Re: SV: [Nautilus-list] Desktop window

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes:

> > 2) It avoids having to create a bunch of shaped windows, one for each
> >    desktop icon. Doing this is bad for performance.
> 
> I don't think this can be claimed because the net effect of the Nautilus
> approach is *lower* performance. The reason many people complain is that
> having Nautilus manage the desktop results in horkedness moving windows.
> So much so that a few people around here aren't willing to run it. While
> there may be a theoretical load the X-server from using lots of little
> shaped windows, it seems to perform better on the whole than our current
> approach.

We could easily get really smooth redraw of the background just by
setting the background image as the background pixmap for the desktop
window. However, so far the people in charge of the desktop window
code have refused to do this, assuming they can get the redraw fast
enough. The problem is that there are enough slow parts of Nautilus
right now that even if the desktop redraw itself is super-fast, other
parts of Nautilus can block it from even happening, thus resulting in
mass ugliness.

> > For reasons of this sort, most modern file managers for X are being
> > designed with the model of using their own desktop window instead of
> > using the root window.
> 
> I'm interested in which ones, because Nautilus is the only one I've seen
> that creates annoying effects when you move windows. Is this because we
> can't redraw fast enough? Actually...this seems to be a systematic
> problem with X...application windows seem to redraw very slowly.
> Whatever.

Both efm and kfm do this. The reason they don't see the same redraw
problem is because they set the background pixmap as I described.

 - Maciej