User interaction problems

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

After Martin committed his change to require Mesa 7.10, I found that
my system upon logging back in after my daily trunk build started up
without compositing started. This was shown particularly badly by both
Plasma (which had a virtually black and unreadable panel) and KWin
(whose control modules think my system can handle compositing).

This experience isn't very good, especially considering that pressing
the keys to toggle the state of compositing resulted in the state of
the Plasma panel changing - to a not pretty looking greyish colour
(which is at least readable) - and no notification from KWin when I
pressed them again that compositing couldn't be enabled as it wasn't
supported.

After locally reverting Martin's change, and restarting KWin I found
that Plasma - as usual[*] - failed to handle the change in compositing
state, leaving me with the same greyish, unblurred panel until I
exited Plasma and torched it's svg caches (even toggling the
compositing state twice doesn't fix it). A user shouldn't have to do
that - if compositing is available, it should work.

In regards to the change in KWin to leave all users with Mesa 7.9 and
earlier without compositing, a lack of feedback from KWin in it's
control modules gives the appearance it is supported - when in reality
it isn't. KWin needs to communicate clearly to the user if it doesn't
want to enable compositing - and what they need to do to correct it.
In addition, you should inform packagers and those who support KDE
users of this so we are aware of this and can take the steps to ensure
a pleasant experience for those users who don't upgrade the underlying
distribution often. OpenSUSE 11.3 (which KWin claims is insufficient
in terms of it's Mesa version) isn't even 9 months old.

Please take steps to improve the user experience.

Regards,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Community Forums Administrator