Trying on a rawhide installation 'man gnome-wm', which is supplied by gnome-session-2.24.1-3.fc10, you can read the following: NAME gnome-wm - Launches the user selected window manager for the GNOME session The catch is none what is described down this page seems to be true. If you will look at /usr/bin/gnome-wm script then you can find in it the following: # NOTE: DON'T USE THIS. Please have your window manager install # a desktop file and change the gconf key # /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager That gconf key used to be /apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager and that worked, even if 'man gnome-wm' was telling fairy tales. With /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager the best I could achieve was a session with no window manager at all. I tried some interpretations of an "install a desktop file" remark but this got me nowhere. There are hacks to get another window manager running. For example, you can put early enough in $PATH a link, named 'metacity', to a desired window manager binaries. In case some option mapping would be required then this link should be replaced by an appropriate shell script but you get the drift. So you can have any windown manager you want as long as it is _called_ "metacity". Is this un-documented somewhere and I missed it or this is a straight bugzilla material? A Google search brought me only numerous tales of woe from people attempting switch window managers for Gnome and miserably failing. Michal p.s. For "again" part check https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449048