Re: How do I switch to Sawfish??

[Rui Miguel Seabra <rms 1407 org>]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 11:36:06AM +0200, Gaute Lindkvist wrote:
> People love MacOS X, and lots of people love Windows 2000, lots of people
> love BeOS and lots of people love KDE and Atheos. What do these all have
> in common? They force the WM-issue, like just about every desktop-system
> out there!

I think that this cause-effect judgement is a little off the reality.
The enforcement of a single window manager has absolutely nothing to do
with the 'love' you mention.

If anything, the possibility to change the window manager in Gnome (and
later in KDE) increased the love towards those environments, rather than
decrease it.

> Having a GUI-option for Window Manager when 99% of the
> potential market for GNOME doesn't have a clue about what a Window Manager IS,
>  is just plain crack.

Having a different operating system when 90% of the potential market for
operating systems doesn't have a clue what GNU/Linux is and live happily
with Windows is just plain crack.

See the flaw in your logic?
(ps: I really hate the 'it is on crack' argument)

> I say; let the power users have a way to change Window Manager, through
> the environment variable WINDOW_MANAGER or the session-system. Knowing
> what a window manager IS, should make you competent enough to do this..
> and let the rest of us enjoy a user interface without the clutter and
> potential for errors with options like this.

Why not give users the easy chance? I thought GUI's where about making
stuff easier and not about making simple stuff (like changing the window
manager, or some other option) harder.

> Choice DOES have a cost yes, and including such an incredibly obscure
> option paves the way for an onslaught of new obscure options, since there
> are by far better candidates for options out there that have already been
> slashed. I just don't understand the problem with doing this without the
> GUI. The "power users" are the ones that mostly use bash instead of
> Nautilus.

I think that to a new user executing gconftool-2 -t string -s /x/y/z/f/prop in a 'scary' terminal window is a lot more obscure than a GUI (even gconf-editor is obscure since you have to search a tree for nested and deep branches).

The problem is that finding those options is now incredibly harder for
begginers, regardless of gconf-editor or gconftool.

For people who are not scared of a command line, at least you have
`gconftool-2 -R /apps | grep galeon` to get all the options for galeon

Hugs