John Williams, of GNOME fame, recently blogged on window placement as part of his "things about gnome that suck" series.

Well, I basically agree with him - but he doesn't propose a solution.

Devil's Pie isn't a solution, because it's not configurable by the average user. Or even by me, I failed to have it tell apart my terminal windows and use a sane placement for them.

Just remembering the last window position doesn't work either - I'm annoyed by this "feature" by nautilus, for example. I tend to have a default position for my windows, by I occasionally have to move them away, and I do not want to have them reappear at this different position ever.

My personal approach basically is to run all windows (except my terminals and popups such as IM windows) fullscreened, on dedicated desktops. Even the IM windows are usually on my "IM & Chat" desktop. This works really well, especially since I keep my terminal windows open all the time, and the default placement to minimize overlap works fairly well.

Still I couldn't specify a general rule how any window manager could learn where to place my windows... so just complaining that Gnome doesn't do this good isn't all - we need to find a way to make this work just fine without the user noticing...

I don't know about OSX - how does this work there? In windows it definitely is horrible. When you watch windows users, you'll often see them stating their Internet Explorer, then clicking on the maximize button. All the time.

Some time ago, I installed Debian on my mothers new laptop (which worked fine once the Xorg drivers supported PCI Express and I did a Bios update).

Since my Laptop is currently being repaired, I'm using hers now (she works 95% of the time on her Desktop anyway). And I noticed a couple of odnesses:

Package: libsdl1.2debian
Depends: libsdl1.2debian-oss (= 1.2.9-0.1) | libsdl1.2debian-all (= 1.2.9-0.1)
| libsdl1.2debian-esd (= 1.2.9-0.1) | libsdl1.2debian-arts (= 1.2.9-0.1)
| libsdl1.2debian-alsa (= 1.2.9-0.1) | libsdl1.2debian-nas (= 1.2.9-0.1)

This makes SDL install OSS support by default, not alsa. IMHO we should now make alsa support default. Maybe even some dmix configuration, since that is what most users will need.

Similarly, lots of stuff depends on libesd0, which is the OSS library. Or to be precise, they all depend on "libesd0 | libesd0-alsa", tons of packages. Each single one preferring to install the OSS version instead of the ALSA version. :-(

Is it just me thinking that OSS is deprecated, while ALSA works like a charm and can do much more than OSS? Sure, you can use ALSA via it's OSS emulation, but then you lose e.g. the ability to use dmix.