The hostility towards Metacity from critics is due in large part to the hostility shown towards people whose needs don’t fit into the limited scope of the application’s functionality. Requests for much-needed features have been summarily dismissed and characterized as “crack.”

Innovation only transpires when experimentation is permitted. By rejecting outright anything even slightly progressive or creative, Metacity mires itself in a culture of anachronism and does a profound disservice to end users.

And even with a small number of options, it’s really hard to get a window manager right. The Metacity maintainers work very hard, for little thanks. People can claim that it’s easy to get everything working right, but so far nobody actually has. Software remains difficult to develop even if it “should be straightforward”, particularly when confronted with human behaviour.

It’s hard to choose between angry rants from people demanding options and angry rants from people demanding basic functionality. Well, if you add the options, then you can delay people by telling them to try a few more options until it seems to work, until they tell you that that broke something else.

Obviously not everyone agrees with the strategy. Which is fine. What I don’t understand is that the very people who want these extra Metacity options are the people who are very comfortable with switching window managers, compared with me, for instance, who doesn’t want to bother with the knowledge that the window manager even exists. What is making these people feel forced?

More importantly, there’s certainly no excuse for the abusive language and wild accusations.

“Anyway, back to Linus and his irritation with Metacity. I can’t not say if his patches will go in or not, its not my call. But I did at least add them properly to bugzilla for Linus to ensure they get reviewed and commented on at least.”

That is very big of you; taking the high road. Keep up the great attitude.

Personally, I would have liked to see Linus take the month long challenge before submitting patches. That is just my opinion. After using Gnome for a month; he may or may have not issued the same patches.

FYI: I am not a Gnome user any more; I know prefer WM’s as opposed to DE’s. Nothing wrong with Gnome; it was my DE of choice several years ago.

When I then tried Metacity, I was suprised by how much *faster* it was than sawfish. It was a huge difference.

I ended up at using openbox. I never even considered going back to metacity because of the huge speed difference. Openbox had the configurability I need, while still being somewhat more minimalistic than Metacity (and even a bit faster). I’m still at openbox, I tried compiz once for the effects, but if focus was lagging so much it was usually losing a few keystrokes of mine on desktop switch - that was not acceptable. Openbox has been completely reliable, so I’ll likely just stick with it.

As for Linux arguments - I’ve come to appreciate Galeon 2 and later on Epiphany. I definitely prefer them to Firefox or Kazehakase (that one is just plain crazy to configure. I’d probably spend a whole day to just get it configured!). And in many other situations, I *totally* appreciate the gnome efforts of keeping configuration options low. For one simple reason: I don’t lose time by trying to configure stuff differently. Usually I end up with the defaults anyway. Any day *not* configuring anything is a good day.

I read through some of the bugs and saw that there was such an experiment with nautilus, but it failed. I think that if that “advanced” set was well burried (let’s say just path to get there in at least 2 level deep nested set, i.e. not directly in the menu, but on a second level) I think the experiment would be successful.

BTW, the *FIRST* thing I do in GNOME after an installation is to disable that spatial browsing.

Maybe the way to deal with this is to revisit the HIG and add a section on “second class options” which should deal with this kind of things.

About my desktop usage: I have recently switched back to GNOME for the second time from KDE after finding the later slow and bloated while the first lacking some apps that I needed. I dislike the fact that many KDE apps have their own settings (e.g fonts) which does not inherit the default KDE ones, implicitly.

It’s disheartening to see the spluttering denial from Schaller, Cumming, Pennington and friends, no doubt with the surreptitious encouragement of the Ximian fifth-column behind the scenes. Why won’t they listen? Even with Linus championing the down-trodden majority of GNOME users, these clowns persist in their devotion to the concept of “users are idiots.”

GNOME is an irredeemable project, It’s time for a development fork and/or a userbase switch to an alternative and for all of those arrogant GNOME developers mentioned above to join David Dawes in obscurity, where they can contemplate the cost of their slavish devotion to impractical ideals.

You get what you pay for.

Could they just stop working instead, that would be a great win for all of us.

I hate Metacity, I’m telling you, I’m using Linux exclusively for the last 10 years or so and I have yet to see a WM that’s so limited. What’s the point of using (desktop) Linux if I get a WM that’s even less featured than Windows?

I wrote my 2 cents — http://mihai.bazon.net/blog/linus-bashes-gnome — after reading the desktoplinux.com entry, and even if I didn’t read this blog previously, it seems the problem was the same: Metacity. Print it, burn it and shut it down!

Long live Sawfish.

Was it necessary when Federico Mena-Quintero finally fixed the file selector (bug 136541), which has been giving GNOME a bad name since GNOME 2.3 (and had a bug opened that long)? His blog entry really gave me motivation to file bugs.
Sorry, I wrote bug earlier, but evidently, the complete lack of location bar, in strict contradiction with what the GNOME accesability team was saying was some kind of feature. Some kind of feature that I was “too busy whining” (ala Federico) to get.

Metacity is great. The GTK framework is great. Gstreamer is impressive.
The applications are amazing (some of them can give OpenOffice a good run for its money).

The Nautilus team (and the rest of the desktop team) need to realize that people want to use their software, but can’t. Maybe all GNOME hackers are like me - I use Gnome Terminal for copying files, Gnome Terminal for opening files (Debian is not putting the version that actually has the fixed file selector into testing yet), Gnome Terminal for creating/moving directories. See a trend here?

So if someone can explain why my 6 year old dataloss bugs (bug 47893 - yes, 6 years) in Nautilus are getting Zero attention (I’d settle for an explanation why it can’t be fixed), I’ll change my mind about the “let’s minimize the desktop to one button” crowd, which seems to be running rampant.

Right now, I don’t necessarily think that Christian or you deserve the yells, but someone in the GNOME community sure does. You two are being visible.

Yours,

Uri David