"Official" gnome window manager

[Jim Pick <jim jimpick com>]

Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com> writes:

> No reason why Gnome shouldn't come with > 1 wm.  I think most
> complainers (myself included) have been saying that it shouldn't come
> with < 1 wm.

Gnome will usually come with a Linux (or *BSD) distribution.  In those
cases, it will come with many window managers.  Debian has 14 --
olvwm, kwm, fvwm, fvwm2, fvwm95, scwm, gwm, icewm, 9wm, afterstep,
ctwm, wm2, wmaker, and olvwm (someone was doing enlightenment, I
wonder what happened to it).  Several of these will integrate nicely
with Gnome, I assume.  There are also many, many window managers
Debian doesn't have (ie.  piewm).

Looking at it from that perspective (my vantage point), arguing over
what window manager should be bundled with Gnome is counter-productive
and basically a waste of bandwidth.

Before anybody says Gnome should ship with a window manager, I would
first appreciate it if they would describe the reasons why they
themselves can't pick and bundle a window manager alongside Gnome in
the product they are producing.

My suspicion is that this commonly held position (Gnome should ship a
window manager) is just a variant of the widely voiced opinion that
"all these different window managers is too confusing to new users, so
there should be a standard one".

I feel the choice of a default window manager should (and will) be
decided by the people putting together the final distribution
(ie. Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSe, etc.)  Tools such as dpkg and
rpm, which don't know about Gnome, let the user select which window
manager packages are available.  Debian and Red Hat already let the
user choose a window manager.

Mainly, my argument is that shipping window managers with Gnome is
pure 'advocacy' -- there's no practical reason to do it.

IMHO, the Gnome project is fairly focused.  It isn't meant to be an
entire OS distribution.  So, it shouldn't be advocating a particular
window manager to go into the final OS product.  Doing so is really
the realm of the final distribution builder (like Debian, Red Hat,
Corel) or do-it-yourself'er.

I don't agree with people who would use the Gnome project to advocate
'one true wm' for all users.  We'll never get everybody to agree and
it will lead to endless bickering and politics.

Cheers,

 - Jim

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