xfwm4 not just for xfce

[Matthew Walton]

Hello everyone

I'm a die-hard GNOME user, and love it, except for one seemingly tiny
but in actuality a humungous niggle - metacity is horrible. I had some
hope for it when sensible click-in-window-to-raise behaviour was put in
CVS, but then it got taken out again and I don't see it coming back, so
I had to cast around for another window manager.

Finding a nice one (preferably GTK+ 2 based for visual consistency)
wasn't easy, because I'm horribly fussy and also it had to work
perfectly with GNOME. I hear KWin probably does, but I don't like that
very much either, so I thought I'd try xfwm4.

And aren't I glad I did! Edge snapping, decent raise-on-click behaviour
(configurable, but I don't care what the default is as long as I can set
it how I want), some very nice themes, and it works perfectly with GNOME
save for a few niggles which I'll just mention briefly:

- the 'show desktop' button which GNOME provides doesn't seem to work,
either this is some kind of extension to the WM standard or you missed a
bit. Not critical as I rarely even think of using it
- Xine in fullscreen mode seems incapable of covering the panels unless
it is told to stack itself in layer above, which means it's always above
everything else in windowed mode as well, and also means it can't pop up
its menu and GUI in fullscreen mode. I'm not sure where the issue lies
here, if it's related to how xfwm handles panels and fullscreen windows,
but it does seem to work fine with metacity (although I've not tried it
for a while) so it's possible it's your fault. I should probably talk to
the Xine people about it as well.

Other than that, you've produced a fantastic window manager, and though
I'll freely admit I'm not very fond of the rest of xfce, I'll promote
the project everywhere I go because it is a highly valid alternative for
people who don't like KDE or GNOME or GNUStep or any of the alternatives
out there, and because it's great for people like me who like GNOME but
hate metacity.

Now I just need to figure out how to write themes for this thing...


Matthew Walton | matthew at alledora.co.uk Once I finally figured out all
of life's answers, they changed the questions.