The answers page

Feel free to ask more questions, but here are answers to the ones you asked already:

• How would you make a Prelude theme? Answered here and now floating around the net.
• Will the compositor ever be enabled by default? I’d like it to be.  There are apparently people it still doesn’t work for well, though.  Perhaps as newer hardware becomes more common this will become less likely.
• Will there be new features in the compositor? Possibly.  It seems to be working fine now, and I don’t want Metacity turning into a knock-off of Compiz.  But I can imagine some kind of plugin-based thing happening in a wild handwavy future, and in the meantime plenty of people are asking whether the shadows can become adjustable.
• What is Metacity’s role in GNOME Shell? GNOME Shell uses a fork of Metacity called Mutter (i.e. Metacity with Clutter).  Whether this will become the main Metacity in future, or whether the two will be developed in parallel, or whether it’ll be merged back upstream and have some way of controlling which control path is taken, is not yet decided.  I need to talk to the Mutter people more, anyway.
• How about window matching? Raise your voice about option 2 of this list.
• Can Metacity move the title bar from the tops of windows to the sides? Not in versions 1 or 2 of the theme format.  Maybe in version 3 this will be possible, if there was any use for it: it’d be a fairly simple change to the existing system.
• Why not merge Metacity and KWin and have one über-window-manager? Because choice is good.  That’s why we have EWMH, so you can run KWin with GNOME or Metacity with KDE if you really want.  Trying to reduce choice in window managers, or desktop environments, or whatever, really ends up with the choice of The Non-Free Market Leaders versus Everyone Else, which really isn’t much of a choice.  (But we do talk to Luboš and the other WM maintainers, and they’re all fine people, and we’re not attempting to sabotage one another’s work.  We’re even holding the conferences in the same place this year, you know…)

Photo © Nick Ford, cc-by-nc-nd.