Compiz Sees New Update Ahead Of The Holidays - But It's Mainly Bug Fixing

[starshipeleven]

They look cool but windows wobbling and going up in green flames are the most pointless desktop effects.

Looks like I need to add some green flames to my wobbly windows now.

[starshipeleven]

I get confused thinking about where Compiz fits into the desktop.

Linux + Mesa graphics driver <-> Xorg <-> desktop environment (e.g. XFCE or Fluxbox)

"desktop environment" is not really what you have there.

Linux + Mesa graphics driver <-> Xorg <-> Window Manager <-> GUI applications (with or without toolkits like Qt/GNOME/whatever)

The window manager is the application that deals with the fact that each application is in a window and not fullscreen, generates a single large full desktop image and sends it to Xorg to be actually shown on screen.

Compiz is a "compositing window manager". All DEs that work on Wayland, like Kwin, Mutter and MIR use "compositing window manager"s now as that's what they found is the best way for modern day applications.
Compositing window managers let the applications talk to Mesa directly to render themselves, and just stitch together the rendered frames. This is flexible and allows to add all effects you want on top, like making the frame wobbly.

See here for details

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager#Types_of_window_managers

[cybertraveler]

"desktop environment" is not really what you have there.

Linux + Mesa graphics driver <-> Xorg <-> Window Manager <-> GUI applications (with or without toolkits like Qt/GNOME/whatever)

The window manager is the application that deals with the fact that each application is in a window and not fullscreen, generates a single large full desktop image and sends it to Xorg to be actually shown on screen.

Compiz is a "compositing window manager". All DEs that work on Wayland, like Kwin, Mutter and MIR use "compositing window manager"s now as that's what they found is the best way for modern day applications.
Compositing window managers let the applications talk to Mesa directly to render themselves, and just stitch together the rendered frames. This is flexible and allows to add all effects you want on top, like making the frame wobbly.

See here for details
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window...indow_managers

Thanks for the explanation. One part of it seems odd to me though: if the window manager "generates a single large full desktop image and sends it to Xorg", then why does Xorg have all these features for for remote clients and for actually drawing things to the screen? Is that stuff all redundant/unused on a modern Xorg based desktop?

[starshipeleven]

Thanks for the explanation. One part of it seems odd to me though: if the window manager "generates a single large full desktop image and sends it to Xorg", then why does Xorg have all these features for for remote clients and for actually drawing things to the screen? Is that stuff all redundant/unused on a modern Xorg based desktop?

Correct, it's mostly dead weight, or it was evolved organically over time. Consider that at some point Xorg had a printer module to interact with printers.

Some auxiliary functionality remains in use and allows easy screen scraping for remote desktop (and something else too but I don't remember), but Xorg isn't used as a true "display server" for like 2 decades now.
There is a reason if with Wayland, what little is done by Xorg now is integrated in the compositing window manager, and there is no "display server" at all in the new stack
Xorg 2D drivers are used as-is by Wayland compositors.

[cybertraveler]

Correct, it's mostly dead weight, or it was evolved organically over time. Consider that at some point Xorg had a printer module to interact with printers.

Some auxiliary functionality remains in use and allows easy screen scraping for remote desktop (and something else too but I don't remember), but Xorg isn't used as a true "display server" for like 2 decades now.
There is a reason if with Wayland, what little is done by Xorg now is integrated in the compositing window manager, and there is no "display server" at all in the new stack
Xorg 2D drivers are used as-is by Wayland compositors.

Yet another good reason for the shift to a Wayland desktop from instead of using a XOrg+compositor+window-manager setup.

[Guest]

Thanks for the explanation. One part of it seems odd to me though: if the window manager "generates a single large full desktop image and sends it to Xorg", then why does Xorg have all these features for for remote clients and for actually drawing things to the screen? Is that stuff all redundant/unused on a modern Xorg based desktop?

You are really wrong! The window manager doesn't "generate" any image. Any Xorg window manager only catch what the gui libs create.

[starshipeleven]

You are really wrong! The window manager doesn't "generate" any image. Any Xorg window manager only catch what the gui libs create.

It generates the full screen image.

Each GUI application creates its own window image one way or another, the window manager will take all these images and join them together to create the image shown on the full screen.

Different types of window managers use different ways to join images to create the full screen image.