metacity

[Greg Hamilton]

I agree, Metacity does seem to look better. Obviously the choice of 
theme would make a huge difference. Also, the default font for window 
titles is an ugly fixed pitch font in Sawfish and a much nicer 
anti-aliased scalable font in Metacity.

The speed difference is negligible and probably not noticeable on 
faster hardware. I'm running it on a 500Mhz iBook. It doesn't do 
anything in a hurry. I get a lot of shearing and trails and the like 
when resizing and moving windows. It's not quite as bad with Sawfish. 
This may reflect poorly configured X. I'm not sure if hardware 
acceleration is being used or even if the video driver supports it, 
though the YDL site suggests that it should.

I want to know how to configure Metacity beyond the limits of the 
current GUI config tools. I usually get around all the slow GUI 
problems by not displaying window contents when moving/resizing and 
turning off unnecessary animations. One of the main things I didn't 
like about running OSX on the iBook was the sluggishness of the GUI and 
the lack of options for switching off the visual effects.

Anyway, in the absence of a project home page and any obvious 
documentation/mailing lists/newsgroups/etc. I've downloaded the 
Metacity source and I think I'll have a read over the weekend and see 
what I can see. I've been reading up on GTK+/Gnome app development and 
tinkering about with Glade. A really good Metacity configurator might 
make an interesting little project as an introduction to Gnome app 
development.

Greg

On Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 12:15  PM, Felix Jodoin wrote:

> Well, this isn't really much of a technical opinion, and I don't want 
> to
> start a flame war over this, but I think metacity looks a lot nicer,
> there are more themes available for it (THIS IS ALL MY OPINION,
> CONTRIDICT ME AT WILL!) and I'm not really sure why it would be slower.
> It's also easier to make themes and install them (Trust me, I had
> sawfish once and the stories I could tell...).
> -AliasN
>
> -This is just my opinion, don't take it personally