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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 :)
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
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.
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.
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.
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
Metacity saved our business. Maybe it will save slashdot, too
Let's get one thing clear; metacity is not Jesus, allright?
And if it took a new window manager to save your company, then I need its name. I'm worried I might be a stockholder.
:-)
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
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)
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 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'll agree that translucence and themability are fluff. I might be able to envision an actual use for translucence if I thought about it long enough, but it'd be a real corner case.
But...
Things that suck in Windows window management:
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light