Re: _NET: Disabling shading

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Wednesday 01 of October 2003 15:54, Denis O. Mikhalkin wrote:
[snip]
> > This is the big misunderstanding. It's the users desktop and they should
> > be in control of the windows appearing on it, with the help of a wm which
> > they've selected for its interpretation of the specs.
>
> I don't agree with that. I don't think user want to do what you say -
> users usually want PREDICTABILITY. And I don't mean those rare Linux
> gurus which happened to work on X, but those millions of desktop users
> which we want to attract to Unix Desktops. They want the software they
> have to work. They become very confused when something that worked
> before starts to work differently, they want it to work as specified in
> manuals and as it worked for some time. I doubt there are many of them
> who know how to even change their desktop(Gnome or KDE), even less of
> them know that WM exists and that it can be changed and know how to do
> it.

 So those users run the same desktop and WM all the time, and therefore don't 
see any changes or different behaviour, so it's predictable  ... where's the 
point?

>
> And it is obviosly that Unix desktop is already moving toward such users
> - we hardcoded WM into desktop(Metacity-Gnome, KDE-KWin), it is now have

 You're confusing defaults for the only possible options.

> less options and is more tightly bound to other components. Here we come
> to another predictability - that which developers expect. That's why we
> standardize WM or other IPC interfaces, I am sure without them you can't
> expect all those desktop-managing programs to work together so well.
>
> I think that the role of WM has changed - from managing component it
> became more of a serving component. And being so it means that is should

 And I think you're wrong. In fact, my future plans for KWin include shifting 
more from serving to managing. And, finally, I personally think that the spec 
is designated that way - that's why it has window types, describing what the 
window is, instead of bunches of flags, describing what the app wants or 
thinks.

> And to achieve predictability you should first specify interface, you
> should eliminate all implicits("If you don't specify <something> then WM
> is free to <decide something>" - this is wrong) and turn them into
> explicit rules. It doesn't mean restriction - add as more explicit
> features as you like. Add guidelines for what you think is a good UI in
> terms of feature usage("toplevel are usually focusable, with caption..."
> and so) so that developers don't misbehave.

 Hahaha. "so that developers don't misbehave". Or do you have a magical wand 
that will suddenly turn all developers that created all the crappy 
misbehaving applications into nice perfect developers?

> Note that feature richness doesn't result in
> unpredictability when applied to variety of programs using features
> differently. Every single program will behave predictable, and most of
> them will operate with concepts known to user. If one wants to do
> differently - it is his right.

 And you're talking about predictability? Every program will have a rich set 
of possibilities to do, will have rights to do it differently, resulting in 
unconsistent mess, and that will be predictable?

 Hmm, I just noticed Matthias Clasen has expressed my thoughts in a much nicer 
and shorter way than I wanted to write here. It must be the second time for 
today :).

 One more thing though. I think you're missing one basic point. For 99,9% of 
applications, the applications don't really care about many details about 
their windows. Why should an application care of it's shaded or not, 
minimized or not, on current or different desktop (besides the fact that it's 
visible or not)? Why should it care about its position? Why should it care 
about what buttons are in its titlebar? Why should it care whether the user 
has to click inside of the window to activate it or it's just enough to move 
the mouse inside? And so on, and so on. Will you also suggest a flag 
requesting only clicktofocus or focusfollowsmouse policies for a window?

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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