Re: Preserved Window Placement

[Jason Simanek <jsimanek gmail com>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> wrote:
> This is not true as I said before. Nor btw is it a Linux thing. X is not
> Linux X is way bigger.

Chalk that up to my ignorance. I guess I thought we were talking about
Metacity or Mutter, not X. But I might be using the wrong terms. Not
my intention. Thanks for the clarification.

>> And the idea that the window manager shouldn't do this and that the
>> applications themselves should do it will only produce one result: a
>> complete mess of inconsistent behavior ....
>
> Which is why the toolkit does the heavy lifting and it tells the session
> manager how to get that application back into its previous state.

I started this discussion because I'm getting really frustrated with
the lack of window state preservation on Linux. I understand that this
involves a lot of different pieces of software. I am talking about the
desired end result. I probably do not have a complete understanding of
the various individual actors involved in creating the experience.

> The window manager in an X environment may be running on another machine,
> running another OS, or even being a thin client. X applications are also
> able to do things like have windows open on multiple desktops and
> machines at once.

Yes, I understand the complexity of X and its wide array of abilities
beyond the single-user desktop interface. But none of those many
capabilities excludes providing the option of preserved window
placement. Obviously for now this is simply not a priority for X. I
guess I was thinking preserved window placement would be something
handled by metacity or mutter or something that is under the domain of
Gnome. Hence, discussing it here.

> The MacOS approach assumes applications are constrained to a particular
> narrow set of behaviours, local and to some extent written with one set of
> tools.

Right, but there are already some standard elements between Gnome/GTK
and KDE applications, right? Should I be talking to the
Freedesktop.org people?

> That's not to say the X approach couldn't do with improvement, but that
> its solving a whole different and vastly larger problem space.

Please point me in the direction of the people I should be discussing
this with. At the moment I'm refusing to give up on using Linux (or
whatever word we can use to refer to the collective of desktop
environments that share the same or similar resources). If I can help
improve this little detail, I will. But it might be out of my scope.

Again, thank you for the excellent and helpful discussion! Pardon my
ignorance. It is not my intention to insult or disregard any project
or person.

Jason Simanek