Comments on: KDE4 Desktop Effects (KWin Composite) Video Tour

By: kohler

kohler — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:21:15 +0000

I love watching all of the improvements in openSUSE. Soon we will take over the world and Microsoft will be nothing but history.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:34:55 +0000

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.

By: Ali

Ali — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:02:39 +0000

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.

By: Francis

Francis — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:09:03 +0000

@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

By: BartOtten

BartOtten — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:50:58 +0000

@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.

By: chad

chad — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:27:18 +0000

@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.

By: shuss

shuss — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:12:08 +0000

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.

By: Francis

Francis — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:54:58 +0000

@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

By: jospoortvliet

jospoortvliet — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:11:33 +0000

@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…

By: hmmm

hmmm — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:59:13 +0000

to rudolph: in recent svn, you can change the number of desktops from the pager plasma applet, like you could in KDE3.