b.n. wrote:
Richard Fish ha scritto:
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Xgl either, but I am of AIGLX, and I was under
the impression that the open source radeon driver had good support for
AIGLX. I'm using nvidia, so I had to wait for the 9xxx driver release
before I could use it... :-(
I was under the impression AIGLX was dying in favour of Xgl. Well, I'll
do my research :)
Quite the other way around, as far as I've been able to tell. Xgl got
greater publicity, yes, but AIGLX is the one that will eventually be the
"official" solution - it's already present in Portage's xorg-server in
some form.
By the way, the latest beta drivers from nVidia provide the OpenGL
extension that Compiz and Beryl use, so you don't even need AIGLX nor
Xgl, and DRI can remain enabled (wobbly quake3! ^_^). My laptop at the
moment has no overlays at all - xorg-server from ~x86, compiz from ~x86,
and nvidia-drivers in package.unmask - and it's all working very nicely.
:) Hopefully other driver devs will follow suit.
I find the task switcher that displays live images of the windows, and
the scale effect (move the cursor to a corner of the screen and all
windows shrink and tile on the screen, and then you click on the one
you want to switch to) to be the most useful,
Yes, an Exposè-like thing would be really useful. Is it *fast*?
Yes. I tried compiz+AIGLX on my old Celeron 1.5GHz with integrated
motherboard video (eeew!) just for kicks and it ran fairly smoothly -
modest framerate, but definitely usable. If you mean literally fast,
then also yes - all of the animations happen within half a second or so
(not that I've measured ;)). There's a key shortcut, too, if you want
to see jiggly windows in slow-mo. (shift-f10 is the default, I believe?
Someone help me out on that one.)
although I could watch
my windows wobble and jiggle all day!
lol!
That is awfully cute. :) My favorite feature is the window scaler. Oh,
and the way the rest of the desktop sort of drops into the background
while Alt-Tabbing - it's subtle but cool.
For simple things like shadows and transparency, that could be done
independently of the window manager. But for more complicated
effects, like the task switcher, or being able to animate window
operations, or flash windows that want attention, or the desktop cube
thingy, you need tighter integration with the window manager.
Sigh. I see. I wonder if/when common WMs/DEs will support these things
out of the box (KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox are my favourites :) )
It depends on how important the WM is to the whole thing, you see.
Compiz and its fork, Beryl, work very well with Gnome and KDE because
the window manager isn't very important to them - it does very little
besides manage windows, while (in Gnome for example) gnome-session and
Nautilus do a lot of work as well. There's even a separate program that
handles window decorations (gnome-window-decorator in Gnome, kwin I
think in KDE). On the other hand, with Fluxbox, Openbox, and similar,
the WM is all there is, so it's a big deal to change it. You can't have
"Compiz integration in Fluxbox", since they both do the same thing, and
will refuse to run at the same time. I have, however, heard rumours of
an Openbox clone with some Compiz code spliced into it in initial
development... :D
m.
Ryan
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