Fedora Core 7 - Compiz vs Beryl

[David Malcolm]

On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 14:41 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 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.
I got permanently scared off from hacking on the internals of X (and
thus GL) after an afternoon of pain spent trying to deal with the
monolithic build.

Thanks to all the effort to modularize X, it's now _much_ more amenable
to people stepping in and fixing individual drivers themselves.  But I
think the horror that was the old monolithic X build has scared away
many potential contributors.

> 
> 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.