Re: Gnome shell suggestions after a bit of usage

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

Alright, here's some simple explanations.

>> By the way, talking about notifications, if I move the cursor over them it's
>> only because I want to open them, so why do I have to click? There should be
>> an option to let you open the notifications just by hovering over them, the
>> same way than when they have just popped out.
>
> No.

I don't see any benefit to making them come out on hover, but talk to
aday on #gnome-design. He's working a lot on revamping the message
tray, so you can bounce some ideas off of him.

>> Allow the top-panel to auto-hide just as the bottom one. I readed somewhere
>> that the top-panel is something like a visual anchor that allows the user
>> rememeber where he is... well, I perfectly know where I am, and, honestly,
>> the biggest part of the info displayed there is not really something I need
>> to see all the time. If that doesn't change, I prefer to have more space in
>> the screen.
>
> No.

Because the top bar is extremely important. Not to mention that
technical limitations would make it hard to auto-hide effectively.

>> Sincerely, i miss so much the gelatinous
>> windows and all that nice compiz stuff. When you show your computer to a
>> windows-rules friend, that's the first thing that amazes them. I hope those
>> effects are soon ported to mutter, but, instead of that, maybe a
>> compatibility layer to run compiz plugins with mutter would do the trick. In
>> fact, it would save you thousands of lines of code. I ignore if this is even
>> possible, but that's why I ask...
>
> No.

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about if you think a
Compiz plugin compatibility layer will be easy. It's not worth the
engineering effort so you can have your fancy useless wobbly windows.
It would probably be easier to rewrite the shell to be a Compiz plugin
than adding that to mutter though. You are free to try, though. Here's
some of the differences to get you started.

  * A lot of Compiz's plugins rely on the fact that they use NET_WM
viewports, not NET_WM workspaces, cubes and desktop wall included.
  * Compiz doesn't paint their window recorations into their
reparented frames, they just grab the window pixmap and paint their
decorations on to the scene directly.

Compiz is effectively a very plain window manager, and two special
things add all all the fancy effects and capability: a special set of
helper processes (there's a window decorator process, for instance)
and plugins. The plugin API is just Compiz. To write a compatibility
layer would be to rewrite the Compiz core, but hosted on top of
mutter.

I apologize for my tone in advance, but I'm frustrated at this kind of
"proposal".

>> Be happy ;)