Despite the fact that the Sugar UI is very different from a standard desktop, it's almost completely implemented using standard window manager hints and properties. We are planning to move from matchbox to a more compliant window manager and to address the little incompatibilities at the shell level, so that standard desktop applications can run out of the box in Sugar.
Here are some of the steps to get there:
- Change the sugar-shell startup code to run metacity instead of mathcbox.
- See which parts of Sugar breaks. I expect the frame will not work well, the windows needs to be hinted as panels.
- Decide how to make activities run fullscreen. We could either modify metacity to run every toplevel window in fullscreen. Or we could set the fullscreen hint on the activity windows. We should clarify the tradeoffs there.
- Support standard window icons in the frame activity list.