Review Request 116648: Split into one KCM for Desktop Effects and one for Compositing

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Friday 07 March 2014 13:07:06 Jens Reuterberg wrote:
> Sry for perhaps breaking etiquette with review requests.

No that's just fine, but it would be better if you used the web frontend to 
keep the discussion in one place and you just lost the kwin mailing list :-)

> The
> KCM are at this moment a hot topic and one of the many issues
> is fragmentation vs merging of subject.

Well this change has nothing to do with the fact that it is a hot topic :-) We 
discussed this month probably even years ago that we want to split this KCM. 
Given that we are approaching alpha 1 I decided to sit down and make it 
happen.

> 
> The main issue is that the settings are, as it is, an extremely
> hostile area for new users. The sorting is arbitrary but justified
> through technical reasons (Like having two separate
> appearance segments) and the idea of splitting them up into
> an "advanced" section and a "basic" section has been met with,
> perhaps to some, healthy skepticism ;)

In this case it's not really an advanced vs. basic. It's two orthogonal 
things. One KCM is to configure the "effects" - a better name would be 
"plugins" because that's more what it is. The other KCM is a very technical 
thing about how KWin performs the rendering. One could even think about not 
adding it to system settings at all.

From the experience of the last six years where it was not split we learned 
that most users just want to configure the effects and if they change other 
settings they mostly break it, because they don't understand what it does and 
think they can fine tweak it. They only got those settings because they 
thought it's related to the effects, which it isn't really.

> 
> But this is just such a split. Having a compositing and desktop
> effect as two separate areas so that one of them, the more
> technical section would be held isolated from a user only
> makes sense if it actually signals this shift:
> 
> Having two titles, one "Desktop Effects" and one "Compositing"
> doesn't tell the user anything except "darn it they split it into
> two things again for no reason".

I don't think so, users are interested in the Desktop Effects but not in the 
compositing settings. Those who are will understand why it's changed and will 
approve it.

> 
> If they have to be split into two, I suggest renaming them into
> something more correct instead of something precise - like
> "Eye candy" and "Compositing KWM system", one being
> extremely childish and fancyful and the other unecessarily
> technical and complex. Signalling accessability with one, and
> distance with the other.

I'm certainly fine with adding better names but "Eye candy" is a no-go. Our 
Effects are not about eye candy - Present Windows is everything but not eye 
candy. If we go for such a name it causes a backslash.

My suggestion would be to go in the direction of "Windowing System Plugins" 
for Desktop Effects, for Compositing I don't know a better name, just that it 
may not include KWin or KWM :-) But yeah not showing in systemsettings is an 
option. Probably the best fitting name is "Compositor" which is the 
established technical term for this kind of applications.

Cheers
Martin
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