Composite toggling in gnome3 [LWN.net]

Composite toggling in gnome3

Posted Feb 8, 2012 3:44 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: Composite toggling in gnome3 by Duncan
Parent article: Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu

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.

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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