My noise about gnome 3

[Matthew Gibson <mdg583 gmail com>]

These are just ideas. Ideas are easy to come by, but the work to implement them is another thing. I was just wondering what other people thought about this.

Here's how I would go about making gnome 3 given the know-how and a lot of work:

- don't force the gnome-shell package on people. (I know this is against the gnome 3.0 goals - the idea is to give one gnome experience)
- aim for making mutter the defacto window manager for gnome. (As opposed to metacity. For compiz - see below for a possibility)
- 'modularize' gnome-shell into components, 'plugins'. Don't have a gnome-shell plugin for mutter, have a collection of plugins for mutter which together are gnome-shell.

Here is how I see how gnome-shell is set up now:

mutter = metacity & clutter - the compositing window manager.
mutter supports plugins
gnome-shell is a mutter plugin
gnome-shell is the taskbar, activities area, notification area, etc. of the gnome shell.
gnome-shell supports plugins - using gobject introspection
gnome-shell has a bunch of plugins, both official and unofficial, to change how it works.


What I would do is rather develop mutter into a nice, complete window manager which supports both composting or not composting, and decorates windows. Much like the current metacity. But mutter would also have a plugin engine a bit like gnome-shell's plugin engine. The gnome-shell top bar is one plugin, the activities (with workspaces zoom-out) is another. The alt-tabber is another, etc.

So that would remove the gnome-shell layer. Mutter would be the gnome-shell. This makes more sense to me, the gnome-shell is the window manager-desktop environment combination. Once gnome 3.0 is actually released, users in general will use mutter, and may use composting & the gnome-shell plugins. Or they may remove some gnome-shell components, or they may not do window composting at all, and continue to use gnome-panel.



It would be nice, but I know very difficult, if the plugin system for mutter was an abstracted standard, which compiz could then implement, and the gnome-shell components could eventually be wrapped into compiz, so that if people want to use that wm, they can.
Then mutter would have moved closer to being like compiz, but would still be different enough to warrant another wm.