[conspire] Future of GNOME

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> It's just aweful. It starts with an all intiutive blank screen with a
> little useless node on the extreme right, and two words, application
> and places on the etreme left.

Strictly speaking, GNOME has never dictated a specific appearance and 
desktop metaphor, because in _theory_ you are not obliged to be 
stuck with someone else's choice of GNOME-supporting window manager.
http://xwinman.org/gnome.php

Over the years, quite a number of somewhat diverse window managers have
gotten bundled by major distros as 'the' GNOME window manager:

Enlightenment
Sawfish
Marco
Metacity
Compiz-with-Unity-plugin (a la recent Ubuntu)
Mutter


Plenty of other window managers have _also_ supported GNOME hinting.[1]
One of many is Window Maker, the WM I use most often.  Another is
'Awesome' (http://awesome.naquadah.org/).

Anyhow, Ruben?  Didn't you know this already?  Saying as an expert Linux
user that you dislike the way GNOME3 looks seems to miss a really huge
and basic point -- that GNOME3 doesn't dictate that.

Granted that most people never bother to use the ability to change from
the distro-default GNOME WM to a different GNOME WM, but I'm surprised 
that you forgot (or seemed to have forgotten) the ability entirely.


[1] I'm a little vague on what-all the Freedesktop.org people currently
expect a GNOME WM to support as 'hinting' and such.  Probably a bunch of
specs with obscure acronyms that change on average about every three
months.  ;->  Like this:  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications