Re: Metacity Compositor

["Kristian Høgsberg" <krh bitplanet net>]

On 10/3/06, Marco Cabizza <mc newglobal it> wrote:
> Ciao,
>
> Il giorno mar, 03/10/2006 alle 18.33 -0500, Travis Watkins ha scritto:
> > Does compiz work without a 3D card? If not it's worthless as anything
> > but a power user addon.
>
>         This is exactly something I was thinking of a couple hours ago. Maybe
> compiz should be able to work EVEN WITHOUT the composite extension so
> that it may act just like the "boring window manager for the adult in
> you".

No, I think this is a bad idea. Metacity is not going away, it will
always be there if your hardware is not able to run a composited
desktop or if you don't want to.  As such there is no need to
complicate compiz with double code paths for the composited and the
non-composited case.  For all the drawbacks of writing yet another
windows manager, compiz is a very nice way to make the transition to a
composited desktop; metacity handles the fallback case, which allows
us to focus entirely on the composited, OpenGL accelerated desktop in
compiz.  You're going to end up with two code paths in any case, the
question is do you want them in the same application, or cleanly
separated into two?

>         Still with all the effort put in compiz and everything else ( AIGLX,
> X11 in general... ) the result is that you may now get to install some
> random Linux distribution and have a "good chance" to see those thingies
> work "out of the box", with the usual xorg.conf hacking.

Our hope is that in Fedora Core 6, which will be out shortly, no
"usual" xorg.conf hacking will be necessary.  If your hardware is
capable and our drivers support it, you should be able to just enable
compiz from the "Desktop Effects" preference dialog, and it will
replace metacity immediately.  If you want to try this out, you could
check out Davids livecd, which has compiz on it:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/fedora-live-davidz-stream-development-build-1-20060828_0123-live.iso

> And you *might*
> even not miss what you used to do with metacity. I used to have 12
> workspaces and left-hand-only keybindings to select them, which is the
> thing I'm missing *right now* as well as some wnck-applet integration -
> compiz's GNOME integration in general sucks *right now* - and random
> stuff.

Again, instead of talking about "random stuff" and "missing
integration", I wish that people would file actual bugs about specific
features that don't work. Having said that, compiz can't work exactly
like metacity, but we don't want it to either. A combined window and
compositing manager allows new types of user interaction that might be
even better than what metacity offers now.

thanks,
Kristian