Debates on the future of Compiz

Posted Jan 8, 2009 3:02 UTC (Thu) by filteredperception (guest, #5692)
Parent article: Debates on the future of Compiz

I'm the quintessential example of someone who just doesn't care about 3D desktop effects. I've even spent two and a half years working for a GPU startup 10 years ago, and I totally agree with the premise that the GPU should be running the desktop. But until it's 100% rock solid, I truly don't care. I'm here with my 7 virtual desktops hotkey switched with ctrl+up and cntrl+down, and can't imagine why anyone would seriously prefer the added animation delay of watching a cube rotate. Of course, that is just me the esoteric linux using engineer.

I just checked wikipedia which answered my confusion reading the article. I.e. that beryl was part of the merge, and that there doesn't appear to be an alternative... except android. It seems like it will take an OS that needs to fit on a cell phone, to truly dictate that things like zooming windows are absolute requirements. So I think once we see the same OS being used on our cell phones as our workstations, is the day when the motivation will be in place to have a rock solid 3D desktop implementation.

$0.02...

Debates on the future of Compiz

Posted Jan 8, 2009 3:28 UTC (Thu) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link] (1 responses)

KDE 4's KWin has integrated many of the features from Compiz, and this code
is still being actively worked on and maintained.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KWin/4.0-release-notes#W...

Debates on the future of Compiz

Posted Jan 8, 2009 8:32 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

"this code is still being actively worked on and maintained."

The "still" is not necessary in this sentence :-)
I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1 on my notebook and everything just
worked out of the box, including all the 3D effects, completely
integrated with the DE. The effect are not only the desktop cube, but
also translucent windows, e.g. a translucent panel, which does make
sense, grayed out windows if a modal dialog is open (very useful),
overview over all desktops and more.

Alex

Debates on the future of Compiz

Posted Jan 8, 2009 9:45 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> things like zooming windows are absolute requirements

Unfortunately, real zooming windows as seen in the iPhone aren't hung up on details of Compiz development or GPU drivers, but something worse: an annoying low-level limitation of X's architecture. To get real zooming, you need to munge windows on their way to the display -- that's easy, we have it -- and you also need to munge mouse events on their way back to the window (to rescale the coordinates). This is a big mess, because of the interaction between the compositing manager (who knows how the X events should be munged) and X grabs (which can lock out clients, including the compositing manager, during input handling). Last I checked the X folks have given up on dealing with this for now...

Debates on the future of Compiz

Posted Jan 10, 2009 5:59 UTC (Sat) by lonely_bear (subscriber, #2726) [Link]

I have the same feeling. Most of the "cool" features are just a waste of computing resources and decrease productivity.