window manager [LWN.net]

window manager

Posted Oct 30, 2003 1:55 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: A look at Fedora Core 1

quote: "GNOME with Metacity as the window manager."

what exactly is the point of throwing on the Metacity as the WM bit? It's GNOME, Metacity is the GNOME WM, simple. We don't say KDE with the KWM window manager. ;-)

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window manager

Posted Oct 30, 2003 2:28 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Not quite. There is no such thing as "the GNOME window manager". Metacity is just one of many window managers that have good GNOME support. Others are Enlightenment, Sawfish and IceWM.

From http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metacity/:

Metacity is a window manager that integrates nicely with GNOME 2. Originally an experiment, it's now turning out to be halfway usable and lots of people are using it, though there are still some caveats - be sure to read the README.

It's very different from KDE, where the window manager is an integral part of the project, even though it can be replaced.

Re: window manager

Posted Oct 30, 2003 15:10 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

So lets see

kwm: Distributed with KDE as the default window manager. Interaction between window manager and desktop specified in the window manager spec, and some KDE specific extensions. Can be replaced with another WM implementing the relevant specs.
metacity: Distributed with Gnome as the default window manager. Interaction between window manager and desktop specified in the window manager spec, and some Gnome specific extensions. Can be replaced with another WM implementing the relevant specs.

What exactly is the difference?

Re: window manager

Posted Oct 30, 2003 16:59 UTC (Thu) by sideshow (guest, #2791) [Link]

The difference is that the "default" window manager for GNOME has changed in the past (from sawmill/sawfish) and may be different in different distributions (I think someone still ships sawfish as the default). It's worth noting with GNOME rather than KDE because AFAIK noone ships anything other than kwm as the window manager for KDE.

Re: window manager

Posted Oct 31, 2003 5:06 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Gnome, as distributed from ftp.gnome.org ships with metacity. A third party is free to make modifications to what they distribute, in accordance with the licenses on the various packages. I am simply stating that an unmodified Gnome ships with Metacity, the same way KDE ships with kwm.

Both Gnome and KDE have rewritten and replaced components of their respective desktops over the years. However, the switch to Metacity as the default is not something new for Gnome (it happened in 2.2), or Red Hat/Fedora (they were using Metacity in RH8).