The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly (Score 2, Informative)

Ok, so I had a look at the screenies, and wasn't completely repulsed. Certainly, there are some aspects of the wm that could, theoretically, be quite useful. Transparency on any window (and not to the root window, I mean real transparency, like has been possible in windows since win2k), rotation on an x-axis (well, sometimes) and certainly scaling would be really useful. Well, at least, that's what I think, but the crux of the matter is that we all have personal tastes, and that's probably part of what draws us to "alternative" operating systems like linux and bsd. And any others that I have left out before an OS zealot flames me.

So I go get the packages, which, on dialup, does take a little time (Ok, I was kinda using all the bandwidth I could at the time). I compile and install both nucleo and metissa. So far, so good.

I followed the instructions that were given to a T, and the X server actually started up, joy of joys, with what seemed to be a working wm.

Seemed to be.

Because none of the goodies that were supposed to work (rotation, scaling, transparency, feeding the dog) did, in fact, work. Neither did any of the usual things you would expect a window manager to do: window movement and resizing, for a start.

And don't even start me on fvwm. Or the color cyan. We are out of the 70's and there's no need to inflict that on ourselves any more. Heck, if I wanted that, I would just go get a fugly sun box.

I'm quite willing to try it all again, if there is someone with some ground-breaking tips for me. I'm certainly not beyond being told that there was something banally silly that I was doing. But remember, I was following instructions.

All the negativity aside, I think that there is potential here. Perhaps this is something for the good people at x.org to look at. Certainly a properly hardware accellerated X server would be good. Something that does all of the other nifty things that metisse promises (the aforementioned scaling and transparency at least, though I think that the rotation and pee-back ideas are quite novel) would be a great step in a good direction, imho.

Perhaps it's also time for the good people at the enlightenment project to get something solid from E17 out there. Much of the hardware accelleration that should be taken advantage of on today's desktops is supposed to be in there.

Let the flames begin.