[RFC] Enforcing Compositing

[Dario Freddi]

On Sunday 20 February 2011 23:03:10 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> 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.

After a series of mails, we decided to switch it off by default :) in 4.7 I'll 
move the action away


> 
> > > 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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Dario Freddi
KDE Developer
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