Re: desktop effects tab in appearance capplet

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 22:54 +0100, Patrick Niklaus wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> first of all, nice to see some activity to get this integrated
> properly in gnome. I think thats this is really important for a nice
> end user experience.
> >
> >  * first of all, what should be done to choose compiz or metacity? That
> >  is, a user would install a default desktop with metacity without
> >  compositor (is that the case for Fedora and Ubuntu?) and when the user
> >  enables the desktop effects, what should it do, activate compositor on
> >  metacity or just run compiz to replace metacity?
> >
> 
> Is the compositor of metacity even really indented for end users? I
> mean there has been a lot of effort put on the compiz compositor and
> on it's window management abilities. It would be a shame to waste this
> effort in favour of a rather basic composition feature. I think when
> the user wants "desktop effects" he/she wants compiz not metacity.

I think this is totally untrue and counter productive. Compiz is not the
only window manager with "desktop effects" and we should not force users
into switching window managers for this option.

And please remember, metacity and compiz are not the only window
managers in the world. Right now, the GNOME project does not decree a
particular window manager to be running (although some can be said to be
more "GNOME-compliant" than others). 

[...]
> 
> >
> >  * Also, the windows capplet should deal correctly with whatever WM is
> >  running, or even this enable-desktop-effects thing should be moved
> >  there ?
> >
> 
> I think the current WM capplet could actually stay. Compiz is able to
> map on metacity gconf keys when using the CompizConfig settings
> backend provided by Compiz Fusion with 'integration' enabled.

If a window manager wants proper GNOME integration, it should really
look at implementing a gnome-window-manager plugin. Perhaps we should
add an "enable effects" option to this which the checkbox would control?
See libwindow-settings in gnome-control-center for more info.

Alternatively, we could have a standard gconf key. We already have:

/desktop/gnome/interface/enable_animations

which could be used for this purpose.

Regards,

Thomas