situation with window decorations

[Lucas Murray]

The facts on Oxygen/Nitrogen:

1) Oxygen still doesn't have the settings for customisation. Once they
add all the useful settings from Nitrogen then I agree that Nitrogen
will probably not be needed anymore, however as the current state of
Oxygen doesn't have those customisations then an alternative
decoration must be made available if we want the features to be
available in trunk/KDE 4.4 (I develop for the present, not the
future).
2) Oxygen developers refuse to add any setting that makes things look
ugly even if they can be useful to some people (Quote in context is
available in this thread).
3) I am ensuring that Nitrogen and Oxygen are pixel-perfect copies
when default settings are used (Another reason why the default hasn't
been switched).
4) The Nitrogen configuration panel needs work (And it's being changed
at an alarming rate). Some settings need better descriptions/layouts
and the like.
5) Nitrogen does contain settings that will probably not be used by
anyone. It was copied AS IS from KDE-Look, useless settings and all.
They however add almost no maintenance as all that the setting change
is a single small section of the rendering code. The big settings that
change everything are far from useless such as the border size
setting.
6) Nitrogen is the #1 KWin decoration on KDE-Look even if it's only
been available for 7 months (That's my definition of "what users
want"). 10,000 downloads and an overall score of 93% cannot be wrong
(Cannot get exact numbers as KDE-Look is currently down).
7) Ozone's only extra setting is being enabled by some users
(Non-OpenSuSE users) as KWin receives bug reports VERY quickly when it
breaks (And apparently it's still broken... Works for me though).
8) I asked Nuno on IRC if it was fine to swap Ozone with Nitrogen
before I did the switch and he said it was fine...
9) I am the developer that is overviewing all this, not Lubos. I do
however have the same view as him and have been discussing with the
Oxygen team on how to fix this whole Oxygen/Ozone thing since I joined
the KWin team over a year ago with absolutely no success at all.

About the off-topic snapping issue that the Oxygen team wants:

1) Oxygen team wants to be able to customise the snapping zones of a
window from the decoration.
2) They want it so if a user clicks on another window but it close to
a window's decoration then it will issue a resize command.
3) If the snapping zone is changed then it will allow two windows to
overlap each other by a small amount even if the user cannot see it
(As the overlapping part is transparent)
4) This means if the user wants to click a part of a window near the
edge of another window then they will accidentally resize the window
instead (Bad).
5) It will be possible to resize a window to the edge of the screen
but not be able to resize it back as the resize handle is now off the
screen (Bad).
6) Customising the snapping zone can only work when compositing is enabled.
7) I am not for or against adding this feature but other developers
have voiced their opinion against it (I'll let them discuss it if they
find it important).

-- 

Lucas Murray :: http://www.undefinedfire.com
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