GNOME braindump

I was an Enlightenment user between the end of July 2001 and the 1st of October 2004. I never switched to another graphical user interface because, well, I liked Enlightenment; and after using it for three years, I obviously know it pretty well, too.

However, for various reasons, I started to use GNOME since October this year. At first, I thought I wouldn't like it at all, but it's not as bad as I thought. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that E is in fact buggy and unmaintained since a while before when I started to use it, and that the one guy who tried to remove some of its most horrible bugs, only worsened the situation with the one new version he prepared.

Luckily, GNOME does not have these problems; there are, however, a few annoyances left. Here goes.

• Enlightenment has this cool feature called 'sloppy focus'. It allows you to have a small window on top while typing in the much larger window which is below that one. As an example where this is interesting, there is the case where I'm trying to work, and some people keep sending me messages over Jabber; in those cases, I generally keep the message window on top (in case anything useful comes up), but will keep it out of focus. Getting the message window in focus requires a simple move of the mouse. Easy. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find out how to configure GNOME to behave similarly—if it even has that feature.
• Another nice feature in Enlightenment is the ability to switch virtual desktops by moving the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen. I found the ability to enable that in GNOME, too, by using the 'brightside' application. However, that one is giving me more trouble than it's worth: First, it gives me an error message every time I exit GNOME; second, the E implementation to move to another virtual is simply better in that it does not switch virtual desktops if you hold the mouse button down while touching the edge of the screen (think 'scrolling' and 'maximized windows' here), and in that it, contrary to brightside, does not reduce the time before it'll switch back to the original desktop right after you did switch.
• If there's anything I hate, it's software that tries to be smarter than me. GNOME's metacity does not allow me to move the upper edge of a window above the upper edge of my screen, and I really, really hate that.
• Of course, there's also the gconf issue that I blogged about before.

Other than the four above points, using GNOME has been a mostly positive experience to me.