Re: [Sawfish] Sawfish with gnome3

[Christopher Roy Bratusek <nano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 26 December 2011 11:21:32 Brian wrote:

> XMonad has explicit instructions for setting it up as the WM for

> Gnome3 here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xmonad#GNOME_3_and_xmonad

>

> I expect some tweaking of these instructions would be necessary, but I

> expect Sawfish is still usable under Gnome. Would be really nice if

> somebody who did the hard work of getting it to work would post it on

> the Sawfish wiki.

>

> On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Darth Emacs <darthemacs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I folks,

> >

> > The more I read on gnome 3.3 the more questions arise in my mind on the

> > usability of gnome 3 with sawfish. The reading I have done suggests that

> > the gnome-shell in gnome 3 is intimately integrated and built from a

> > metacity variant called 'mutter'. Wouldn't the close association between

> > the gnome-shell and metacity preclude the use of sawfish as a window

> > manager with evolving gnome 3 builds?

>

> ---

> --

> Sawfish ML

 

GNOME-Shell uses libmutter to do WM stuff (so it registers and acts like a WM into the session). That is why you can't use GS with another WM. GNOME3 provides "fallback-mode" which is nautius' desktop-shell, gnome-session, gnome-panel and a given WM. So you can use GNOME3 with Sawfish, but you won't get anything new compared to GNOME2 (except GTK+3).

 

Well... besides using GNOME3 you could also try another DE, with less headache on getting Sawfish to run:

 

KDE4: Sawfish works pretty well with recent versions, only very minor glitches in normal usage. Third-Party-Stuff like tiling can give headaches, but shipped stuff with Sawfish works just fine.

 

MATE: MATE is the continuation of GNOME2. Currently available in version 1.1 and still using GTK+2. It's just like GNOME2 with different names for everything (eg "Caja" instead of "Nautilus").

 

XFCE: Sawfish works well with XFCE. What's more to say about XFCE? Ah, it's lightweight.

 

LXDE: Not really a DE in common sense, more a collection of tools like a panel, file-manager with desktop-shell and session-manager. Uses OpenBox by default, but can use Sawfish, too.

 

Razor-Qt: a shining star on Qt-Heaven. A lightweight desktop-environment, written in Qt. Current version 0.4.0 lacks features of course, but it's rather stable and very fast. Just like KDE4 it has a UI to change WM, works perfect with Sawfish.

 

If you get too much headache with GNOME3 you might consider a switch, too. Still improved integration of Sawfish with GNOME3-FBM is welcome. (As long as I don't have to do it, though)

 

Regards,

Chris

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