ARRGH! Metacity is killing me.

[Matthew Miller]

Okay, so there's the general new Orwellian mantra of "lack of features is
better!" and "your preferences are scientificially proven to be not very
usable by you despite what you think" and "shut up; human factors are
perfectly quantifiable and we measured this and who the hell do you think
you are". 

Okay, fine. Off to the reeducation camps with my computer habits. It's more
convenient to find a tiny little pager applet in the middle of the bottom of
the screen than to be able to configure the scroll wheel to flip desktops.
And it's obviously better to not be able to click on a link in a background
window without it jumping to the top and covering up everything else I'm
working on -- I couldn't possibly be working on *more than one thing at
once*.

But *why* can't I push windows off the top of the screen with alt-drag?
Maybe I want them up there! I thought this whole "spatial browsing paradigm"
-- who knew it was a *paradigm*? -- I just thought it was tedious and
annoying and filled up your workspace with clutter, but science has shown
the error of my ways -- anyway, this "paradigm" was all about stability of
physical relationships between virtual objects. Well, dammit, why's the top
of the screen suddenly hard and fast?

Is this helping user-friendlyness by assuming that I'm so stupid that I know
how to use alt-drag to move the window *off* the screen, but might, in the
next few minutes, forget that I can do that to get it back on and be
bewildered forever looking for the title bar?

Arrrgh.

Okay, I feel better now.

The question is: how can I change the window manager Gnome uses to something
a little more _flexible? I've got Window Maker installed, but then I
discovered that the new GNOME apparently has no visible option for changing
window manager. (Of course! It's better that way! Why would you want to
change it away from the perfect-for-all-humanity defaults?!?) So I did some
googling, and discovered that there's a GConf setting for this. So I use
gconf-editor and change it. Log out, log back in again, and hey, lookit
that, no effect at all.

There's got to be a way. What am I missing here? Or should I just ditch
GNOME entirely and go back to my happy little Window Maker world?

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>