Re: desktop effects tab in appearance capplet

["Patrick Niklaus" <marex opencompositing org>]

>
>  I still don't understand. Is it not possible to disable all the fancy
>  effects in Compiz? Surely this is what the "enable desktop effects"
>  option should do.
>

Since compiz is plugin based you can turn off almost everything.
(apart from the very basic core functionality)
The problem I see here is the definition of "desktop effects". Is it a
"desktop effect" when your windows have shadows, or when you can move
windows smoothly? All this requires compositing and compiz simply can
not run in an non-compositing mode. Sure you can strip down the list
of enabled plugins until you only get the very basic window manager
features like moving, placing and resizing windows, but still to be
able to do so you would need compositing. If you only need this few
features, you don't actually need compositing and thus you don't need
compiz for that.

In fact it is really hard to draw the line between "effect" and
"feature". This is nothing that a simple checkbox could ever handle,
not just for compiz but in general. You need to trust the actual
effect configuration to the "desktop effect provider"s settings.

For now, the best would just be adding that checkbox which sets a
gconf key and when enabled it checks if there is another gconf key set
which defines a start command for the "desktop effect provider", if so
it runs that command and lets the "desktop effect provider" deal with
it.

Regards,
Patrick