Re: Theme patriation

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Iain * wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Rui Tiago Cação Matos
> <tiagomatos gmail com> wrote:
> > 2008/10/27 Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>:
> >>> IMO decorating a window belongs in the WM, not all X applications use
> >>> GTK as rendering toolkit...
> >>
> >> And not all users of gnome use Metacity as WM.
> >
> > IIUC from Owen's post[1] and things really end up going that way, you
> > won't have much coice. And that's a good thing.
> 
> Thats irrelevant to this discussion.
> GTK apps cans still be run under other window managers.

So long as the apps in question operate gracefully if they don't 
find metacity to do their bidding, then OK.  

However, I strongly object to the idea that it's "a good thing" if 
there's no choice of window manager under gnome.  IMO, sawfish 
remains greatly superior to metacity if you're an "expert" user, 
and I don't see why gnome should wish to drive away expert users.

Here are just a couple of reasons for my preference.  If they're 
out-of-date with regard to metacity, please let me know.

1) I like to run an analog clock on my desktop.  Gnome doesn't 
provide one, but xclock works fine.  But xclock looks stupid with 
window decorations, you want it to blend with the background.  
Using sawfish, it's trivial to specify (via the GUI) that xclock 
should be displayed without decorations; I haven't found a way to 
do that in metacity.

2) If desktop software supports multiple virtual desktops -- and 
of course it should -- it seems rudimentary that you should be 
able to specify that a given app always starts on desktop N.  
E.g., I do web-browsing on desktop 3, so under sawfish I specify 
(via the GUI) that firefox starts on desktop 3.  Again, I haven't 
found a way to do this under metacity.

Allin Cottrell