Re: desktop effects tab in appearance capplet

["Patrick Niklaus" <marex opencompositing org>]

>
>  1) "Desktop Effects" should turn on and off various effects in the
>  current window manager (usually Metacity, since this is the default for
>  GNOME).
>
>  OR
>
>  2) "Desktop Effects" should swap the window manager between Compiz and
>  Metacity. When Desktop Effects is enabled, Compiz should run with
>  various options available. When Desktop Effects is disabled, Metacity
>  should run without a compositing manager.
>
>
>  Personally I prefer the first option and I think it is the only option
>  the GNOME project can adopt for the reasons I've outlined in previous
>  e-mails.

In my opinion 2) is the best choice for 90% of the users how want to
have desktop effects. Joe The Average User doesn't know nor care what
window manager is running. He just wants 'the cool effects the guy
next door showed him yesterday'. That is all.
Of course there might be reasons for a user to prefer 1), but as I
already said, Joe The Average User doesn't care what window manager is
running and whether it is part of the gnome project.
Just refusing to add support for Compiz to Gnome is plain politics and
doesn't help anyone.

>
>  I think the only way to resolve this is to implement both solutions and
>  add a configure switch called "--enable-compiz-switcher" which would
>  enable the second option.
>

I'm ok with that. It would maybe make the code a little bit messy but
that should not really be an big issue. It is still cleaner than
forcing distributions to maintain patches for that. Most distributions
with an extended user base will most likely compile it with that
option anyway, since a Metacity compositor is not too interesting for
Joe The Average User. Users who like to compile Gnome/CC on their own
can of course disable Compiz if they want to.

Regards,
Patrick