Who’s out there?

Who’s reading this? Comment if you like and say hello. Feel free to ask any questions you’d like us to answer at the same time.

Do you think everyone who might possibly want to know about day-to-day Metacity life is reading the Metacity blog? If not, how could we tell them about it?

Published by

Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

30 thoughts on “Who’s out there?”

  1. Get yourself on planet gnome?

    It’s not really a metacity question, but is there a command line utility to control window properties?

  2. You’re in my feed reader. I’m not entirely sure why (no offense, I just don’t recall adding GNOME news. Something must’ve added it somewhere). I skim the posts.

    Keep on keeping on ;),
    Bernard.

  3. I’m just a run of the mill web developer and Debian user, so Gnome is my desktop and Metacity is my window manager. I like keeping up with the development of all the different Gnome components, so I read both Planet Gnome and Gnome News. I’d love it if more projects published news to Gnome News.

    Thanks for all of your hard work. I keep telling myself one of these days I’m going to get back into desktop programming. ;)

  4. I can’t wait to get the new theming discussion started. There’s a few ideas from my gtk/css work that might be worthwile …

  5. Could have a separate Planet for Gnome Projects, although I don’t think it is sensible to keep Planet Gnome exclusively for people.

    In my opinion, a Planet for the projects would be more interesting ( less irrelevant stuff ), anyway. I know LugRadio had a session on this…

  6. I’m here :)

    news.gnome.org is on the list of sites I check daily. I found it by reading your blog on p.g.o. Before that I did not no it existed. I doubt that you reach many of the people who would be interested in the news this way though.

  7. I’m a reader, I think I generally enjoy the posts that talk about the decisions you guys need to make and their justifications. I use metacity primarily because it means I don’t have to think about anything, and I can’t think of a time where I’ve even thought – “metacity could have done something different here”, so it is cool to see what those things actually are.

  8. Oh, and I’m a reader.

    I enjoy features, usability and bug posts, in that order. And screenshots are always nice!

    If there is any way for people to help / get involved, you might want to post about that, too!

  9. It would be interesting if you or somebody else (Matthew Allum?) would do a short write up about the clutter based compositor.

    How does it compare to the existing compositor? Is it just a tech demo or something which will be merged in the future?

  10. Yes, I love that you guys are far more regularly communicative about progress on the project than many other open source projects out there — it takes a lot of time and effort to compile such updates, and it is much appreciated.

    The big thing that irks me about Metacity is that its focus behavior is STILL broken, despite several generations of dialog like the following: “It’s broken” “No it’s not” “Yes it is” “Oh, you’re right, yes it is, OK, we fixed it for that app” “It’s still broken” “No it’s not” “Yes it is” “Oh, that’s an application bug, file a bug report with the app developers, not with the Metacity developers”. Basically many apps, when launched by clicking on a launcher, *still* open with a flashing icon down in the taskbar, even if the keyboard hasn’t been touched in ages…

  11. Oh, hullo there.
    Me? Nah, don’t mind me. I’m just a.. user. ah, that’s right! a perfectly normal earth-user. Nothing strange with it, no no.

    Ah, let’s fess up, I’m a parttime Metacity user and have been since the project was first launched and you teased me off my beloved BlackBox (that I had minor hands in packaging and getting to work). All this from back in the early Gnome 1.9 days when I was still on the packaging team and later on in Gentoo.

    So, Yeah, I’m still around, reading and using.

  12. Hi, Danny Clark here, Sys Admin with the FSF. Just skim the blog to keep up-to-date with metacity. I’ve found that one of the best ways to increase gNewSense and Ubuntu GNU/Linux system stability is:

    aptitude remove –purge compiz compiz-core compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins compizconfig-backend-gconf libcompizconfig0

    for pkg in compiz compiz-core compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins compizconfig-backend-gconf libcompizconfig0; do dpkg –purge $pkg; done

    (thus switching default Window Manager to metacity :-)

    The only window focus error I’ve noticed is that the “Log off, switch user, lock screen or power down the computer” / “Exit” screen appears behind all other windows in Metacity. This is with metacity 1:2.22.0-0ubuntu4 under Ubuntu Hardy on x86_64.

  13. I read this blog directly until I realized it was on GNOME News too, so I now I read you from there.

    I appreciate your work keeping the community up-to-date, and would like to ask about future plans for the compositor. Perhaps you could about it in your next post :-)

    I think GNOME News is the perfect site to get this blog to interested audience. It’s just that GNOME News may not be as widely known as it should be…

  14. Hey I’m reading this blog to know when you guys are going to remove the insanity that is WM rendered window frames (and thus WM themes). Pretty please, make it client side, then the possibilities are endless!

    Ok, it’s not _just_ for that :-)

  15. Whoah, lots more comments. Thank you all. In particular:

    @Jeff: sure, I’ll ask him.

    @Mats: I will try to think about ways for people to get involved. I’ve mentioned them from time to time but there hasn’t been much uptake; I think I’ll work on overviews in greater detail. (http://news.gnome.org is the planet for projects.)

    @Sven: I don’t know that much about what they’re doing myself; I’m talking to them about the possibility.

    @Luke: Yes, focus has been a bete noire over the years, hasn’t it? :( Feel free to prod us on one or another of the relevant bugs a bit.

    @Spider: That’s happy to hear.

    @Danny: Okay, that made me laugh. Thank you for your kind words.

    @Zeth: Oh, cool, I didn’t know that RSS readers came with us preloaded. Nifty.

    @Rui: this is actually something due to be discussed here soon! I want to raise the question on the GTK list first, though.

  16. Hmm, thanks for letting me know about wmctrl. It’s sticky option doesn’t work for metacity though…

  17. I just thought of another question (let’s hope I’m not to late).

    Earlier this year[0] you mentioned not being able to work on dual-screen issues because of the lack of a second monitor. Is this still the case? If so, have you given any thought to asking for donations?

    Monitors aren’t exactly expensive these days, and I’m sure quite a few of us would be willing to chip in…

    0. http://blogs.gnome.org/tthurman/2008/03/25/catching-up/

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