The thing that mostly keeps MATE in the mix with Sawfish on my desktop is MATE's panel and applets. Having a network config applet has become important as my brain purges its cache of how to run ifconfig. The notification area that works with random apps has also become fairly useful thing for me. About the only other MATE feature I use is to drag favorite app launchers from the menu to the panel.
For a "Sawfish DE", integration with the existing Sawfish configuration GUI would be essential for wide adoption, I think. In the MATE/Gnome3/Unity DE world this configuration has fragmented, but it still hangs together more or less okay and this lets newbies get the customization they want w/out getting into too much technical details. One downside with it is that it always takes a lot of fiddly, manual tweakage to configure a new DE installation. One thing (of many) that I love about Sawfish is that the configuration is kept in plain text and in plain sight. I echo fuchur that not having a recent Sawfish in Debian (and thus Ubuntu) is a major blockage to getting new users. And, echoing Bobby in that not having a way to start MATE+Sawfish from the DM which is on par with how one starts MATE+Marco is basically a show stopper for new users. I've recently tried (again) to figure this out for myself how to do it but was (again) left bewildered how to do it properly. If we could get this kind of MATE (and LXDE and XFCE) integration into Sawfish's installation from git then maybe it would help Sawfish become a "first class" alternatives in those DE worlds. If anyone has some guidance for me on how to do it for MATE I'll give another go at it and provide a patch. -Brett. On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Christopher Roy Bratusek <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > I was wondering about bundling Sawfish together with some other applications > as a "(very) minimal Desktop Environment". > > In fact sawfish.wm.prg.* does nothing else when loading stuff up that's > installed separately. So using this you already can build a "Sawfish DE". > Not that this is a priority or something. > > It's just something that came to my mind about acquiring new users (and > possibly) contributors. > > Any thoughts? > > Regards, > Chris > > -- > Sawfish ML > -- Sawfish ML
