After having implemented the same functionality already available in Fedora and Ubuntu (different implementations of the Desktop Effects tab on the appearance control-center applet) for openSUSE, it is time to come to a common solution for all distros to remove their need to add this functionality. An initial patch is available here.
Still lots of things need to be discussed and clarified, so if you care about activating desktop effects in GNOME, GNOME Control Center mailing list.
Yay! Let’s do it.
And, cough, Mandriva. Who had it before anyone else. In a cross-desktop utility (drak3d). Which was available under GPL. Not, of course, that anyone else bothered to use it. *sigh*
You’re proposing that GNOME should have a capplet which allows switching between Metacity and $random_other_WM, or Metacity and Compiz? If the latter, are you proposing that Compiz should become an officially-supported GNOME project?
well, its all about merging it to the gnome settings tool.
Adam: I am just a lowly user (and developer), but I think I can understand why other distros do their own thing. Just look at yast in current opensuse – it’s like a boeing 747 control panel, there are far too many similarly named widgets and many panels force you to go through a 7 step wizard, when you only need to change a single setting like IP address. I haven’t used Mandriva for quite some time, but it seems to be much simpler. However, I’m sorry to say that but it looks very amateurish in some places, for example when I installed ipw2200 firmware an ugly grey dialog with monospaced text popped up, which cannot be cancelled and gave no progress indication. This kind of dialogs were present in some other parts of configuration as well. I think Ubuntu fares much better in these areas, they seem to consistently use proper spacing, fonts, give progress indicators for tasks which take more time. If they only fixed the ridiculous preferences menu and made a control panel out of it. Fedora also seems quite nice in this regard, but I haven’t used it much lately because Ubuntu seems to be easier to use overall.