Bugs
- GNOME bug 550670 led to the discovery of GNOME bug 561911, which is also possibly related to GNOME bug 513944, that errors happen because of graphics contexts being of different depths.
- Launchpad bug 296757: gdesklets and Metacity’s compositor apparently don’t play nicely.
- GNOME bug 344072: It has been suggested that alt-Esc should be removed, and alt-Tab should depend on the state of the reduced_resources flag: if it’s TRUE, it behaves as alt-Esc does now, with no popup, and if FALSE, it behaves as alt-Tab does at present. Gentle reader, what do you think?
- GNOME bug 99335: Should ctrl-alt-del bring up some kind of logout dialogue? (It does on Ubuntu.)
- GNOME bug 560990: Compilation without the compositor turned on is broken in various ways. This needs fixing soon.
- GNOME bug 351647: Some kind of command-line option to choose which screens Metacity comes up on might be a good idea.
Things that need writing
Thomas has been working on a test suite for a while, but it’s not ready yet.
Also, before Vectacity gets anywhere near usable, we need to start with an editor.
Around the blogs
- blackphiber was amused by our error messages.
- Tombutu covered the Metacity compositor. This seems to have been news for many people, because it generated some buzz on Digg and then found its way to LifeHacker and was also apparently translated into Polish.
- Someone is working on using Metacity with OLPC (and other people are working on using other WMs).
- Owen discusses the use of Mutter, the Clutter semi-fork of Metacity, in GNOME Shell.
I think you got the boolean meaning of reduced_resources inversed because what Alt-Escape does is certainly more expensive on CPU (all the expose events) and on the wire (all the expose event handlers’ drawing commands). Thus, if it is to be used at all on Alt-Tab, it would be when reduced_resources is False.
Of course that if you have a compositing manager which keeps the window contents and thus the apps don’t get the expose events it would be different.
Also, personally, I don’t like the current Alt-Escape, it’s too much visual noise for my poor eyes to process when I want to quickly change windows. The current behaviour is actually quite good since my eyes can concentrate on a small screen area. YMMV.
Regards,
Rui
Inspired by some of the ‘we don’t need SVG theme support, we can use SVG files in existing Metacity themes’ commentry in recent posts, I experimented a little with SVG the other day, and wound up rather confused and depressed.
Bug 561896 tells my sorry saga, if you hadn’t noticed it.
@Rui:
good point.
@Screwtape:
I did see it. That’s pretty bad. Seems we need Vectacity all the more.