I would have ignored Gnome for another decade, but its integration with the rest of Ubuntu is so good (nm-applet and other status bar applets rock), I decided it’s time for change.

But almost fled tonight, after so much pain with Metacity for a window manager. Keyboard shortcuts are lame, window options and window decoration can not be configured, etc, etc.

In the end, I switched to a combination of icewm for window management (and keyboard shortcuts, and winoptions), and Gnome for everything else.

kostja@shmita:~$ cat .gnomerc 
export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/icewm

Looks nice!

kostja@shmita:~$ cat .icewm/winoptions 
#
xterm.dTitleBar: 0
xterm.icon: xterm
rxvt.dTitleBar: 0
rxvt.icon: xterm
URxvt.dTitleBar: 0
URxvt.icon: xterm
desktop_window.ignoreQuickSwitch: 1
gnome-panel.ignoreQuickSwitch: 1
desktop_window.ignoreWinList: 1
gnome-panel.ignoreWinList: 1

kostja@shmita:~$ cat .icewm/preferences| grep ShowTaskBar
ShowTaskBar = 0