Re: [Usability]Gnome 1.4->2.0 experience

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Oh look, same old tired flamewar. ;-) 

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 04:57:48PM -0800, Erik Walthinsen wrote: 
> First thing I found is that metacity (no offense, Havoc) is not very
> featureful.  Compared to sawfish, it doesn't allow me even a tenth of the
> features I use on a daily basis.  Simple enough, I switch to sawfish,
> right?  Well, switching to sawfish was only feasible because I had an
> inkling of how the session manager worked.  I had to *kill* metacity,
> start sawfish from the terminal that happened to have focus, then tweak
> the session manager to make it persistent.  This worked, unlike setting
> the window-manager gconf key.

The gconf key shouldn't exist, because all it can do is get out of
sync with the session state. The WM in the session should be and
effectively is the master copy of this setting.

The way it should work is:

 $ sawfish --replace
 $ gnome-session-save

If you can't do that, you have no business running a non-default WM.

It doesn't work that way because sawfish doesn't support --replace, it
only supports forcible kill. But, not metacity's fault. fvwm2 and
others support -replace and there's a standard spec for how that
works.

Changing WM *breaks the desktop* for most users. It can't be in the
prefs dialogs. For example, if a blind user said "well let me try
clicking this WM switcher control" then they would immediately lose
all window navigation keybindings, and lose any accessibility support
in the WM. This would mean they were screwed.

But even for not-blind users, the UI change is an effective
showstopper.

Not to mention that there's simply no way to explain what a "window
manager" is without descending into "PC Load Letter?!" technobabble.
(reference to Office Space)
 
> In GNOME 1.4, I had 8 workspaces (virtual desktops, viewports, whatever
> they were called back then) arranged in a 4x2 grid.  Prime terminals go
> upper left.  Browsers go along the rest of the top.  Coding workspaces go
> along the bottom.  xmms and xchat are sticky, and in the top-right and
> lower-left corners respectively.
> 
> In order to switch from one task to another, I set the Ctrl-arrow keys to
> switch between these workspaces, in a geographic/geometric manner.  If I'm
> reading mail and need to browse something, Ctrl-right.  If I'm coding one
> (of two) project and need to browse, Ctrl-up.
>

The workspace grid and directional keynav works in metacity, and
there's a well-defined spec for how any other WM can implement it.

Try upgrading to Sawfish 1.2 (which is newer than 2.0, don't ask) - it
may be fixed there.
 
Or you can use a WM with viewports.

> Problem is, the workspaces are shown as being 'physically' contiguous, but
> they aren't.  I cannot switch between them in any form that relates to
> their perceived arrangement, except that "next" and "previous" happen to
> translate roughly to right and left.  There's no edge flipping, and I
> can't drag windows from one workspace to another.

So those are missing features in your window manager, from your point
of view. Use a different window manager. Metacity is interacting with
the desktop exclusively via documented specifications, with the
exception of the Keyboard Shorcuts dialog. So any standards-compliant
WM should be able to drop in.

(Adding viewport support to the pager/libwnck is also easy, and I have
no objection as long as it's not in the prefs dialog, i.e. causes no
visible UI change when you aren't using viewports.)

> Every one of these features is implied by the grid arrangement
> shown by the switcher, but has disappeard since 1.4.  Every one of
> them is critical to the way I work, and from what I can tell from
> the archives, I'm not the only one.

Everyone who's ever gotten used to a past UI finds its features
critical to how they work. Amiga users find its features critical,
Windows users find its features critical, Mac users find its features
critical, and GNOME 1.4 users find those critical.

Unfortunately, the result of developing a UI that is a union of all
these is a pile of crap. That means that we have to ask some of those
users to change, or to continue using their current UI.

We have some prefs for the things that are hardest to change (such as
mouse focus). But even those result in significant issues.

Making the problem worse, UNIX historically has about 200 ways of
doing things that people could have gotten used to.

> Next issue is gnome-terminal and fonts.  I used to use 'fixed' in 1.4,
> which looked good and allowed me to cram up to 9 terminals on my 1600x1200
> LCD.  I'm on a CRT now, which reduces clarity, but is really a moot point
> since I can no longer select that font or even find a remotely
> similar-looking one.  'Monospace 8' appears to have too many serifs, but
> without a side-by-side I can't tell anything else.

This is just your font configuration, nothing to do with GNOME:

  https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/psyche-list/2002-October/000585.html
  https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/psyche-list/2002-October/002797.html

Havoc