Hi Linuxers!
Okay, Gnome2 and Bluecurve look really cool, especially with AA fonts but there's quite a lot that I didn't like. Here are the issues (when I say that something "is" or something "isn't", it is supposed to be *AFAIK* and not the absolute truth):
- Under-featured window manager:
The MetaCity Window manager doesn't have any options for layering management and attribute memory. I can't keep EveryBuddy on top now.
- No options for custom keyboard short-cuts:
Unlike Enlightenment or Sawfish, there's no provision for having keyboard shortcuts to run commands. There's a lot more move-move click-click involved now.
- No option to switch Window Managers! I installed RH8 clean on one system and upgraded another. The former doesn't have sawfish, the latter doesn't have an option to switch Window Managers, even though it has Sawfish.
- Complicated Menu:
The main menu is now more broad than deep a la KDE and that was one of the main reasons why I didn't like KDE.
- Overall lack of customizability
I could go on and on but to summarize, a lot of customizability that Gnome users had grown accustomed to is now gone and the overall feel has a lack of "freedom".
- The Terminal is now a "System Tool" (duh!)
I looked around the Net a little and I didn't find many people ranting about these things. Is it just me? Am I missing something? I'd be grateful if some of you could give some pointers.
TIA
--- Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST) http://staff.ncst.ernet.in/tahir tahir AT ncst DOT ernet DOT in
We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed
On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 11:36:08AM +0530, Tahir Hashmi wrote:
I looked around the Net a little and I didn't find many people ranting about these things. Is it just me? Am I missing something? I'd be grateful if some of you could give some pointers.
Well, some people will never leave windowmaker/icewm/wmx etc. etc. to notice such things! ;-)
Long live windowmaker! Long live xterm!
On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Ravindra Jaju wrote:
Well, some people will never leave windowmaker/icewm/wmx etc. etc. to notice such things! ;-)
Or BlackBox. :-)
Long live windowmaker! Long live xterm!
And BlackBox with rxvt ;-)
On Wed, 9 Oct 2002 11:36:08 +0530 Tahir Hashmi code_martial@softhome.net wrote:
Under-featured window manager:
The MetaCity Window manager doesn't have any options for layering
management and attribute memory. I can't keep EveryBuddy on top now.
No options for custom keyboard short-cuts:
Unlike Enlightenment or Sawfish, there's no provision for having
keyboard shortcuts to run commands. There's a lot more move-move click-click involved now.
- No option to switch Window Managers! I installed RH8 clean on one system and upgraded another. The
former doesn't have sawfish, the latter doesn't have an option to switch Window Managers, even though it has Sawfish.
OK, I managed to kill the above three birds... er... problems. The first two can be solved by using a more capable WM. RH has not provided any obvious means to switch window managers so it's a bit of an exercise everytime you login. Here goes:
- Select "Failsafe" session from the login prompt and login.
- In the resulting Xterm, run "gnome-wm &". This looks for the value of the environment variable "WINDOW_MANAGER" and launches the one indicated. I set it to sawfish.
- Voila! Sawifish is up and running. Just do "gnome-session & gnome-panel&" and you're through!!
- To logout, kill the original Xterm window.
Not very neat, all this, but you can do neat things with your profile. Here's what went into my .bash_profile:
export WINDOW_MANAGER="sawfish" -- some other stuff -- gnome-wm & gnome-session & gnome-panel &
These two lines allow me to login and run Sawfish directly. It also has a good side-effect - an Xterm window :D
On Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:00:43 +0530 Tahir Hashmi code_martial@softhome.net wrote:
- Select "Failsafe" session from the login prompt and login.
[snip]
Another discovery: Setting the variable "WINDOW_MANAGER" does the trick! You can happily select Gnome session and your favorite WM will be loaded.
Wonder why RH guys were so reluctant to include Sawfish and WM prefs.
-
Dinesh Shah -
q u a s i -
Ravindra Jaju -
Tahir Hashmi