[RFC] Enforcing Compositing

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Sunday 20 February 2011 22:50:01 Dario Freddi wrote:
> On Sunday 20 February 2011 13:38:40 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > sending this to both Plasma and KWin as the idea affects the complete
> > workspace.
> > 
> > Since 4.2 we have enabled OpenGL based compositing by default and I was
> > wondering if in 4.7 we should go the next step: disabling the possibility
> > to turn compositing off if supported.
> 
> I think I agree with this, provided that KWin is smart enough to detect
> when compositing won't be supported.
> 
> BTW, I think this implies I should trash the disable compositing action in
> powerdevil for 4.7, isn't it? (I would be glad to do that)
I thought it was already trashed in 4.6 or was it just disabled by default?

The correct answer to the question whether turning off compositing saves 
battery or not is probably: it depends. Personally I think that switching off 
compositing and all the stuff implied with it (Plasma rescaling SVGs, Oxygen 
adjusting...) is worse than keeping it on.
> 
> > With Mesa 7.10 it seems that the driver problems (Mesa 7.8) which hit us
> > in 4.5 are finally gone and our new compositor is performing much, much
> > better than the one we have in 4.6. This means from a performance
> > perspective I am optimistic that we can go such a way.
> > 
> > This would imply the following changes
> > * Remove the enable checkbox in the compositing KCM
> > * Remove the suspend/resume compositing button in the same KCM
> > * Remove the "functionality checks" - the heuristic is rather useless
> > anyway * Disable unredirect fullscreen windows by default
> > 
> > I would keep
> > * the shortcut to suspend compositing
> > * the dbus call to toggle compositing (might be useful for games and so
> > on)
> > 
> > I am unsure about keeping respect to the Compositing/Enabled config
> > option. I would say we do not honor it in development mode, but honor it
> > again in the branch. This way users could still disable it if something
> > goes bad.
> > 
> > For development it's better to have the option not honored to get bugs
> > reported ;-)
> > 
> > If compositing is not supported, it will not try to enable it, so no
> > problem for our old, old, old users. (Though I doubt Plasma is of any use
> > in a system not supporting OpenGL).
> > 
> > What do you think about this idea?
> > 
> > Cheers
> > Martin
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