Window control

[Mario Vukelic]

On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 22:42 -0500, Chris Rohde wrote:
> Anyone care to indoctrinate me into this secret club?

You have basically three options:

1. Change the default Ubuntu interface
Ubuntu uses Gnome as desktop environment and Metacity as window manager.
To change those, first go to menu System/Peeferences and play with
Theme, Keyboard Shortcuts, Menus & Toolbars, etc.
There are many more settings available through the configuration editor:
press Alt+F2 to bring up the run dialog, type gconf-editor, and run it.
Click yourself through the tree on the left, e.g., starting
with /apps/metacity. Be careful with gconf-editor

2. Choose a different desktop environment and/or window manager
There is a huge variety available that often work completely differently
from what you are used to, for example Ion:
http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/

For an overview, see 
http://xwinman.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_window_manager

Most can be simply installed in Ubuntu, then you log out and choose it
from the Session menu on the login screen.

KDE and xfce are used by the Ubuntu variants Kubuntu and Xubuntu, but
you can install them easily from Ubuntu (however, doing this might make
the next upgrade to a new Ubuntu release harder; at least the Ubunti CTO
said so on a mailing list once)

3. Go with very new approaches that use 3D-acceleration:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/AIGLX
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/Xgl