On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 19:03, Matthew Zimmerman wrote:
Yes, but Bevan said "easily". :)
Well, "easily" is relative. Normal people don't know that a window manager exists let alone care which one they are using. My mother would totally freak out and hide the computer under her bed if the look of her windows were to be changed. Having "window manager" as an option in some easily found preference would probably be far worse than the inconvenience of having to learn how to properly use the session manager.
Certainly it is relative, and certainly, changing window managers is something that only `power' (and not `normal') users will want to do. I agree with you on that.
I am a little concerned, though, that the solution the GNOME folks have chosen lay dangerously close to the ``weld the hood shut'' mentality. I don't know about you, but if I want to change the window manager and I didn't know how to go about doing it, the first thought that comes to mind is not the session manager. I'd look through the preferences menu, or poke about in .gnome2/, or maybe look through the GConf database.
But no. The real solution is ``kill the old window manager and hope that you get the new one started before GNOME realizes you've killed it and tries to restart nautilus, and *only* nautilus, since it's hard-coded somewhere into the system''. That seems incredibly hacky to me. I've had problems doing this, not to mention problems with sessions getting broken or corrupted and having to do it all over again.
I understand the logic of wanting to keep desktop configuration simple. But this sort of thing doesn't have to have a pretty little GUI. If they would just put a key into GConf ('default_window_manager' = '/usr/bin/metacity', or something), that would be worlds better (IMHO). Your mom doesn't use gconf-editor much, does she?
--
Matt Matthew Zimmerman
Interdisciplinary Biophysics, University of Virginia
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mdz4c/