@Alberts, Dmitry: > No compositor means - no desktop window or it will be black - you will never > see background. > My plan is to fix this in Xenial+1. Less patches will mean less work for me, > too :P
That's a good example, does that mean that in Ubuntu 16.10 if one doesn't use compositing he won't be seeing the desktop icons and background? @Alberts, which distro are you using or which one is closest with upstream flashback? Debian? > P.S. Do you have numbers about usage? I have somewhat exact numbers for Greece: http://www.ltsp.org/stories/widget-map/?location=Greece (less than half of the installations are shown in that map) 1000+ schools are using LTSP. They have on average one computer lab with 13 computers, serving 100 students. So 1000 installations, 13,000 computers, 100,000 users are using gnome-flashback 12.04 here. We didn't upgrade to 14.04 because of issues with the keyboard layout and the indicator. We'll upgrade them to 16.04 sometime this summer. They don't show up in the official stats much (popcon, ubuntu repository hits etc) because there's only one installation per school, the rest of the computers are netbooted from a single image. Worldwide I don't have exact numbers, the LTSP map is at http://ltsp.org/stories/ but I suspect there are 10 times more installations, but only half of them with gnome-flashback. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to metacity in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1565640 Title: Set compositing-manager=false by default Status in metacity package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix Bug description: In Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, metacity's compositing-manager was false by default. In 16.04, it's been set to true. I tried to pinpoint the advantages vs the disadvantages of that, and currently I've only seen disadvantages. I was testing with: gsettings set org.gnome.metacity compositing-manager false (or metacity --no-composite) versus: gsettings set org.gnome.metacity compositing-manager true (or metacity --composite) Speed: the speed for window drawing and moving around is 3-5 times slower when compositing is enabled. This is rather visible locally on old computers, but it becomes a real problem when Xorg is used over the network, like for example in LTSP thin clients. There, dragging around a window draws it in slow motion a whole lot behind the mouse, like a trail, while with compositing disabled, everything is lightning fast. RAM: xrestop shows that with a couple of windows open, metacity now needs 10 MB more RAM. This value increases with the number of open windows. Vsync: in most cases vsync was broken with or without compositing (while with compiz it's working much better). I tried with youtube videos, with VLC etc. The only difference I saw is that with some SDL games like teeworlds, vsync was working with compositing disabled, and was broken with compositing enabled. So my personal results is that metacity's compositing-manager=true doesn't have any advantage currently, and that it makes old client and LTSP client performance a whole lot worse. And unfortunately those are exactly the cases where we prefer gnome-session-flashback instead of e.g. Unity. Therefore I'd like to ask you to consider disabling it by default like it was in the past. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/1565640/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
