Compiz by default ?

[Tristan Wibberley]

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 11:46 +0200, Michael Vogt wrote:
> Dear Friends,
> 
> 
> one of the goals for this cycle was to enable compiz by default for
> all systems where this is feasible. We added a detection from Tribe-2
> on to see if the system is able to run compiz and turn it on then.
> This detection works well and we are happy with the results.
> 
> We still need to discuss if we should enable compiz by default for the
> final release or not. This discussion was started yesterday by
> Matthew Garrett at the techboard meeting and it was decided that this
> needs to be discussed in a wider forum. 

I've tried gutsy compiz but I haven't got spare hardware that works with
it so my comments may be irrelevant these days - they are based on
beryl, but here goes anyway:

I don't think it should be enabled by default until some
keybindings/features are unified.

As an example, and this appears to be relevant for fusion based on the
videos I've seen, there are separate keybindings for the live 2d ring
buffer and the live 3d ring buffer, these should both be Alt-Tab where
the computer uses one or the other depending on the configuration.
Something like a slider for Alt-tab behaviour from the old
icon-with-moving-border, through snapshots (enlightenment style updating
if supported) and 2d live view to 3d live view (perspective ring) would
be a nice way to configure it.

Also the scale plugin keybinding (I forget, is it Super-Tab?) should be
standardised, and a non-accelerated version should be introduced before
this is turned on by default since it would be bad if the keybinding was
useful on new machines, but not old - or worse was caught by the
application and something unexpected happens just because you were using
a friend's older machine. The non-accelerated version could just be
snapshots arranged in the same way as the 3d version but without
animation or live view.

The task applet previews should be more integrated than I've seen in
beryl (is this improved in fusion?), since they appear on top of the
context menu and a tooltip with the title still appears behind it in
beryl - it should be a tooltip alternative, again something like a
slider for configuration should be used if this feature is on by
default.

Integration with the gnome multiple workspaces feature in
feisty-with-beryl is poor. The gnome workspaces should be limited to
horizonal arrangement only, or each row should get a cube. Is this still
a problem with fusion?


I think it is easy enough to discover and in an intuitive enough place
that it should only need to be advertised in the release literature and
youtube. That way these considerations I mention above won't be needed
for gutsy to feel nice.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

Any opinion expressed is mine (or else I'm playing devils advocate for
the sake of a good argument). My employer had nothing to do with this
communication.