[gentoo-amd64] Re: Compositing WM

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Mauro Maroni <mmaroni@fi.uba.ar> posted
200702061409.52494.mmaroni@fi.uba.ar, excerpted below, on  Tue, 06 Feb
2007 14:09:52 -0300:

> Is anyone here using a compositing window manager?
> I would like to give it a try but I have some general questions:
> What is the best option for a Nvidia + KDE user? Beryl? Compiz?
> Are they stable? Anything else that I should consider?
> Just wanted to hear about your experience :-)

I'm using kwin itself, which already has some decent compositing effects. 
I've been using mainly the transparent windowing features for quite some
time (the others, shadows did little for me, and I got tired of waiting
on the fading effects when I wanted to get stuff done, so I turned that
off). With xorg-7.1.1 and <kde-3.5.6 using EXA  rendering instead of XAA
(which was very slow with compositing turned on in 7.1.1), the transparent
windows weren't CPU intensive at all, even on my older Radeon 9200 running
dual 1600x1200 in merged framebuffer mode (stacked for 1600x2400). The
biggest problem I noticed was a bit of kompmgr/kwin memory leakage -- kept
under control with decently strict ulimit settings on virtual and resident
memory -- and a desktop copy of a script to killall -9 kwin; sleep 1;
kwin, thus reclaiming the leaked memory when things got slow because it
was running up against the resource limits I had set.

With xorg-7.2, EXA had some bugs (blank/missing pieces of windows and the
like, it's a known issue), but XAA is fast enough to be usable now, where
it wasn't really usable with composite before, at least here.  Thus, I
switched back to XAA.  The leaks seemed to be somewhat worse for a few
days, but kde-3.5.6 came out just days after xorg-7.2, with some major
memory leak fixes for those running composite, and indeed, it's /very/
stable now -- I've not had to use that kwin killer script at all since the
kde-3.5.6 upgrade.  I've been going to try EXA again and see if the newer
3.5.6 KDE fixes the bugs with it too, but I've not yet.

FWIW, my general window opacity settings are

Active: 93%
Inactive: 60%
Moving: 77%

I have the checkbox to treat "keep above" windows as active, checked.

Taking a look at the Beryl 2 previews, the spinning cube eye candy looks
nice, but I have a number of Window-Specific Settings that AFAIK need kwin
to work, so while I might try Beryl at some point, I expect I'll be back
to kwin when I actually want to get back to work, and will be waiting
patiently for a truly KDE integrated version in KDE4.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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