Re: Metacity Compositor

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le mercredi 04 octobre 2006 à 10:34 +0200, Xavier Bestel a écrit :
> On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 09:44 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote:
> > The problem is that 17" TFT screens with 1280x1024 in dualhead setups
> > are also becoming quite common. Given the limitation of ATI R200 and
> > R300 cards, which have a maximum 3D framebuffer of 2048x0248, it's
> > impossible to use dualhead in combination with XGL or AIGLX in
> > fullscreen, which means GL compositing is impossible.
> 
> AFAIK that point will be moot with Xorg's new way of doing multiscreen
> (see Xorg's ml archive about RandR 1.2, discussion between Alex Deucher
> and Keith Packard about MergeFB).
> When I started using compiz it was just for the fun of it, but believe
> me now I can't go back to Metacity. Having windows slightly wobble when
> you move them, having your virtual desktops mapped on cube faces, and
> all the sorts of other details make the desktop experience much much
> more concrete. With compiz your windows feel like *real* entities.
> 
> Whatever. All distros adopt compiz (heck, even on debian it's one
> aptitude install away), and all users I know who touched it won't go
> back to something else. Its development community is alive and kicking.
> Either metacity adapts itself to the new needs, quick, or it will be a
> new sawfish.

Distributions are mostly adopting compiz for marketing reasons (just
like they adopted Firefox previously), even if some developers (like me
for instance) are against it, because they want to "match" against MacOS
and upcoming Vista.

>From the feedback we got during Mandriva 2007.0 beta test, people got
busted by bugs which was been fixed in either kwin or metacity, mainly
on focus stealing. And I'm not talking about features which are required
to be added in libwnck or kicker to get compiz working like metacity
(since compiz is using viewports unlike kwin/metacity).

Again, I'm not criticizing work which has been done by Novell hackers
but I found situation extremely unfortunate to regress in feature,
bugfixes and usability, just for adding eye candy.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva