Compiz default Application Switcher (Alt+Tab) is difficult to use

[chombee]

On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 00:20 +0100, chombee wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> I took the liberty of assuming you meant to reply to the list and not
> just me. I would like to find out what if anything is happening among
> the compiz people about this issue and speak to them about, but I can't
> find out how. Their website is quite confusing (for one thing I don't
> know if I want compiz.org or compiz-fusion.org). I gave up easily, I'll
> try again.
> <snip>

So I discovered that both compiz.org and compiz-fusion.org point to the
forums at http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/. I couldn't find any mailing
list or bug tracker. A search of the forum for "application switcher"
finds that various people have complained about both of the issues with
the application switcher in various threads, but it doesn't look like
anything is being done about it. Ubuntu has been shipping with this (in
my opinion) major usability regression for I believe a year now? And
it's not the only one, the Show Desktop button is pretty bust in compiz
too. I worry that there is no developer momentum to get these kind of
usability issues in compiz fixed.

I'm not sure there was anything useful I could do. Perhaps I could have
started another thread, summed up the issues and how they should be
fixed, and linked to all the other threads, my closed bug report, and
this thread, but I would only have been repeating what has already been
said.

I'd like to point out that metacity's new compositor has a correct
implementation of alt-tab with window previews. In general compiz has
many bugs and usability regressions compared to metacity, but in my
testing metacity's compositor is not as fast as compiz. Hopefully it
will catch up and could potentially replace compiz, but I fear compiz is
already too entrenched, it seems to be very popular.