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Expose Metacity With Expocity

ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."

8 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. Expose by captainclever · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not just say "Expose effect for Metacity" instead of beating around the bush.

    Call a spade a spade.

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  2. Re:a Better headline would be by KamuSan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, good. Maybe now I'll fire up Linux again, instead of just working with OS X. If you have worked with Expose, you don't want anything else. It feels so natural.

    Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
    I'm NOT an Apple zealot or apologist, I actually like Linux more than OS X (and don't like Windows at all) and have used Linux for far more than I used OS X.
    So, please, show me some URLs to OSS projects that you think are really innovative and are not copies of commercial initiatives. Please restore my faith in OSS ;-)

  3. Re:a Better headline would be by quigonn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, basically everybody copies features from everyone else. That's business.

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    A monkey is doing the real work for me.
  4. Re:My 2 Cents. by nuffle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am here to tell you that is exactly why Linux is losing the desktop race.

    Please don't tell people who are volunteering their time writing open source applications that their time would be better spent elsewhere. The reason Linux is as close to where it is on the desktop is because people have worked on the sort of things that interest them. You may be right: Maybe some other project would be more objectively useful. But on the other hand, if you were in charge, deciding who got to work on what project, nobody would want to work on open-source anymore, and Linux would suck pretty quick.

    So let people do what they want, even if you think it's dumb. It's a community effort that is strong because people can work when, how, and on what they want.

    Do you hang out at neighborhood cleanups telling people they should be volunteering their time at soup kitchens instead?

  5. Microsoft's Definition of Innovation by Llywelyn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yep, using the same definition of innovation as Microsoft, you're right.

    Copy your ideas from Apple, give it a slightly different finish and not do it as well, and then have it named "innovative."

    Bloody brilliant.

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  6. Classic example by Sanity · · Score: 5, Insightful
    And here we see a perfect example of the attitude that is holding back Linux on the desktop: "Why would anyone need X, I can do that with Y" where X is an easy-to-use feature, and Y is a complicated way to achieve the same thing that most desktop users would never adopt.

    The average desktop user barely understands the concept of files and folders - do you honestly expect them to be organized enough to arrange their programs into virtual desktops as you have done?

    This project is exactly what Linux should be doing - assimilating the best features from its competitors on the desktop. I just wish that Linux was also innovating on the desktop, rather than just following in the footsteps of others (and no, themability is not an innovation so far as usability is concerned).

  7. The desktop is a marketplace, not a race. by Moderation+abuser · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's no hurry. The desktop market isn't going anywhere.

    Right now, we're seeing the catastrophic takeover of the server market by Linux, it's devastating the vendors Unix offerings, Microsoft will be next, all that will be left for non Linux systems will be a few small niches and long term holdouts.

    The desktop market is really no different, the same will happen there too. Like the server switch it really is inevitable and has been for years. Purely a matter of time now.

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    Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
  8. Re:a Better headline would be by Dwonis · · Score: 4, Insightful
    OSS projects *do* take a lot of ideas from others, but they also do lots of things on their own that nobody else has done.

    For example, Python has evolved into an extremely intuitive yet powerful programming language.
    Perl was also fairly new in its time.
    There's GNU Emacs which is one of the most powerful text editors in existence.
    There's the Apache Webserver. Although webservers aren't new, I would hardly call Apache a copy of anything.
    I'm not sure whether the first publicly-released blog software was open source, but I think it might have been.
    OpenBSD was, AFAIK, the first secure-by-default modern Unix system.
    Linux (the kernel) has also done (or been modified to do) several things not done before.
    X11 started as a project out of MIT (which I would guess was open-source, even though the phrase hadn't been coined yet.)
    GNU readline is also something that is exclusive to open source
    I'd guess that ls --color was something new to free software, as well, just because I douby anyone with a pure profit motive would consider it worth the time to implement. :-)
    The Debian Project has made several innovations in operating system integration.

    Anyway, there are plenty of examples. You just have to look.