Selecting a window manager

[Paul Michael Reilly]

David L Norris wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 12:45 -0500, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> 
>>Why does Gnome (and Fedora) not have a Window Manager preference 
>>selector?
> 
> 
> Metacity is the official GNOME window manager and thus it is the window
> manager being used by GNOME.  I don't think the reasoning need be more
> complex than that.  If you do want/need to switch WMs then the odds are
> good you will do it exactly once and thus don't need some utility
> cluttering the menus for all eternity.

Appreciate your feedback.  Actually, I precisely want the ability to 
select a WM, try it out for size for a short while (many minutes) to see 
if I want to use it for even longer or if it is clear that this one just 
doesn't work for me.  I'm curious to see how fvwm works these days.  It 
was OK years ago.  I've never tried Maker but surely would if it were a 
click or two away.  And I would probably switch back and forth between 
sawfish and metacity depending on my mood.  I could be unique but I'd 
hazard a guess that there are more than a few Users who have this itch 
but none of us yet have reached the threshold to actually make it 
happen.  I'll keep my fingers crossed that someone beats me to it.
So much software to write yet so little time ... :-)

>>Having to simultaneously kill one WM while starting up another on the 
>>command line seems so twentieth century.
> 
> 
> Why would you have to do that?  You would gnome-session-properties to
> control what's running in your session.  (Applications -> Preferences ->
> More -> Sessions)  Highlight metacity, select remove, select apply
> (metacity is then permanently killed for you), run your preferred window
> manager from a run dialog or whatever, set it to "restart" if it doesn't
> automatically, and then save the session.  If the WM doesn't support
> session management you'll have to add it to the Startup Programs list
> with a low priority number.

This is an OK alternative but still a clunky way to tell Gnome I'd 
prefer to use sawfish rather than metacity for a while.  Thanks for 
pointing it out however.

-pmr