Featured Comments: Week of 2014 August 10

There was one post this past week that got two comments, so I'll repost parts of both of those together, as they are both long and from the same commenter.

How-To: Use KWin in MATE

An anonymous reader said, "Just wanted to say that, coincidentally, I've also been toying with these things past week. Normally a KDE user, I tried to give Xfce a spin on my better machines. Of the two main desktops running Mageia KDE, one is able to use Compiz perfectly and on the other it just doesn't work. I seem to recall a problem with a gtkrc file, but I'm not really sure; maybe it has something to do with gconf (there's a lot of messages when I try compiz --replace), because I don't use Gnome. Anyway, an easy trick I found is to install and use the "Compiz Fusion Icon" which becomes an icon in Xfce's "Notification Area". I suppose Mate would work likewise. Right-clicking on that icon it's easy to switch among some WM options -- ate least in Mageia... toggling between Kwin or Xfwm4 becomes easy. Now, what I'd like to say is about a point on which I'd rather have XFwm4 than KDE. It's about automatic tiling, that action of dragging a window to the border and having the WM change its size. Normal Windows-like working is to maximize when dragged to the top of the screen and tile it to half-screen when moving sideways. Very well. Kde does better and has quarter-screen tiling when on drags the window to each one of the four corners (Kwin does that, as I understood). Even better, it allows one to drag the window to the next workspace after a delay. This is very convenient. Xfwm4 does 2 things: one good, one bad. The good one is tiling half-screen to the top (the window becomes half-screen in height and full-width). The same happens to the bottom of the screen. I've wishing that Kwin did that, but it maximises the window instead. A workaround would be using quarter-screen tiling and then right-clicking on the titlebar's maximise button. These things are important e.g. when comparing spreadsheets. And I can live with maximising windows by double-clicking in their titlebar. Xfwm4 doesn't do quarter-screen tiling but I'm betting this is rather an infrequent need. The bad thing is that Xfwm4 does not allow dragging windows to the next workspace if auto-tiling is activated. For the moment, I'm using the "workspace switcher"/pager to move windows among workspaces. It's not very easy because it's small. I'm using the linear workspace configuration instead of the traditional 2x2 matrix, but the idea of having a "B I G" pager has ocurred to me -- inside a second auto-hiding panel. Let us see. Good article as always, btw! Neko Nata PS: Mate was an option, too, but I found difficult to find some settings -- specially single-click (maybe it's a Mageia omission, I don't know). I found it in dconf-editor, but there were some warnings about how things would never work again in my life, so I got back to Xfce. 8-P", later adding, "Just want to add that: 1) after that pager idea (btw the second auto-hiding panel worked), I tried and saw Kwin "show all windows" function (usually Ctrl+F8) can be used to move windows, just as well and 2) there is an equivalent third-party utility for Xfce, it seems, called Skippy-XD. Must try some day. Also, Xfce is a little "whimsical"... if a maximised window is dragged off-border, it restores to normal size, but when dragged to top it fully maximises. To get half-screen zoom, it seems necessary to release the window for a brief moment. Finally, I realize you're after all the nifty desktop effects Kwin has; I agree it's beautiful, but I'm just trying the speed of things on my 2GB RAM machines. For the 64-bit versions, it seems Xfce really makes everything go faster. Surely, given more RAM, KDE would probably would be as fast... and more featureful. Neko Nata".

Thanks to that commenter for those long and detailed comments. I have a review coming up for this week, but I don't anticipate having much else. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!