Comments on: 2008-10-29: Metacity Journal

By: Ross Burton

Ross Burton — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:40:31 +0000

Instead of hardcoding the FPS, why not ask xrandr for the refresh rate of the monitor?

Obviously there are edge cases: some incomplete drivers this will be 0 (so assume 50?), and multihead will complicate matters.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:29:36 +0000

Sound effects are *hard* to get right, especially sound effects triggered by user actions. Usually they’re simply annoying and add nothing to the experience. Notifications, on the other hand, have a legitimate use for sound effects (e.g. something to discretely tell you there’s a window flashing in your title bar).

Don’t listen to me, listen to a good user interaction designer, if you can find one…

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:12:41 +0000

@Robin: I know what you mean. I’m not sure what causes this, but I’ve heard someone mention it before now who had some suggestions. I wonder whether Iain knows. (I’m no expert on the compositor, at least not yet.)

By: Robin

Robin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:56:19 +0000

For me, Metacity also feels jerky with compositing on. So if increasing the refresh rate improves this, I’d say do it.

The primary reason though why I haven’t turned compositing on yet is this: When restoring a window or calling up the window switcher with Alt+Tab, the windows that appear sometimes “flicker”. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s like the window contents haven’t been fully initialised yet but are shown already and so for a fraction of a second the “garbage” that is there primary to initialisation is visible. Do you have an idea what that could be?

By: Rui

Rui — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:45:36 +0000

I tried to put some objectiveness onto the Theme patriation thread.