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LFCS 2012: X and WaylandLFCS 2012: X and WaylandPosted Apr 12, 2012 15:15 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)In reply to: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland by sorpigal Parent article: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
I notice all kinds of artifacts all the time on my Linux Desktop. "Every frame is perfect" is definitely something that needs to be worked on, and I'm glad that somebody finally stepped up to do it.
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LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 12, 2012 21:10 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] I'll go out on a limb and say that the things you notice most users wouldn't identify. At best after they have the new stack they might be able to say it "just seems nicer" - but only a few of them.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 13, 2012 17:02 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It makes a difference.
Back in the day when OS X was the only desktop to use composition people tended to always regard the OS X desktop as the 'most snappy' or 'best looking' desktop. They would then look at the Linux desktop and compare with that and talk about how slow it was all the time.
The difference is that without composition the Linux desktop would force a re-render of the the window being moved and any of the overlapping windows in order to display the window moving around. This caused a lot of re-rendering of windows and when Linux couldn't keep up with the movement you saw a lot of high cpu usage, tearing of windows, and badly/incorrectly rendered space on overlapping windows. With composition OS X just used the image buffer and didn't have to re-render anything.. also if it couldn't keep up with mouse movement the display just lagged in order to retain smooth movement.
Without the technological understanding it was impossible to understand why OS X behaved and looked so much better then Linux/X did. So they just say 'OS X is faster' and just assume that is a valid explanation.
One of the horrible little facts about life is that people will often form a very valid opinion about something, even though they lack the ability to explain how they came about that opinion. Then when you ask them to explain it then they will simply make something up as to not appear to be stupid, and it's often very wrong. What is worse is that If people expect that they need to explain their opinions they often unconsciously pick a opinion that is easier to explain away.
The moral of the story is that even if people are unable to discern and point out differences in how windows and displays are rendered they will still react to changes positively or negatively.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland Posted Apr 13, 2012 17:24 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
It might also provide some perspective to point out that back when OS X was the only desktop with a modern compositor it was primitive compared to today, there's been a decade of enhancement in the design since then. Application resize performance and memory usage for display buffers were both areas that had major performance improvements over the lifetime of that system. The addition of GPU acceleration was also a major improvement that was lacking in the initial implementation. Wayland gets to benefit from the decade of operational experience with the Mac OS X compositor and graphics stack.
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