Speaking of Desktops

[Jason D. Clinton]

On 9/28/07, leenix <leenix at kc.rr.com> wrote:
> I've been looking at Beryl and Now Compiz Fusion.
>
> Both look very fun on You Tube, but I was wondering who on the list has
> used them and could give an opinion on which is better.
>
> Obviously, noone NEEDS fancy 3d desktops and flipping cubes, but it is
> fun!

I've been occasionally checking in with both projects for a while and
while they ARE exciting and interesting, they are not ready for
prime-time. The compositor provided by these projects is only one
piece of a large "video offloaded to GPU" project that needs to happen
across the whole desktop.

Currently, applications are talking Xlib to an offscreen pixmap, the
pixmap is scraped and turned in to a texture and then the texture is
displayed on a floating rectangle (two triangles conjoined). What
needs to happen is that applications need to render fonts, buttons,
splines, and gradients directly in terms of OpenGL primitives. This is
exactly what Qt's Arthur and GTK's Cairo are headed toward. However,
it's not there yet.

As it stands, the compositing method is SLOW on a number of
applications that assume to have direct bitmap access to a window. For
example, Gnome Games playing field for the game Aisleriot renders at a
stunning 2-3 frames a second when redirected while the window is too
large. I co-maintain this program and I can tell you that we are NOT
looking foward to rewriting our renderer from scratch...

Maybe some day.