Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> Too many options are bad.  But few options is just as bad.  A lot of
> people joined the GNOME "camp" because they wanted the option to have a
> different window manager that was not the one the one single vision.

I conjecture that the reason people wanted the option to have different
window managers is because all window managers sucked in some regard or
another. Fewer people care about window managers today, largely because
Sawfish made them boring. To a larger extent than most other contenders
Sawfish made things just sort of work without being flashy or whatever.

I suspect that if Metacity (obviously a more bug-free metacity than we
have today) were around at the beginning of X the whole window manager
war would never have occurred. Maybe you'd get a little enlightenment
style development, but I don't think it'd be mainstream.

-Seth