Now, I know that “normal” metacity rendering is silky smooth and responsive, new gnome/metacity users won’t.

And, since Gnome devs are pretty much against allowing users to fiddle too much with customisation, the compositing setting is going to remain buried in gconf for the foreseeable future, and thus be non-obvious even for new users informed enough to start looking for a way to turn off the lag-inducing eye-candy.

My Mum, borderline luddite that she is, still knows enough to disable Windows eye-candy by digging through desktop settings. I suspect gconf would be a few steps too far for her.

Making it easier to enable compositing for those with the desire to use it is better than enabling it by default and making new users with bad performance:
a) know that they’re experiencing abnormally slow performance (ie an edge-case where rendering is slow)
b) know that it’s due to compositing being enabled
c) know that they can disable it and return to a faster non-composited rendering system
d) know that the setting is buried in gconf

Please bear in mind that I absolutely love metacity and can’t envision ever using anything else, so please don’t write me off as some unwashed KDE user :)

I’ve tried Compiz which works well enough… but is too glitzy for me, composited metacity would be perfect except for the slooow resizing. Does anyone know why it’s so slow to resize windows? Is it just me or does everyone else just put up with it?

Moving windows around: no problem, menus: no problem, resize a window: crap-city
I’ve tried various versions of the NVidia driver (currently 177.80) and I’m now running metacity 2.25.5 (experience problems with all versions upto bleeding edge versions, not just the current state)

Of course it all looks very nice… as long as I don’t try to do anything.

-Anders

I ask as I recently was reviewing too lots of code and found myself using two desktops, not the best way to do it! I thought – Hey, my window manager should let me do this right? And maybe even allow me to sync up the mouse to scroll both at the same time :D

Any thoughts?

- regarding compositor in Metacity, we tried to enable it one year ago but after more than one month, we had to disable it because it was causing a lot of slowdown (because it is still Render based) mostly on systems not using EXA (ie almost all systems, including intel until recently) and on Nvidia with proprietary drivers.

I think the single most useful feature that Compiz offers is Zoom. It would be great to be able to zoom while being able to stick with Metacity. Regarding Exposé/Scale, although the effect is extremely useful, adding such a function in addition to Alt+Tab has some usability drawbacks. First, there’s a Hick’s Law penalty, as there are now two discrete ways to locate a window, and the user must choose between the two every single time. On top of that, whereas Alt+Tab is quasimodal, Exposé is modal. Instead of copying Mac OS X and piling up more and more ways to overcome the problem of overlapping windows, I think it would be more useful and usable to alter the Alt+Tab visualization to look more like Exposé, thus inheriting its usability without the drawbacks I mentioned.

I only wish it would incorporate more of the useful features of compiz, like that window picker (scale, in compiz) that tiles all your open windows on the full screen, and you can click on the one you’re interested in. It beats the hell out of alt+tab switching.