On 2011-03-31 at 13:45-04 Christopher X Candreva <[email protected]> wrote:
> Has anyone started looking at what we'll have to do to keep useing > Sawfish under Fedora 15 / Gnome 3, when Gnome Shell replaces use of > a window manger and the panel? I don't think this will be possible. The entire point of Gnome Shell is that it combines the functionality of the panel, window manager, and notification daemon. It's not designed to be modular; it's designed to be single, monolithic entity. However... On 2011-03-31 at 20:05+02 Christopher Roy Bratusek <[email protected]> wrote: > There's a sub-optimal "fallback mode", which is basically GNOME2 > (panel, self- choosen WM (...)). But I guess it's not what you > expect before 3.2 is out (panel not finished, applets not ported). Yes. "Fallback mode" is essentially "GNOME Classic": gnome-panel, a window manager (metacity), and a notification daemon. I think having sawfish be able to function as a window manager in GNOME 3 Fallback Mode is a worthwhile goal. However, as you've observed, fallback mode support is very minimal at the moment. I'm running Fedora 15 Alpha on my laptop (which has GNOME 3 prerelease), and only last week did they push out updated packages that make fallback mode more palatable. (And unfortunately, those updates broke sawfish. But I'm running an old sawfish version; I'll try building the latest versions against these new GNOME 3 packages.) > Though I don't know what is required to enter fallbak mode nor how > to set it up. Open System Info > Graphics; change "Forced Fallback Mode" to "ON". > Recently I've switched back to KDE4 (I hate new technologies, which > are combined with someone forcing you to use it's companion, instead > of developing something less single-solution-only). I was really looking forward to GNOME Shell. I was hoping it would be something like the Windows Aero interface: an evolution, not a revolution. But after spending 30 minutes or so exploring GNOME Shell, all I wanted to do was KILL IT WITH FIRE. It was one of the most confusing, nonsensical, and non-intuitive interfaces I've ever used. Nothing was documented. There were no tooltips to explain anything. The desktop effects were arbitrary and mercurial. Managing virtual desktops (a feature I really care about, because I use 9) was a frustration. And although it's not GNOME's fault, my laptop has an nVidia card, and the nouveau driver's DRI support for my card is beta-level at best. Thus, all of GNOME Shell's DRI-based eye candy was slow and buggy. I'm really hoping my adverse reaction to GNOME Shell is because the version I was using was only partially complete, and that the final version will be a lot better. Because if what I used was the final version (or anything close to it), I think most current GNOME users will run shrieking from it. > A DesktopShell is definitively something which should not be a one > way. Plasma for example offers greater functionality and > flexibility, while it doesn't matter what other software (in our > case: WM) you use. For better or worse, this is not the direction that GNOME went. Either you drink the GNOME Shell Kool-Aid, or you stick with GNOME Classic ("Fallback Mode"). There's no middle ground.
