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Comment by rob05c | Hacker News Reader

> a complete desktop environment

I agree. I wish more Tiling WMs came with a GUI application launcher, better mouse support for moving and resizing, login screens, etc.

Not everyone uses a Tiling WM because they're a masochist musophobe.

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I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle. The WM is just a component of a complete desktop environment. Instead of making a Tiling WM that comes with the kitchen sink, we should make a Tiling WM that simply replaces the WM on the pre-existing, and fully featured, desktop environment you already have. Technically speaking, this is not challenging. For example, to make Awesome the defualt window manager in gnome, one need only run:

  "gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager awesome"

Obviously, this is a large barrier for a casual user wanting to try a tiling window manager. However, if WM installer changed that setting instead of just creating its own desktop environment, then we would not be having this problem.

I'm a casual user of GNOME. I would like to do what someone mentioned on here: use a TWM with the GNOME menu bar for applets but I want them to have predifined "snaps". [0]

How hard is it to implement this?

[0] http://imgur.com/SO4LmDq

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