KDE4 Desktop Effects (KWin Composite) Video Tour
December 03, 2007 around 5am (KDE, openSUSE)I’ve now updated to the latest openSUSE KDE4 Packages and got another video (first one being: KDE 4.0 RC1+ Video Tour) to add, and it’s one all about the new KDE 4.0 KWin composite; that is, the new desktop effects that will be available with KDE 4.0.
The desktop effects are coming along nicely, with many plugins available. You will no longer need to run Compiz to get many standard and convenient composite features: they will be available right inside KDE. In many cases the plugins improve window management (like “present windows” or Compiz’s “scale” plugin), provide a little eye-candy to the desktop (like translucent windows), or are just useful in various situations, like mouse mark (handy when doing a presentation).
Download high quality video (OGG, 38M)
Thanks goes to liquidat for informing me about recordmydesktop’s --full-shots option, which is required when taking videos of window managers using composite effects.
Note: all of the effects themselves are in fact perfectly smooth on my desktop. Some of the effects and window manipulations seem a little dodgy because of the recording software which is reasonably intensive. Under normal operations it performs incredibly well.
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Nice Video, well done!
May I ask what kind of hardware was used?
AMD64 3400+, 1G RAM, NVIDIA 6200. All of the effects themselves are pretty much perfectly smooth, despite looking dodgy perhaps on the video.
Do you know if intel gma 950 is supported?
What’s the printout of the
# free
command after loading the eyecandy desktop?
(Just asking because I noticed a dramatic increase in memory footprint already in the latest Fedora and Ubuntu releases)
Tom
This is whats wrong with linux, and the open source community as a whole. Rather than the community focusing on one project to better it. People create a bunch of fragmented projects that never really take shape. This is why most linux apps are under featured, under developed, under polished and under used.
Mark,
I think really that’s the beauty of it.
I use Xfce because my hardware is very limited and it provides for excellent performance.
KDE is very good for beautiful desktops on better hardware.
Incorporating this sort of eye-candy into KDE directly rather than porting it into Compiz is probably nicer for some hardware and also is a good idea insofar as you don’t have to go around installing extra packages or bloating a distro further than you have to for presentations’ sake. 🙂
Where are the windows going when they just disappear? how does this improve the user experience?
The link Hight quality video (OGG 38M )is broken 😉
Very nice video.
I’m impressed; I had no idea that KDE4 was going to include compositing features. Very cool.
Cheers to all of the KDE programmers for their hard work. P.S. thank you for focusing on code quality rather than the shipping date. The only thing that stands out now are the icons that contain “?” instead of something more meaningful; it’s really shaping up.
Jonny,
While subjectively XFCE may suit your limited needs, Mark is quite right. Open source desktop software’s growth and maturation is tremendously stunted. Too many people are busily working on the same project in different groups. Nothing truly profuctive can come of disunity – if Linux desktops want to match and exceed the usability, functionality and empowerment mainstream desktop OSes give the end user, they need to begin working together as one.
Brad and Mark are right. For KDE to add in composite manager into kde doesn’t it then bloat kde(which is one of the reasons I don’t use.) Also every effect I see is compiz. Nothing new just the same thing. This takes hours of developers time which could be put towards projects that have not been done yet? What if I don’t want composit effects in kde? Compiz will no doubt remain the best so now I will have compiz and kde effects if I want compiz and kde. Honestly this is not good at all. I was hoping to see something new not the same thing “built in”. KDE is trying to do everything when linux and most of it’s software has the idea of doing one thing really well. too bad 🙁
Nice video!
Can I ask you if you have some kind of special configuration for your nvidia card? I have an 8400GT and it is unbearably slow when resizing windows while keeping their content visible. The other effects are working ok, but resizing is really a pain.
FYI, I’m using an SVN build from 3-4 days ago.
Thanks in advance!
CodenameKT: The developers of kwin explained several times, why reusing compiz or beryl was not possible. Basically, reimplementing the composite stuff into kwin is much easier than fixing beryl/compiz into something that would be usable as kwin replacement.
Nice video!
I’ve tried those effects by myself, works great.
But having opengl turned on makes kwin run with at least 14% cpu all the time, which is why I disabled it again for now.
Any idea if that will be improved ? I mean to use less cpu ?
The fall apart and explosion effects don’t look “nice” to me, the effect is too “perfect” “symmetric” or however you describe that; anyway not an effect I would use, gets annoying if you’re trying to work on your computer 🙂
@bluescarni I got a nvidia 7700 and can confirm that slowness
@CodenameKT the reason for “re-inventing” the wheel here has been explained before. IIRC they looked into using compiz, but the new code in kwin is much much cleaner and easier to maintain, and plugins are easier to write… I guess a developer can better comment on this.
“Open source desktop software’s growth and maturation is tremendously stunted. Too many people are busily working on the same project in different groups. Nothing truly profuctive can come of disunity – if Linux desktops want to match and exceed the usability, functionality and empowerment mainstream desktop OSes give the end user, they need to begin working together as one.”
Brad, your black turtle neck is a little too tight, cutting off blood to the brain. Go read the Cathedral and the Bizarre and then see why you are wrong. Have you ever used Vista? The product of all kinds of organized “unity” is shit whose Aero interface, 3-4 years in the making, was matched feature for feature then smashed by someone’s side project in less than a year…Compiz. And within a year of this post KDE4 will be doing stuff on the desktop that will take even Apple years to catch up to. The real factor stunting the growth of Linux on the desktop? People who repeat the same opensource voodoo nonsense FUD over and over again like you and the other Apple fanboys like you.
I have Nvidia Geforce 6600GT, AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+ and 1 GB RAM. And 2 1280×1024 monitors in xinerama.
Some months ago, I have tried Beryl and it worked normally. A couple of crashes now and then but speed was normal. Around 160 FPS in beryl test.
Some weeks ago I have tried KDE4. It was deadly slow. Resizing windows, resizing widgets, moving widgets. Dropboxes showed seconds after I clicked on them.
3 days ago I tried compiz fusion to see if the problem was in KDE4 or my hardware settings. Compiz fusion was deadly slow to. I got 8 FPS max. I have tried all possible settings found on internet for nvidia. To get a better FPS. I am currently using nvidia drivers 100.14.09.
Does anybode know where to look for solution. Can somebody, who has reasonable fast KDE4 post his xorg.conf file. that we others can maybe see our problem.
great video and great work.
it would be great if porting compiz plugins was easy.
why do people that obviously dont understand nothing about linux come with always the same crappy argument “drop what you are doing and just do what i want you to do”.
if i had a cent for every “this is what is wrong with linux” comment that i read , i would have money to buy ubuntu from mike
The whiners who think that beryl can replace kwin obviously know nothing about what a windowmanager does. How it manages hints, how it places windows, how it integrates with the desktop.
sometimes, I play with beryl, and I find it cute. And fun. But I always end up switching back to good old kwin which really does manage windows well.
So it is brilliant that kwin can also have the glitz, because it would take years for beryl to get to do windowmanagement remotely as well as kwin — effects are very easy to add comparatively.
Compiz doesnt need to replace kwin, it can run ontop of it. Compiz doesnt do window management, it just pretties it. You dont need to run Emerald to get the eye candy, just use kwin with Compiz.
Does the author, or anyone else using opensuse, know if there are any special options needed in xorg.conf to enable these effects, or is it a case of just installing the nvidia driver? I tried beta4 but it did not work out of the box.
@hmmm
x2
my system is capable to run compiz/beryl/*, but i dont like it, they are “too gnome” or “too not-kde”, so im really happy with the new kwin, and the best, is just install kde4 and nothing else, doesnt metter what distro are you using.
but i miss the capacity to set the number of desk, but can live without that(for now).
to rudolph: in recent svn, you can change the number of desktops from the pager plasma applet, like you could in KDE3.
@Mark: Compiz DOES replace kwin, it can’t run on top of it. Yes, it can emulate the look of KWin, but not it’s behavior – which is why I’m happy we will have a proper windowmanager in KDE 4.
As said before, Compiz is a mess, codewise, and doesn’t have a proper pluginstructure (which is why plugins have to be ported – same with Firefox). The composite part of a windowmanager (like kwin) is just 10% of the whole codebase, and it’s rather silly to reimplement the other 90% in compiz – better to add the 10% functionality to Kwin…
@bluescarni, @chad: no extra configuration apart from the stuff described in the COMPOSITE_HOWTO. See: http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kwin/COMPOSITE_HOWTO
@simon: I agree with your sentiments about the explosion/fall-apart effects. Hopefully this will be improved in the future.
With regard to “why KWin’s going composite and not using compiz”, I can really only once again re-iterate what Jos Poortvliet has said above: KWin is a proven, established, stable window manager that has many great features. Composition is a very small part of the overall window manager’s code, so going to another window manager to get such a small benefit codewise is not very helpful.
The option was carefully considered by the KDE developers 🙂
Thanks for this video.
For those who rant a lot (I mean : why not using compiz instead… to this is why linux devel suck) :
1°) Competition between projet is always good, I’m realy not sure that kde and gnome would be that good in there part if only one exist. Do you think that IE7 would have tabs if firefox hadn’t first ?
2°) “those write the code have the power”, so if you think you can do better than what is done already in kwin : do it yourself and you’ll have more popularity than kwin (good luck at this one)
3°) as jos said compiz act as a window-manager So it replace kwin…
4°) Compiz use glib as it’s core, and I’m fine with that one, but glib and QT are not that friend (ok QT can use glib main-loop, but arrk :D)
Anyway I love what I see, and I’m damn to lazy to test it my self. So thanks for your sharing.
@Francis: thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated. Those small xorg.conf changes work perfectly with latest opensuse and nvidia card (using latest beta driver 169.04). I wonder if there will be a mechanism to automatically add these lines in kde4 (when compositing is selected in systemsettings) as it’s not obvious to newbies.
@chad: xorg.conf editting needs root-permissions. While configuring kde4 in systemsettings is done with user-permissions. For that matter it won’t write lines to xorg.conf.
But maybe it should. openSUSE-XGL-settings does ask for root-password to write lines to xorg.conf.
@chad: For the next openSUSE version, 11.0, AIGLX will be enabled by default for Intel, NVIDIA’s own aiglx will too, and ATI users will be able to use Xgl where they have to (aiglx lacking the relevant features in this case). So, the answer is that users will be able to enable it very easily (probably no xorg.conf editing). This was discussed last week: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2007-11/msg00194.html
to the anti-competition guys, I suppose you want there to exist only one manufacturer of CPU’s, Mobos, RAM, Hardisks, OS’s, Cars, Planes? you get the idea. sounds like Steve Jobs’ wet dream.
@Mark, to say ‘Compiz doesn’t do window management’ is to say ‘I just like to run my mouth’
Intel AMD, Nvidia ATI demonstrate the point best… the world isn’t about to declare one the victor.
The beauty of having compositing built into KDE is that you don’t have to replace your native window manager with compiz/beryl and lose the functionality of kwin. That was a problem in KDE3 that brought me (and many others) no end of frustration. There’s no sense in installing a desktop environment only to lose the most integral part to eye candy.
I love watching all of the improvements in openSUSE. Soon we will take over the world and Microsoft will be nothing but history.
Kde should be smart enough to detect when performance is an issue and suspend the special effects until the resources are freed.