In fact here is a whole thread on focus policy...
I have noticed that the configuration of focus policy is gradually becoming more and more difficult.
With the window manager installed by default, you mean.
[...]
The problem is this; what's the point of enabling focus follows mouse policy, if one can't disable the window being raised when inner window is clicked?
How do I disable that?
By default, Red Hat 8.0 installs Metacity as the window manager. The design policy in Metacity is to try and avoid configuration options and just implement one choice that trys to suit a large number of people. In that respect, being able to choose whether focus follows mouse or not is a concession. So Havoc (the Metacity maintainer) has a made a choice about how "focus follows mouse" will work and implemented it.
Opinions are still very divided about whether the "make one choice for everybody" policy is ideal, but the people writing the code and on the usability team and the release team seem to think it's not too harmful, so that's the way things are moving.
If you want to be able to customise things further, install a different window manager. Sawfish would be the obvious choice for GNOME, since it's actively maintained and allows you to customise as much as you want (although whether the customisations are easy or not is another question). Completely dropping GNOME and installing KDE is obviously an overreaction -- there are less intrusive changes you can make to use a different window manager.
J
