Are GNOME and KDE window managers? No. They include window managers, but they themselves are not window managers. GNOME uses a window manager named Sawfish (formerly called Sawmill) by default, and you can swap Sawfish with other window managers and still use GNOME. I used to prefer a window manager called Icewm for use with GNOME.

GNOME 2.2 officially incorporates the Metacity window manager, a fully integrated window manager that uses GTK+ for UI elements, communicates tightly with the panel and other desktop elements, and is configured straight from the GNOME preferences dialogs. At the same time, all interaction between the window manager and the desktop is done via documented standards (see the section called "Standards Compliance"), so you can substitute the window manager of your choice from a long list of available options: Sawfish, fvwm2, icewm, Waimea, Openbox, are just some of them.

It is important to list which parts of GNOME Window Manager compliance are supported. This is done fairly easily by doing the following: Create a property on the root window of the atom name _WIN_PROTOCOLS. This property contains a list(array)of atoms that are all the properties the Window Manager supports. These atoms are any number of the following:

Just upgraded to gnome 2 from sid, and it went through the upgrade process without any complaints. However, enlightenment is not being started, nor indeed can I find any options on the new control panel (which I could only find on the "Debian Menu-> Apps-> System-> Gnome-> Gnome Control Center 2" menu) which allow you to select the window manager.