Metacity

Metacity

Image

Metacity dressed in its default theme. "top" in the terminal shows that Metacity uses a good chunk of memory on a machine with limited memory - and worse, it fires up gconfd-2 (this is compilation-dependent) which uses more memory.

URL

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/metacity/2.4/ . Just downloads.

Version

I used 2.5.3, the latest version is 2.6.2 as of October 2003.

Documentation

No man or info pages, which isn't good. However, the README that shipped with the RPM I used was extensive and useful. Still, I think there should be a man page.

Themes

Yes. Theme support is very good, and should be fairly standardized as it's supported through the Gimp Tool Kit(?).

Discussion

Metacity is the (current) window manager of the GNOME project. As such, it feels naked and bereft without GNOME - it wasn't intended to be used without it. The author calls it "A window manager for the adult in you," and as such seems proud for it to be boring.

It has no menus at all, but does provide workspaces. Given its lack of features, it consumes a lot of memory (over 4M in memory, and another 2M for gconfd-2). I believe the latter is needed to support theming and keybindings.

Pros

Looks nice. Themeable.

Cons

Memory hog. Almost crippled without GNOME.

Community

None apparent.