Fedora Core 7 - Compiz vs Beryl

[Adam Jackson]

On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 14:10 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 14:00 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > alan (alan at clueserver.org) said: 
> > > >Dear god no. Beryl is COMPLETELY INSANE.
> > > 
> > > Why do you say that?  In my experience, Beryl has been more stable and 
> > > easier to configure than Compiz.  I have not looked at the code, however.
> > 
> > beryl-settings.
> > 
> >   [ ] slowness fix
> >   
> >    Toggle this option if beryl is slow or choppy. On some cards, enabling
> >    it makes beryl smoother, and on others disabling makes beryl smoother.
> 
> Haha, that's just plain laziness.  They need to figure out what the
> problem is, and fix it, or else figure out how to auto-detect which
> setting works for which cards.  And lazy programmers are not what we
> need.  The last thing you ask users to do is start toggling various
> random settings in the hope that it makes a problem go away, without a
> clear idea of _why_ the setting makes a difference.
> 
> Go beryl.

One of the major problems I've seen with people writing GL applications
for Linux is that they expect that the drivers are not fixable, and
therefore they just hack around things.  The people writing GL apps are,
in fact, the people who can best tell us where the bugs are, and what
paths need to go fast.  And, in fact, Mesa is not hard (it's an absolute
joy to work with compared to some closed GL implementations), and
getting these things fixed in the DRI drivers is achievable by mere
mortals; but because they expect that the driver is a black box, it just
never happens that way.

This is what closed source does to people!

Given the choice between the kind of project with a Magic / More Magic
switch, and the kind of project that submits fixes to the components it
depends on, I'm going to go with the latter, every time.

- ajax