-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 10:42:46PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote: > On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 03:38:12PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > > And there is no obvious/easy way provided to > > continue to use GNOME without using Metacity. > > It's a simple two commands typed into a terminal, or a trivial text > edit of ~/.gnome2/session. This may well be so, but in my experience average users, even experienced ones, aren't likely to know this. One would expect that GNOME developers certainly would... Though I'd like to know what the two commands are -- my own experience is that it's not that simple. Ordinarily I'd expect that killing the existing window manager and starting a new one would do it (and then of course, you'd still have to save your gnome session to make the change permanent). However, when I tried doing this with Gnome2/Metacity, it brought my whole session down. Tried it more than once. Same result every time... I came across a description of how someone got around the problem, and it was much more convoluted than that (though I don't remember the details)... And mucking around with config files for GNOME apps is something I no longer have the patience for, given that they're often not documented well (or at all), both as to their format, and also as to what they are and/or where they actually live. More importantly, while /I/ could probably figure out the config file format if I bothered to look, less experienced users might not, and probably won't even know there's one there to look at. And many who find out won't want to touch it for fear of breaking something. GUIs for configuring such things have become poplular because people want them -- precisely because they largely don't require reading loads of documentation and don't take a lot of investment on the part of the user to figure them out. Years ago I used to spend lots of time on that sort of thing; but lately I've taken a more pragmatic approach to computing. Like most users, I mostly just want the thing to work, so I can get my work done. The computer is designed to do lots of boring, repetative stuff... It should take as much as possible of the tedium and learning curve of the details out of the user's experience. Of course, I also want to be able to work the way I'm used to, and not have to retrain myself... Havoc, while I'm curious about the window manager thing, I don't really think it would be productive to continue to debate over the usability and/or flexibility of gnome2 (especially Metacity) here. You may feel that Sawfish is crufty, broken, hard to maintain, or whatever else... I won't dispute any such claims, having not looked at the code. But I think that for the /users/, the approach that it takes, offering different views for configuring things to different levels of users, is the best one. Simplicity is great, so long as people are still able to work the way they work, rather than having the software dictate to them how they should work. Certainly, you need to draw the line somewhere, but personally I think GNOME2 (at least, as shipped by RH) is drawing it a bit too low. I've stated my opinion to provide Red Hat with my feedback. I know your opinion, and you've heard mine repeatedly from myself and others, so I doubt we're going to change eachother's minds. Let's leave it at that. - -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+C97jHEnASN++rQIRAspKAJ48wSiAQFEnTv3Q3rEhultHaBiAdACgpQUv 2M/na5a3JY8JeUfHS7y9V5I= =xv8B -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
