Re: GNOME Usability Improvements - Fix the window manager!

[Michael Fulbright <msf redhat com>]

dmiller@ilogic.com.au said:
>  IceWM and WindowMaker got to be very user friendly and GNOME
> integrated all by themselves. 

Icewm does not have a GUI tool for configuring options like focus, keybindings,
turning on/off cool features. It does seem to work with GNOME well (althogh
it doesn't automatically remove its panel if it detects GNOME is running).
Having to edit a text file to configure a window manager knocks it out of
the running in my book if you want it to be easy to use and configure.

Window Maker (I think the real name is the GNUStep window manager but
people seem to call it Window Maker still) requires quite a bit of configuring,
not obvious to a newbie, to work well with GNOME.  Its icons and wharf, in my 
experience, can really confuse a new user who wonders why there are different
kind of icons (GNOME and Window Maker) on the desktop. Plus it doesn't allow 
the gmc selection mouse events throughto the desktop so you can't rubberband 
icons on the desktop.  This may have been fixed recently so I could be wrong. 
It isn't clear to me either that Window Maker and gnome-session don't have 
issues working together  based on email's I've read on the GNOME mailing lists. 

Both are top-notch window managers, but they, like all other window managers,
were not engineered to work with the GNOME environment and UI.  I have read
negative comments in many comparisons of GNOME and KDE that were because our
WM is not neatly integrated into the fold.

I am really pleased we have choices in which window manager currently
works with GNOME. We will have more choices when the GNOME/KDE window manager
spec is completely. Anyone who suggests this isn't important doesn't
understand the hacker mentality.

Dr Mike