shiny desktop, anyone?

[David Nielsen]

tir, 29 05 2007 kl. 01:40 -0400, skrev Kelly:
> On Tuesday, May 29, 2007 1:07 am Hikaru Amano wrote:
> > how bout adding a menu in firstboot (or something similar during first
> > login of a user)..  asking the user whether to enable compiz/beryl or
> > not ...
> >
> > and if enabling fails -> display "You are using <cardname>, and it
> > seems like the opensource driver does not support 3D with this card.
> > Please install the proper driver from your vendor and try again
> > later." - click ok to continue to next screen .. :D
> 
> The problem with such a maneuver (as I bet the Mandriva users are finding out, 
> and the Vista users can testify to) is that there is no really effective way 
> to predict how well the system would perform with Compiz/Beryl on or off; 
> cards that seem fine may actually give horrible results in reality (like my 
> ATI Radeon 9200, which can run Beryl but does so horribly slowly; but a 
> detect would come up positive because the OSS driver can handle Beryl).

For the record my ATI Radeon 9200 runs the shipped version of Compiz at
a perfectly acceptable speed using nothing but what is shipped in F7.
Though lately the decorations has tended to disappear (#228644) but
generally it works nicely and runs at an acceptable speed even on old
hardware like this.

I'm not convinced Compiz is the key to winning users, sure it's
compelling at first glance but scrolling in your web browser is
painfully slow and it can't handle accelerated video playback so
fullscreen videos turn into a grainy slideshow. I think there are
serious problems still to be worked out before this can be relied on
even on hardware we have good drivers for so please don't make the
argument that all we need is to enable such technology to compel users
to try Fedora.. they help but they certainly also currently hurt.

As with technology like Beagle (or Tracker), the key is not enabling
them by default, it's making them useful. Beagle does nothing in our
default install when the technology could be used for media players to
index your music and videos automatically or say in Nautilus to make
sort by type actually do what you'd expect. What does Compiz do that
enhances the experience, for me generally it makes the desktop a bit
more fun but when push comes to shove the scale plugin is what I use the
most. I think we need to make Compiz do more useful stuff in addition to
the incredible cracktastic funfilled bling it does currently.

- David Nielsen
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