Hi,

Jon Nettleton wrote:

That is great to hear. I have been holding off submitting my patches upstream until this happened. Here is the list if anyone wants to give input. Some of them are very similar to what xfwm4 already has.

1. User configurable transparencies for windows when moved, and also

drop down menus. 2) Drag and drop "windows" also become translucent. It was brought up on IRC that cursors are already ARGB, so can theoretically be transparent causing a problem. I think this is a setting that should be desktop-wide, so I prefer having it in the window manager. I am open for discussion on this. I just like being able to grab a bunch of text or large icon and actually see where I am dropping it. 3) Changes to the metacity capplet that also includes a checkbox to turn on compositing. 4) Unredirected fullscreen overlays. I know this should be handled with the new Xorg stuff. I haven't followed up how far along the new memory management code is.

I understand this should also be brought up with the metacity team, and it will be.

Don't be shy on this - bugzilla or metacity-devel is fine.

A thought, I imagine the bias will be toward putting the detailed tuning of visual effects in the theme rather than in gconf. A direction you might consider.

If we see tuning visual effects as something end users want to do with a GUI, a theme editor might be a nice way to go on that.

For turning on compositing, perhaps that should be in the "desktop effects" dialog that Fedora has now?

Remember that in the UI, there is no metacity, or metacity capplet. The metacity prefs are spread over a number of control panels (Theme, Keyboard Shortcuts, Windows). The fact that metacity implements these prefs is not supposed to be something users have to worry about. In fact the words "metacity" and "window manager" are never in the UI at all (or if they are, it's a bug).

Havoc

Hi,

Ray Strode wrote:

...

For turning on compositing, perhaps that should be in the "desktop effects" dialog that Fedora has now?

Why would we ever want the user to be in an environment where compositing isn't available? I mean, why do we want an off button? If COMPOSITE is found, I think metacity should leverage it (at least do automatic compositing at a minimum).

Even for remote X it probably makes sense to have compositing on I think (less redraws).

My assumption here is that we don't have a way to automatically know if compositing works and is fast enough. I definitely agree that when we do have that info, which we should, it would be unacceptable to have a config option.

Basically I think the config option means "test out beta window manager and X server" - at the point that we think the stuff really works and is not just a beta, the config option is silly.

There might still be options for whether to have drop shadows, transparency, etc., I don't know, but we wouldn't have an option for whether to use the COMPOSITE extension.

Havoc

Hi,

Ray Strode wrote:

I'd kind of envision Desktop Effects on -> compiz, Desktop Effects off -> metacity with automatic compositing (or a minimum, non-customizable set of compositing operations that the user wouldn't consider "effects")

I don't think it ever makes sense to have two compositing managers available in the UI each with overlapping / different toggleable effects.

Or were you suggesting make Desktop Effects on -> metacity with iain's cm, and Desktop Effects off -> metacity with no cm (and compiz just taken out of the picture) ?

I was thinking something like "Desktop Effects is kind of a bogus thing that's just there short-term / for testing, so it may as well have a 3-way choice compiz/metacity-cm/metacity-no-cm, or at least that's better than putting metacity CM in the Windows control panel"

In the long term surely the only sane plan is to nuke the Desktop Effects control panel, and to pick only one WM and fix that one WM up to address its shortcomings vs. the other one.

Everything else is some kind of bad-hack stopgap...

Havoc