOME project. Their labor is best used to progress the project, not to drop back to ground zero and start over.
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
I'm actually surprised that they ever went with Sawfish, since it has all sorts of nifty extras (differently themed windows, for example). From the two screenshots I was able to find of Metacity, it looked like a bland Gnome. Given that Sun was a major purveyor of CDE and olwm, I'm not the least bit surprised that they've switched to a tamer wm. I still think they're missing out, but I guess the philosophy behind the decision is "these machines are made for work, not glitz." Not for me...I use Gnome + E .16 at work....single monitor (makes me wish for my dual-head box at home...) with the same desktop look and feel as my home desktop (see more recent shots).
What is your Slash Rating?
nah, people are still working on e17, and it does
look like it'll be good. no guesses on when it
will be done tho.
"Weasling out of work is important to learn; it is what separates humans from animals. Except for weasels."
Is Mandrake and Raster.
And I love it. I have a 5x5 pager at 1600x1200, and it is so much more convinient to CTRL-arrowkey to move around, than the other window managers that have more of a virtual desktop concept.
It's probably the main reason I have stayed with afterstep. [That, and I like to remove all the toggle buttons from the title bar and replace then with CTRL-Fkey sequences. Example: CTRL-F3 institutes window-move, CTRL-F2 is window-lower]
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Um... at last count, sun is selling at least 17 (!) models of Sparc-based servers, and four different Sparc-based workstations. They have six products in the Cobalt line. I don't think you're quite right when you refer to Sun's Sparc-based systems as "its last products."
In other words, no.
Could programming language ignorance or bigotry be at least partially at the root of this? Probably not, but one wonders anyway.
(Don't mod this up. Its just here for someone who might want more details.)
I have run my woody system multiheaded for quite some time. I like to keep a bunch of monitoring type programs running on one display and work on the other.
I do not use xinerama because I do not want the gnome panel to act like it is on one big monitor, thats just a PITA. (plus it had problems with opengl, some of my monitoring uses it heavily.)
It worked ok, except that the gnome session manager would 'gain' applications. All the stuff from the 2nd montor would get started on the first monitor at login time. This machine also has a firewire induced crashing problem, and after a crash even more applications would get started at the next login. Very ugly.
Also, running a panel on each monitor works ok, but the panels get confused about configuration. Maybe there is a way to specify an alternate config file for one of them.
All in all, it worked, but the gnome session and panel developers really need to have two monitors and feel the pain. So, if you can show to me that you are 'the' gnome session or panel developer and you need a PCI video card in order to have two monitors, get in touch with me. I'll give you my old one.
At my former place of employment, some of my coworkers spent more time trying to get their shiny new window managers and SPARC versions of Linux going than they did doing anything else.
That's one reason I stuck with boring old SPARC Solaris and CDE (not that CDE isn't SCREAMING to be replaced).
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
my windows said:
Installing Metacity... done!
Thank you for using apt-get.
Please reboot for changes to take effect.
Now, while I am rebooting, can I see a screenshot or two? Please? I want to see before I try.
Jobs? Which jobs?
I like the KDE/Win32 style alt-tab window list (small window pops up with all available windows listed; alt-tab selects between them).
Very user friendly and very quick to pop between a large collection of windows. No need to mess up your stacking order plowing through umpteen windows to find the one you're looking for.
Why wasn't such a feature implemented in Sawfish? General unpopularity with the feature? Too similar to Windows?
Does Metacity have a similar window list? Or does it use the annoying Sawfish style?
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.
I absolutely agree with you. I get so discouraged when I run into things like the 90 items listed under "Window Managers" on Freshmeat, and not a one of 'em especially useful.
That's the problem with the current state of open source development. Rather than putting 10,000 brains on one project, you put one brain each on 10,000 projects. Net result: almost zero result for a vast amount of work.
Maybe the only way to get programmers organized is to get a bunch of them in one place and wrap a company around them.
Click here
Video Game cheats, hints a
Last year, Sun sold ~100,000 cobalts world wide, making maybe ~$100 per box. That's ~$10,000,000.
Last year they sold ~100 E10ks in the UK, making ~$1,000,000 per system. That's ~$100,000,000. In the UK.
No, they aren't `about to drop their last products', whatever that means. Don't be an idiot.
Excuse me while I crack up.
Has anybody actually considered how useless a screenshot of a window manager is these days? Upon looking at that image, anyone familiar with X window managers should realize that the only parts of the shot drawn by the window manager are just the frames around the two windows. Assuming (I'm guessing) the window manager supports themes in some manner, it's basically a Gnome screenshot. Nautilus, the panel, etc.
While we're all addicted to screenshots, in the case of window managers, a comprehensive feature list would've been infinitely more useful than anything a picture can show.
Next thing you know, people will be asking for screenshots of DBMS's.
from the sawfish-works-nicely-though dept.
HA! Two *serious* reasons why Sawfish doesn't really "work nicely":
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight.
2) Ever looked at the configuration dialogs for that beast!? They're INSANE. Let me give you an example. This is an actual preference in Sawfish: "Offset (%) from left window edge when warping pointer" Pardon my shouting, but WHO THE FSCK WANTS TO CONFIGURE THAT?! What's so wrong about just setting a sane default and leaving it at that? (ie: the way Metacity does it)
That said, for day to day use, Sawfish is ok, but it's got huge issues and it needs to *go*. While it'll throw things into some turmoil, I have to admit I'm pretty happy that Sun made this decision.
The Free desktop that Just Works
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.
When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion", or "The primary developer is no longer working on it". Most likely, the Wipro programmers don't have much experience with lisp/scheme/rep, and a decision was made to dump it for Metacity, which happens to be written in a language they speak (c, that is).
If you read the metacity source code, at least on earlier releases, Havoc had written things like "I won't implement idea X, because it is crackrock. Tough luck." Things like making metacity play nicely with XMMS. Of course, this was when it was his pet project and not being considered by Sun/Wipro. One wonders if there will be a Sun fork of the project, or if Havoc will turn over development or make compromises that Sun will inevitably require.
While I think metacity is a pretty cool project, Sun's decision is probably one of these management mistakes that have been talked about in all the sociology of software development books. Think of all the little bugs that have been sorted out over the years in Sawfish that will have to be solved again. Things like maintaining focus of window when changing desktops using keybindings; or dual-head setups that have different monitor resolutions while using multiple workspaces and desktops. These things will all have to be sorted out again.
rhythmbox.
IAAL,BIANLY
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.
I really liked sawfish for having so much configuration possibilities.
But metacity ist really fast. One thing that keeps me from using it: Clicking into a window raises it. I can't with this. I want a window to be raised, when I tell it so (clicking on the title bar with the right mouse button).
And you can, of course do this without the OS going down, right? Because it's costing you a million dollars an hour while it's down?
And you can get people to bring you replacement parts at 4am, for a 5 year old system?
And, oh yes, you've solved the problems associated with running big transactional databases on farms of PCs?
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.
I recently got tired of sawfish too, so I switched to fluxbox, which is a new fork of blackbox with some nice features. One of its new features is that the user can change the button order! So I have the close button on one side and the minimize and maximize buttons on the other side, as they should be.
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.
So how many windows managers _are_ there now? 134? Not to put down freedom of choice, but do we really need YAWM (yet another window manager) ? Oh, _this_ one is lean and unbloated (don't they all start out this way?).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
That's what everything was designed to handle. I'm surprised they don't tout it as much, considering it was Rob and Hemo's pet project from a while back...
I admit I had never heard of Metacity. Here's a link to and quote from the Debian package.
:)
"Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios".
Hmm. OK, I guess I'll stick with IceWM. I like Froot Loops better.
lol. You know you are correct. I just checked the themes folder of the latest install of it and sure enough Crux did somehow make it in there. This is a classic example of why it needs a better gui configuration tools so that people like me who do not pay attention to the directory structures can actually realize it when new themes come up.
They should at least throw the metacity-theme-viewer in the preferences folder by default like they do with all the other gnome theming tools.
Themes.org... because Bowie J. Poag is still an idiot!
The window management in Windows is better than anything I've seen in Linux. I'm sorry, but it's true. I don't care if you can make windows "roll up" into the title bar and you think it looks cool - what problem does that solve that wouldn't be handled better by minimising the window and showing it in the taskbar? Really, I'd be interested if someone could tell me the advantage.
I'd like to see a better way to handle multiple windows, but sadly it seems we are stuck with things that look cool rather than anything useful.
These are the problems that need to be solved, I reckon:
Own the desktop? Knows it's place?
Excuse me, but do you even KNOW what the goals of the Enlightenment project were/are? Enlightenment was NEVER meant to be "just" a window manager. As far back as DR13 Rasterman was planning on making a desktop -shell-, not a window manager. The whole Redhat/GNOME fiasco was a side-track to that, but now things are RIGHT back on track, where they originally were.
If anything, Enlightenment was a bad fit for GNOME simply because it was NEVER MEANT to be "just" a window manager. I'm glad they split with GNOME...E is going to become something quite different than your traditional desktop (thank god...and it's about time).
And as for Redhat, let's just say there were more politics involved in their decision to dump E (and let's not forget Raster's less-than-happy departure).
I'm hopeful that this is good news. I finally gave up WindowMaker for Sawfish a few weeks ago because they appear to have ground to a virtual halt and they seem to have only a passing interest in playing nicely with GNOME.
I'm happy with it's relatively light weight, but it still seems somewhat hackish and rough around the edges. I don't need different frames for every window. Just give me a fast, light window manager that integrates with GNOME and provides reasonable themeability and I'll be happy.
Oh, and icons instead of task bars.
svg icon support is not new (to nautilus anyway). i have been using the scalable gorilla nautilus theme for months. (available at sunshineinabag.com, along with other svg themes). very nice icons, and a great metatheme too.
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.
You should talk to some investment bankers or large telcos sometime.
Is it gonna be like the scalable icons they have in SGI's IRIX? That's very cool, where you have the "size wheel" on the right, and can just scale icons/text up and down realtime.
neato!
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Just ctrl-alt-backspace and login again; no rebooting required.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
As a disclaimer, this is also not meant to start a WM/desktop war. To its credit, this is one thing KDE always has had. kwm is well integrated and works well, and very few people feel the need to switch, or even know that they can. One of the things that really turned me off about Gnome was the realization that Enlightenment wasn't really part of it, and that switching to sawmill (it was sawmill then for me too) was what everyone seemed to be doing, if for good reasons.
A real standard wm has been something that I didn't much like about Gnome for a while. I don't know what I had against sawfish, it just didn't appeal to me. Maybe it was the Lisp thing, I don't know (nothing against Lisp, I just don't know it) but the feeling of a really clear separation between Gnome and its WM felt very clear to me. If metacity smoothes over this split to make it more KDE-like, I think it'll be good for Gnome in the long run. Here's hoping for improvement.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
Well, they don't use a "size wheel", but yes, Nautilus icons like this can be scaled up and down in real time with drag handles. :)
The Free desktop that Just Works
Shameless plugging of your site.. you have one metacity capture that is an offsite link. That's rather bad form, don't you have some VA hatemail to write?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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.
Perhaps that's because you never told E its place. You can set it not to use a pager, not to set the background, not to use an iconbox, not to take bindings, and not to use some grotesque, ugly theme. E can be a simple WM if you so chose.
Oh, and E takes 6mb of RAM. Maybe when you're strapped for memory that's a problem, but even with 128mb of physical RAM it's hardly anything.
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.
That's nice that you'll raise your own windows, and I heartily concur you should not have the UI force you into a behaviour you don't want. Similarly, the other poster should probably have his/her prefered method of window navigation also supported. That's the whole point about choice and configurability isn't it?
Unless of course you'd like to install the interface suggested in Dilbert that "hurts the users".....me, I think I like choice.
As an example of anti-choice: In Win2K, I can launch a command prompt from StartBar|Run. So, I start this window... what are the odds I want to do something with it? Pretty good. What does the UI not seem to do? Apply focus to the newly spawned window. Kind of annoying... and then some. But I haven't found a way around this behaviour yet. This illustrates my thought that users are much happier if you give them choice....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I installed the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots on a PII 333 machine w/ 64 MB RAM. I know it sounds like suicide, but when I used metacity instead of sawfish and didn't use nautilus to draw the desktop (I don't use desktop icons anyway) it ran pretty snappy.
Well, first I killed nautilus (duh!), noted it was still a little slow, and decided to try out Metacity. I use blackbox normally on my other slow machine, but I wanted something Gnome complaint. Metacity fit the bill perfectly since it uses the same libs as everything else. I've been using the thinice theme for Gnome2 as well.
Oh, and you can find metacity themes at sunshine in a bag.
"viewable in the mini windows in the pager" KDE3.0 does this. Click on the teeny arrow to the left of the desktop switching buttons.
maintainability of the code [1]
Huh? What does the [1] refer to?
deus does not exist but if he does
I know this is vaugely off topic, but...
How exactly does sawfish and / or metacity relate to Gnome? I'm having a hard time differentiating desktops vs. windows managers vs. windowing systems...
%^)
Chris
If you are running a Sun server chances are you won't have any of this shit running - well at least if you have a clue. Why use system resources and have services running, and also providing the machine with more ways to be compromised if it is a server?
If I am running a production server, there won't be shit for a GUI on there. Who needs it...
--Jon
Heyo there one second!
E is built with one thought in mind: EXTREME customizability.
As it is now, you can make E take up less memory than the shell from which you invoked it. It's all in the theme.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
"Undoing moderation to Comment #3561138"
I posted ANONYMOUSLY. IMHO, this shouldn't undo moderation, as I could have logged out and posted anonymously with no change in the moderation.
While I prefer its sloppy focus behaviour (wouldn't take offense at it being configurable, thouhg), it's not possible to maximize vertically. Can't live without that, I'm afraid.
Rather than putting 10,000 brains on one project, you put one brain each on 10,000
project.
This is actually part of what makes Open Source software great. Open Source software still works by the processes of natural selection, where there are many upstarts and few successes.
Yes, there are dozens of window managers, dozens of bulletin boards, dozens of text editors, dozens of whatever available worldwide. However, only the ones backed with real vision, commitment, and some luck have become good enough to earn loyal developers and users. That's why we have software like Mozilla, Emacs, KDE, GNOME, Open Office, GIMP, XFree86, Linux, LaTeX, Perl, etc. The other software packages whose names have been forgotten will simply become idle (this accounts for most of what is listed at freshmeat).
I very much like this weeding process of software. It keeps down the level of trash in the long run; we just need to allow nature to take its course. Keep in mind just how young software is, in general. Compare the last 50 to 60 years of software to the time it took for Man to go from thatched huts to modern houses. Right now, I'd say software is still in the log cabin era.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Everybody has the source, and it is apparently quite usable since many people sue it.
If you use Open Source software, who do you sue?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When are people going to learn that Apple is just as bad as Microsoft? I can hear all the Apple zealots out there now, getting ready to hit the reply button and refute my "madness". Don't bother. I've heard it all before. I AM a Mac admin. I wouldn't be surprised at all that Apple is quashing efforts that are trying to compete with their market. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't done something similar, considering all the cash they have in the bank.
Oh, and this might be something to think about the next time someone says that macs have the best or most intuitive GUI around: even Apple knew that there existed something better and it had to be stopped quick.
Nathan's blog
If you can't take a macine down without losing a million dollars I'd argue that your architecture is flawed. Did your mommy help you design it?
Speaking about mommies I hope she didn't help you proofread while you were at your macine.
I disagree, the Gnome project originally used Enlightenment because it was the only window manager suitable for their purpose and they knew from the start it was bloated and not meant for the job. In this case, only Sun has dropped Sawfish's use, and Gnome will continue to officially back Sawfish, which is not nearly as bloated as the original poster makes it out to be. In my opinion it's on par with WindowMaker, maybe slightly slower than BlackBox.
Is your browser retarded?
I like using Window Maker by itself when I want a fast loading desktop that merely manages windows and provides a quick way to launch applications...
then I use KDE 3 or Helix Gnome when I want some spiffy bells and whistles to play with. By the way, KDE 3 is really slick... I hope Gnome 2.0 is super spiffy also, I haven't tried the betas yet.
Juln
You're totally right about the stupidity of putting the "danger" button right next to buttons that do other stuff. Unfortunately both desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) bought totally into this bad design that has been criticized by many UI design guru's. Yet one more reason why I feel so justified in creating a GNOME fork.
Incidently, you can change the button order in sawfish. In fact, I created a theme that does precisely this. However the key word here is "create a theme". You have to mess with sawfish's quirky, poorly designed "Sawfish Themer" program in order to do this. Or you could code it in rep if you're really a masochist. The point is that you can change the button order in sawfish, but it requires way more work than should be necessary.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Mine is here: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/desktop.xml
Crux is ported. I'm currently using it. Works great, looks nice. This Metacity is compiled from source obtained from GNOME CVS, I'm not sure if the latest released tarball includes any themes, though. In Meta city CVS repository there're 8 different themes.
I've used the current stable release of E very happily on a pentium 75 with a crap graphics card, just by using a fairly clean theme (the one that looks like an IRIX desktop), using the same background for all desktops, and turning off the animations. The machine very happily ran X and E, and it worked very well since everything that required real grunt was running on an SGI box in the next building (and no folks, a GHz Intel box would not have had enough grunt).
I recently on a whim tried out the Oroborus window manager and was pleasantly surprised to find that it is a "boring" wm that does nothing but manage windows, has no menu, icons, pager, or anything. It's also Gnome compliant. It looks really cool by default with a green window border somewhat reminiscent of the qnx gui.
The thing that bugs me about Gnome is that it doesn't have its Very Own window manager. Well actually, it seems like it doesn't have a lot of things of its own, like a file manager, to name one. Everything is someone else's project. Gnome will adopt Metacity, and then, like with Enlightenment and Sawfish before it, the developer will head in some other direction, leaving Gnome in search of a new one.
You've got Gnome with gmc, you've got Gnome with Nautilus. Which one is the real Gnome? Why doesn't the Gnome project unify and maintain its own components? To me it seems that they're really lacking in this area. I like how organized KDE is. The wm and file manager are built as part of the kdebase tarball. All one neat package.
This is not meant to fan any kind of KDE vs. Gnome flames, however. I think Gnome is pretty neat, but I just keep waiting...and waiting...for it to "get there".
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Enlightenment was briefly part of gnome, but the dependencies and politics killed that. At that point E ran on a variety of platforms, and the gnome people of the time didn't have any short term plans to move off x86 hardware and linux. Raster et al more or less had a choice between personally porting the rapidly moving target of the gimp tool kit (gtk) to Solaris etc, or just keeping the window manager seperate. Gnome at the time was sadly dominated by politics over functionality, but thankfully moved on to where it is now. There were actually arguments at the time over whether it should ever be ported to any kind of commercial OS for idealogical reasons. In hindsight, the Enlightenment project was better off without that, and other themed window managers were developed to work with gnome and kde. E v0.16 of course works with both.
E was always about "kewl fx" as well as funtionality anyway - the alternatives were fvwm (not fvwm2) which looked pretty horrible and was time consuming to configure, and windowmaker, which had a few cool features like the dock.
That, I believe, is the long range plan. E at the time was simply a window manager with icons, menus, and a pager. The filemanager etc comes seperately, as whatever one you pick from kde, gnome or myriads of unconnected projects.After so much talk about the adequacy of Linux to the mass market, i.e. the desktop, don't you think it is time to standardize on some Window Manager (at least as a minimum) and stop launching more and more new pet-projects on WMs?.
Another WM thread is not what Linux needs by now. We just need a good one, not thousand half-finished, IMHO.
As an aside note, could this be part of some clever strategy by Sun to delay the wide adoption of Linux on the desktop?
Click on the teeny arrow to the left of the desktop switching buttons.
Whoa... Cool!
Not quite the same though.
I see a mozilla icon over a Limewire icon with a Konsole icon in between.
Enlightenment's pager showed the changing contents of the application windows not just the icons.
You could also drag the windows around in the pager and have them move on your desktop.
I'm no expert at this, so i'm going out on a limb here, but i think they only 'stole' the interface.
The underlaying (is that an English word?) multimedia platform (gstreamer) seems to be very original and innovative and something we will probably hear more about in the future.
Sure, it looks like iTunes, but under the hood it's a completely different thing. In my opinion the inteface is just a thin layer on the surface.
It just depends on how you define 'stealing'. It's a blurry discussion. iTunes isn't the first audio player so you could say they stole the idea from earlier audio software.
Every spreadsheet and wordprocessor looks alike. But that's far from saying that they stole from each other or that they are the same.
Furthermore rythmbox is not a finished product so who knows. Maybe it will be skinnable in the future.
just my two cents.
Actually it's rather more likely that Sun are adopting Metacity *because* of Havoc's "no crackrock" approach. I don't know about the particulars of the XMMS case (though I do know that its refusal to cooperate with Sawfish is a pain in the arse), but I'll bet that 99% of the things that Havoc terms "crackrock" are things which would make Metacity more difficult for most of GNOME's users to use (including those of us who are programmers).
I don't think Sun are going to require compromises with Havoc's approach. If anything they would have had to make compromises with Sawfish. I really can't imagine Sun being too pleased about Sawfish's immensely complex config dialog.
--colin (who has taken to posting on /. about GNOME rather than doing anything to improve it)
...so mine will be square.
Innovation for innovations sake is called a waste of time. If something is done really well, why do it differently? There is always a Better Way (tm).
You know, we shouldn't just apply the principle of having only 1 product for each task to software! NO! We should apply it to everything.
Let's start with cars. Look at all those different makes and models: how much effort has been wasted by Ford, GM, Rover and the rest on designing cars that's - let's face it here guys - are all exactly the same.
That's the problem with the current state of car development - way too many companies, all in it for the money. Rather than having 1 all knowing monopoly making our cars, we have 10,000 different companies producing 10,000 models.
Maybe the only way to get car manufacturers organised is to nationalise the entire industry. Hell, why not do that for all industries? We can leave out software of course, that's already controlled by an all knowing monopoly.
What a radical idea. What should I call it? Oh wait.... that'd be communism...
I didn't have to do anything to make it so. I had to do a lot to make it conform - disabling some of the memory overhead and turning off the windows - but it took a lot of wading through config files to get it into an acceptable state and even then it poked its nose up every now and again. It was a like a game of whack-a-mole. Sawmill behaved properly right out of the box.
It was also a big bloated download, constituting about 10mb of stuff to grab compared to about 1mb (at the time) for Sawmill. Even nowadays, Sawfish is only a 3 or so megs of download.
2002-05-13 John Harper * sawfish/wm/gnome/integration.jl: admit defeat and go back to loading xterm module all the time
Nah, Sun just wants to avoid the complexity of the project and get a WM that does the basics (and just the basics, cos Sawfish does too, but is also highly expandable, so can do more than the basics). Sawfish is also famous for crappy defaults and configuration strings, both of which can be fixed if people agree a bit instead of pushing unconsistency and weird phrasing.
For example, until recently eveyone complained that the menu was slow too appear... cos Harper took ages to accept that the var that keeps the menu running always should default to on, and leave those with few RAM set it to a timeout.
Dialogs (cycle window, quote event, etc) are crappy, but there are improvements (search Merlin and Sawfish in Google, or search for the Sawfish Wiki)... maybe next century they will be accepted in core.
We don't need multihead: users often lack even one.
(Don't bother reading. Just mod me down.)
You, sir, are an idiot. Did you even read my post before launching into your skreed, or did you just hear about it from a friend?
I stand by my assertion that open source programmers (i.e., "hobbyists") should get themselves organized and try to finish something, rather than just perpetuating the cycle of "develop, abandon, develop, abandon."
And to think that just yesterday we were discussing the fact-- not so clear-cut after all-- that open source software leads to less duplicated effort and more code reuse! What a crock!
Maybe it's a quality issue. Open source programmers (i.e., "hobbyists") lack any sort of engineering methodology, so it's inevitable that their software will leave a lot to be desired in the quality department. So when a new guy decides he wants to work on a window manager, maybe he looks around for a project to join, only to find that they're all crap. "Oh, well. I'll just start from scratch!"
This is all just cementing my opinion that there will never be any acceptable noncommercial end-user software. Server or developer software maybe; administrators or developers are willing to accept bad HCI design in things like Apache or GCC. But end-user applications? Never. That kind of software requires a degree of fit and polish that open source programmers (i.e., "hobbyists") just can't achieve. Instead of taking feedback and improving their methods or products, they just respond to their critics with multi-paragraph sarcasm.
Things aren't looking too good for the "revolution."
I'm not that legendary developer, but my solution is to run gnome on my "main" monitor (:0.1), and afterstep on my second one. I tend not to want all the special stuff in my second monitor anyway (well, really, I tend not to really want any special stuff either way...).
Afterstep's pretty easy to get configured with a minimal setup (correct number of workspaces, control-arrow workspace switching, a few rxvt key bindings), and then you never have to touch it again. Unlike gnome... And also unlike gnome, it's not a resource hog: Since my last login, _just_ the deskguide in gnome has accumulated 32H of CPU time, whereas all of afterstep only has 5 minutes, and its equiv. of the deskguide (Pager) has a total of 23 seconds of CPU time...
I generally just kill everything off before I log off, and have scripts which fill my screens in an appropriate way with rxvts.
That was kinda my point...Sawfish and E, as I understand, are both independent wm's that /usually/run with Gnome (though not necessarily)...therefor, if we are going to mention one or more wm's that work with Gnome, let's not leave out the best of them all :)
What is your Slash Rating?
As far as I was aware (maybe I've been living in a cone of silence :-P ) those of us who are attracted to Linux wouldn't touch OSX with a bargepole...
Because it has the "sane" defaults that help Mac/Win users migrate from Windows/Mac to Linux.
So why Metacity? IceWM is older, has the features that some people here crow for, and also has sane defaults. When I migratet to Linux from OS/2, I found that IceWM did a nice job of replicating the OS/2 PM/Win32 WM keyboard accelerators (which is very important, not just because it helps you use the computer faster, but because you have muscle memory for that action).
Did Sun even consider IceWM? It's fully Gnome compliant; I've used it since forever with Gnome.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That's why we have software like Mozilla, Emacs, KDE, GNOME, Open Office, GIMP, XFree86, Linux, LaTeX, Perl, etc.
;-)
I really don't want to get into an argument here, but the programs you named fall neatly into two categories: good software written mostly by one person, and bad software written in teams.
Emacs, Linux, TeX, and Perl were all developed to a state of stable usefulness by a single person, with only occasional or limited help from others. These are outstanding.
Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Open Office, and GIMP are all really bad applications. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. They may be neat examples of software design-- hell, Mozilla itself is almost Turing-complete-- but they're pretty crappy from the user experience point of view. And they're not getting better. Just bigger and uglier.
XFree86 is the odd exception, though. It's hard to say whether it's good or bad because it appears to match X bug-for-bug, misfeature-for-misfeature.
Wasn't that simple, and it wasn't really his boss that tried to take control either - just someone that wanted to be.