Re: migrating from metacity to sawfish

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 02:26:59PM +1100, Stephen Kuhn wrote: 
> I keep trying the same thing, but the damn Metacity keeps restarting
> before Sawfish has a chance to run...it's getting more and more annoying
> that this issue can't just be resolved with an easy fix. I'm almost to
> the point of chucking Gnome2 in the bin and going back to 1.4+ because
> at least I have control over the environment - and don't have so many
> niggling problems - ASIDE from performance issues...

You could also:
 - edit ~/.gnome2/session if you've saved session before
 - open gnome-session-properties and remove metacity there
   (you might want to do "sleep 30 && sawfish" in a terminal first)

Though the intended way to do it is:

 fvwm2 -replace
 gnome-session-save

Unfortunately, sawfish doesn't have the --replace feature that several
other WMs do (fvwm, metacity, etc.):

 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72451

If you have an easy fix to just resolve the issue, feel free to bring
it up. However, there can't be a GUI for it that users would normally
find, because changing WMs will break the UI in a lot of ways for most
users (and there is no way to explain what a window manager is anyhow,
without explaining processes, X servers, and everything else).

By "break the UI" I mean that most documented key shortcuts will no
longer work, the theme control panel will no longer work, the font
control panel won't work, various window behaviors will become
different, the window menu will be different and contain confusing
items, the workspace switcher and window list will have a number of
issues, busy cursor/startup-notification from GNOME 2.2 won't work,
and nothing will match up with the documentation. (These are just
examples, there are a number of other issues too.)

So in short the solution must be discoverable only by people who
already know what a window manager is, or lots of people will get
screwed.

Havoc