Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu [LWN.net]

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 19:33 UTC (Tue) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136)
In reply to: Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu by GrueMaster
Parent article: Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu

The sad thing about Unity and Gnome shell is they are broken by design. There's no way to suspend compositions, so your games run noticeably slower than in KDE based distributions with proper option being set.

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Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 20:02 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

I think your info is outdated. GNOME Shell does unredirection for full screen games now. I don't think there is a current benchmark that shows a slowdown in performance.

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 20:50 UTC (Tue) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Yes, you are right. It's good to hear this. :)

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 3:26 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (5 responses)

What about not-full-screen-games, or media players, for for that matter, firefox with a whole bunch of windows (I'm not sure it slows things down with a bunch of tabs but it sure does with a couple dozen windows)? In kde toggling composite/effects on/off is a simple hotkey away, so it's quite simple to toggle them off if you're running something that's slowing things down or just because you want to, regardless of whether it's full-screen. Full-screen does toggle it off automatically, but it's just a configurable-keystroke away to toggle it off for normal windows as well.

Does gnome3 (or for that matter unity) have something similar?

Duncan

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 3:43 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The GNOME approach would be try and provide the right solution automatically instead. So I assume if you bring it up to the developers, they can work on something suitable. For instance, in the normal day to day workflow, either the performance difference wouldn't exist or should be negligible enough. Games and video players are sort of special cases which are being handled without a on/off switch.

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 3:44 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Gnome 3 and Unity are fully composited environments and applications are beginning to assume that that's the case. Expecting applications to fall back gracefully when they're suddenly moved from a compositing environment to an uncomposited one isn't likely to result in a great user experience. There's certainly still performance work to be done at multiple levels of the graphics stack, but it would seem worthwhile to actually do that work rather than implementing a "Break my desktop but make my 3D faster" hotkey.

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 13:31 UTC (Wed) by jriddell (subscriber, #3916) [Link] (2 responses)

"Expecting applications to fall back gracefully"

That's what Qt and Qt Quick (QML) does really well, it's one reason why Canonical are becoming Qt fans. KWin does it great too.

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 13:41 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

And the application that's drawing translucent or transformed windows as part of its functionality suddenly finds that things don't work. Compositing isn't just about pretty effects. It's an entirely reasonable design decision to depend on aspects of it, possibly with a static fallback in order to support running in a legacy environment. But asking applications to support modifying their UI at runtime just so someone can get a few more FPS in a windowed game? That's ridiculous.

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 11, 2012 13:48 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Again, as Riddel said, Qt/QML apps can do that quite well. Look at KDE's Plasma - does the same thing. Disable compositing and the desktop adjusts to the new situation, replacing the artwork to fit a non-composited environment. I don't see why you wouldn't want apps to do that... If you use a crappy toolkit that makes it hard, fix the toolkit or use something else :D