Tuesday, August 10, 2010

How to Disable the Ugly Gnome Metacity Minimize Effect

I love to make my Gnome DE as functional as possible rather than making it decorative. I detest the idea of putting those compiz, beryl, emerald or whatsoever they are called. The default metacity is good for me, except for its minimize/maximize effect - which is a real joke. Minimizing windows in Gnome (without compiz fusion) displays a kiddish (often annoying) style of showing a black border closing down into the windows list panel. And there has been no easy fix to avoid it. You can turn this minimization effect off by enabling reduced_resources option through gconftool-2 or gconf-editor, but there you will see a wireframe while dragging an application window, and sometimes you'll see really troubled look in restoring/maximizing a windows.

The real fix to avoid the silly gnome metacity minimize effect is a 2-step process:

#1
Press ALT+F2 and type "gconf-editor" without quotes.
Search for a value "Reduced Resources" (you'll find it at /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources )without quotes, and check-select it as shown in the pic below.


#2
While you are still in gconf-editor, search for a value "accessibility". It will result in couple of results, check-select the one at /desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility as shown in the pic below.

That's it! Now your gnome desktop will act quite responsive without those ugly minimize effects.

12 comments:

Danilo said...

Go on gconf-editor -> desktop/gnome/interface and uncheck "enable_animations". This will disable this minimize animations.
Sorry about my English.

manmath sahu said...

Dinilo,
Thanks for dropping by. But unchecking desktop/gnome/interface/enable_animations does not stop that ugly minimize animation that's why I suggested to choose reduced_resources with interface accessibility, and posted the same

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much. This is the one thing about the standard gnome desktop that I disliked. It has been annoying me since I started using gnome four years ago. Finally, my windows now cleanly pop open and closed.

Bogdan said...

Hehe.. thank you.. I remembered some while ago (few years) I managed to get this thing off but after upgrading to lenny I could not remember what I did. Thank you for this!

Vimalkumar said...

Thanks! that helped. I wasn't liking the minimize/maximize effect in NX sessions.

Anonymous said...

You should add that you have to restart for the changes to take effect.
I installed Linux for the first time recently, and choose the "no effects" option at login only to see that crappy minimize effect. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

You should add that you have to restart for the changes to take effect.
I installed Linux for the first time recently, and choose the "no effects" option at login only to see that crappy minimize effect. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for a tip. I hated that stupid minimize animation.

Sinforoso said...

what Danilo commented worked for me. Thank you

Sinforoso said...

What Danilo commented worked for me. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Thanks very much for this great tip! Worked perfectly, and the minimize doesn't show that silly effect anymore.

Anonymous said...

Great thanks ! For years I wanted to get rid of this stupid border !

How about this