Re: Metacity Compositor

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Rob Adams wrote:
> Why bother when both the GNOME and KDE projects already have excellent
> window managers?  I don't understand this idea of writing a whole new
> window manager just to add eye candy.  There's nothing about compositing
> that requires a complete rewrite of the window manager.  The effort
> would be far better spend simply extending the existing support for
> compositors in metacity and KWin.  Realistically, compiz is unlikely
> ever to be accepted by either project, because it's a chimera.  So why
> are we dumping so much effort into it?

Because that's where the innovation is happening. Metacity advertises
itself as the "boring window manager for the adult in you" (from its
README file). Things like compiz's "water" plugin don't really fit with
that.

You can say "yeah, but the water plugin is crack", and maybe you're
right, but I don't think anyone can really say that for sure now. Once
upon a time people thought that virtual workspaces were crack too. Our
usability team was experimenting with using the water effect, colored
drop shadows, and various other bits of compiz bling to call the user's
attention to modal dialogs to make it more clear why they can't interact
with the application. Maybe that's crack, maybe it will turn out to be
really useful. We can't know unless we try.

To quote again from the metacity README, "Metacity is firmly in the
"choose good defaults" camp rather than the "offer 6 equally broken ways
to do it, and let the user pick one" camp." But of course, it can only
manage to be in the "good defaults" camp because it was possible to look
through all the various window managers out there and see what worked
well and what didn't. No one knows what the good defaults for a
compositing manager will be. Is the compiz spinning cube a good default?
Our hope was that it would be more intuitive for users than the
traditional switch-instantaneously-from-one-workspace-to-another aka "I
clicked on the pager and all of my windows disappeared!" model. But
Kristian's "plane" plugin provides a slightly different interface. Will
that turn out to be better than the cube? Maybe. It's too early to tell.

Some day we'll want the "boring compositing manager for the adult in
you", and that may very well turn out to be the metacity compositor. But
we can't have that until we've played around enough to know what sort of
compositing effects the adult in you has use for.

-- Dan