Re: GNUstep & The Window Manager Problem

[Riccardo Mottola]

on 5/24/04 11:55 PM, Alex Perez at aperez@student.santarosa.edu wrote:

> Anyways, does anyone else here have any comments. My apologies if any of
> you have found this e-mail incongruous.

Once in a while I have to agree with you.

The windowmanager situation here is not good and it worsens the GNUstep
experience.

I was talking about this with bheron some nights ago and had the following
thouhgts.

- writing a working windowmanager is a difficult task, you interface to X
often direcly, this is tricky. It requires a lot of work and maintainance on
different OS's,  X servers etc

- having GNUstep working on other wm's is nice because it can be handy
(gnome, KDE, motif-stuff) but for a "true next experience" a dedicated wm is
still the way to go.

so I thought that the best medium term solution would be to fork off
windowmaker. Windowmaker is a quite proven and fast wm and it compiled on
all the computers I have tried (trust me, a maze...)

Many of the features they want to add to WM are non-interesting for us, I
would go in fact to the opposite direction. Remove peice after piece
features of wmaker and reimplement them in GNUstep (say preferences for
example) and integrate them better in a "gnsutep desktop environment". This
permits the removal of some duplicates (like the fiend app top-right) and
better integration in colors/themes (thing about wmaker/gnustep
dishomogenity in icons and menu drawing).
Coupled with a custom gnustep display manager this would be a great leap
forward without requireing the writing of a new InterfaceWM, even if that
would be a more "clean" approach.

_Riccardo