Weblog entry #107 for ajt
See all weblog entries made by ajt.
For a laugh I tried to install Compiz which went in okay. I did the "compiz --replace" jig and the wibbly-wobbly stuff worked. Okay, without kwin nothing worked in a useful manner, but the fancy GUI effects worked perfectly well - even with my bottom-end nvidia card. I'll just have to wait for the proper packages to make it into Lenny so I can test it properly.
On first examination I think I'll have to say that most of the effects are silly and make the desktop less useful rather than more. However if it's more efficient use of hardware then it may be worth it, even I end up turning off most of the eye candy.
Comments on this Entry
I think that one good thing about those nice effects is that some of them allow you to see the transition between states.
For example, when you (de)iconify a window, you actually see it moving and shrinking (er expanding) from the old position to the new position.
Same for the famous cube effect to switch workspace: compare it with the "old way" where all windows suddenly disappear and new ones pop up! Not to mention when you drag a window to the next workspace.
I also like the shadow effect, since it highlights the separation between windows.
Of course wobble and shiver are just as eye-candy.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
My box doesn't have a powerful enough graphics box and CPU for full-on eye-candy so I turn off a lot off eye-candy in favour of system speed. For my father an other new users I think that some visual clues are good, especially as they to be slower than their computer.
It's my understanding that once the X/OpenGL/Compiz stuff is sorted out and stabilised my desktop will be able to do a lot of the eye-candy for KDE quickly and without overloading the system as it does at the moment (without Compiz et al.).
Wobble et al was fun for about 30 seconds...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
My box doesn't have a powerful enough graphics box and CPU for full-on eye-candy so I turn off a lot off eye-candy in favour of system speed.
When you mention the "speed vs eye-candy" argument, I'm totally with you.
But the whole thing about XGL is exactly to have the gfx card do the hard work instead of the CPU.
On my system with Compiz, it takes more time to enlarge a window than to drag it over the screen's edge and flip to the next workplace with all the nice cube effect. That's because the former is a task for the CPU, the latter is handled by a processor that's born to do that.
To have a dedicated gfx processor reminds me of the good old times when I was a happy Amiga fan!
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Even though it's a bit silly at the moment, it is noticeable that the Compiz effects, even with the puny nvidia card I have, are much more fluid and put almost zero load on the system, than letting X/KDE and the CPU do it the old fashioned way.
Now AMD/ATI have announced that they will open up their GPU designs, all we need now are nvidia to show a bit more support and the graphic side of open source hardware will be able to make quantum leaps.
Never had an Amiga, I had a Commodore 64 - that was a real computer! Even that had a RISC processor and dedicated graphics and sound processors, if it was good enough for the Terminator then it's good enough for me. I'll have to install VICE and get nostalgic again...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I am only disappointed at noticing that Compiz eats up much more memory than Metacity. I'm not referring to misleading info like what you get with ps, but to truly free memory immediatly after boot and log in (to GNOME) after netting out buffer/cache.
I will post exact figures as soon as I have collected enough data (I want to test Sawfish as well). Stay tuned!
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Have you checked the preferences in gconf? Especially, the key apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/active_plugins must include all the plugins that you want, especially decoration.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]