A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Choosing Your Window Manager

Through Red Hat version 7.3, Sawfish was the default window manager under GNOME. Starting with version 8.0, Red Hat uses Metacity as the default window manager under GNOME. Version 8.0 includes Sawfish, although you must install it, so you can use either Metacity or Sawfish.

You can use either window manager as it comes out of the box with equal ease. If you don't want to get involved with your window manager, are content to accept someone else's ideas of how things should be set up, and do not want to make a lot of changes to the way it works, Metacity is for you. From the Metacity README file:

Metacity is not a meta-City as in an urban center, but rather Meta-ness as in the state of being meta. That is, metacity:meta ...