Re: Metacity, Mutter, GNOME Shell, GNOME-2.28

[Sam Spilsbury <smspillaz gmail com>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 3:23 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> 2009/3/30 Ted Gould <ted gould cx>:
>> On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 12:07 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>> So, basically, no I don't see a way that GNOME Shell coexists with
>>> Compiz other than as two separate shells for the GNOME desktop.
>>
>> And I think that coexistence is part of the problem with GNOME Shell
>> becoming the default GNOME interface.  Distributions need something that
>> can gracefully decline between a composited and a non-composited
>> environment.  Not saying that Compiz can do that today, but we
>> effectively get that with the combination of metacity and Compiz and
>> lots of nasty hacks.  But, overall it works.

It can, see compiz 0.9.x (admittedly this is the new development
branch and won't be stable for a while but it _can_ do it, if the
opengl or composite plugins can't initialize for whatever reason
compiz just falls back to being a normal WM and all the bling plugins
aren't loaded.

>>
>> For a GNOME Shell like project to be successful it will need to have
>> either two backends or some sort of architecture that would allow for
>> GNOME Shell features to be integrated in other less featureful
>> shell-like tools.
>
> I don't get why that statement is true. For a GNOME Shell project to
> be successful, it hast to be freakin good.
> Mac OS X and Windows XP are way far more successful desktop
> environments than GNOME or KDE are, and they don't even have the
> notion of swappable windows managers, and if they do, none uses them.
>
> So what's your point here?

See KDE. They've abstracted a lot of their stuff and made special
efforts so that it works with other composite window managers.

>
>> While I love many of the concepts being explored and have suggested
>> ideas for some of them, I just simply can't see the currently
>> incarnation of GNOME Shell being the default for GNOME.
>>
>>                --Ted
>>
>>
>>

To be frank in the end, unless we see some kind of co-operation we are
going to have to take a really bad route, which is forking shell so
that compiz users aren't unfairly locked out of half of their desktop
functionality when using future GNOME versions - I'd really hate it to
come down to this.