5 ms·

As someone who uses a tiling window manager it has been a long time since I have actually used a compositor. I have to ask if the cool window effects are actual

As someone who uses a tiling window manager it has been a long time since I have actually used a compositor. I have to ask if the cool window effects are actually worth the bother? I just can't see anyone actually caring about stuff like that in 20 years.

iso8859-1 6y ago
On Android, you have Picture-In-Picture video support now. How do you imagine it working without a compositor? Do you think nobody cares about that feature?
- toast0 6y ago
  Picture in picture videos used to be done with chromakey. Playing a video in one window on top of another window isn't some new thing compositing provides. You could do it in Mac classic or Windows 3.1 or BeOS.
CmdrKrool 6y ago
I have set up a keyboard shortcut to toggle my compositor on and off and tbh I find it tends to remain off most of the time, since I don't care for 'cool window effects' either. Most of the especially visual applications I use - eg. video players, games - tend to handle themselves in this respect, taking their steps for vsync as necessary. On the rare occasion that I'm offended by a bit of tearing I'll just activate the shortcut and then no problem. I just worry that with the badmouthing of X11 that goes around, one day this control - the ability to run without a compositor, if I want to - might be taken away from me.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  The X server code isn't going anywhere. Somehow I feel like it will be around forever.
  - wmf 6y ago
    I predict there will be a systemd-style debate about removing X11 by 2030 and it will be completely gone by 2040 (since someone mentioned 20 years). There won't be a single non-composited OS available at all and people born after 2000 won't really remember anything else.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      There are still distributions that do not use systemd though, e.g. two that come to my mind are Slackware if you are more conservative or Void if you prefer a rolling distro. And TBH IMO the choice of window system affects way more the day-to-day operations of a desktop oriented distribution than the init system ever did, so i expect slightly more friction about removing Xorg (as a sidenote the server is Xorg, X11 is the protocol and another server - most likely a fork of Xorg - can continue providing it if Xorg shuts down).
bavell 6y ago
I also use a tiling WM (awesome) and don't use a compositor or have much interest in doing so. I do get vsync tearing though (skylake i915) and I found that running a compositor (compton I think) fixed it. Not that I use it haha.
yoz-y 6y ago
Nobody might care about the 3D cube but stuff like shadows under windows have a clear usability benefit. aka: knowing which window is on to of each other. Of course in a tiling WM you don’t care about that but vast majority of people don’t want to use tiling WMs.
- mrob 6y ago
  Why would I need to know the Z-order of overlapping windows? None of the windows I'm actively working with overlap (it would be too annoying to have them constantly blocking each other), and all the rest just have "background" status. I don't care how far they are into the background, so drop shadow is useless visual clutter.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    Clearly, you haven't seen non-power users working.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    You are you. Other people work differently. If you want to hear how a power user uses overlapping windows I’d recommend listening to this ATP episode: https://atp.fm/96 https://atp.fm/96
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- toast0 6y ago
  Windows 95 style shadows are good enough for me.
- taeric 6y ago
  Shadows don't need a compositor though, do they? At the least, affordances don't need a compositor. So, make the "active" border less soft and this is easily doable. (I feel like this is how things used to be?)
  - yoz-y 6y ago
outworlder 6y ago
Compositors are not just about visual effects. They are also a pretty good way to leverage GPUs. If you don't care that much about latency, there's a clear benefit in never having windows getting "damaged" just because other stuff has temporarily occluded them. You will never get "ghost" images because one app has locked up or is slow. No flurry of "WM_PAINT", "WM_NCPAINT" or whatever equivalent just because you are moving windows. No matter how fast your system is, any 'movement' is much more fluid (as position changes are almost free). Essentially, having windows completely isolated from one another - except when they are "composited" back - simplifies a lot. There's a lot of cruft and corner cases that you don't have to care. There are features that can enhance usability that are trivial to do with compositors but difficult without - for instance, showing a window "preview" when you are switching apps or when you mouse over in the taskbar. While you can do this without a compositor, you can get this very easily and for almost 'free'. And, as you point out, you can post-process and apply whatever effects you want. But this is a minor detail and was used initially as a selling point. Of course, for a tiling window manager none of this matters as they never overlap. But most users don't use tiling window managers.
- toast0 6y ago
  > If you don't care that much about latency, there's a clear benefit in never having windows getting "damaged" just because other stuff has temporarily occluded them. Isn't that why X11 provided an (optional) backing store?
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > They are also a pretty good way to leverage GPUs. Compositors do not do much GPU leverage outside of drawing a bunch of textured quads for the final image, but those textures are assembled on the CPU (some toolkits have GPU backends but even that goes back and forth the CPU because not everything is done though the GPU). It would need a big rewrite of the GUI stack to actually take advantage of GPUs with whatever service/server handles it to have a full scene tree with all the contents of the desktop resident (and whenever possible, manipulated) in GPU memory. As things are nowadays, however, at best you get a mix of the two (and that itself isn't without its drawbacks too).
sjy 6y ago
How many windows do you tend to have open? I find it quite difficult to use a tiling window manager when you have more windows open than you can display on screen. I recently switched to PaperWM and I find the animated transitions between workspaces, and the ability to scroll through windows tiled across a rectangle that exceeds the dimensions of my physical screen, to be a big improvement compared to my previous setup with sway. I’d really like to get 60 Hz window resizing as well, as in iPadOS’s split screen, but even compositing tiling window managers like PaperWM and sway struggle with this at the moment.

iso8859-1 6y ago

On Android, you have Picture-In-Picture video support now. How do you imagine it working without a compositor? Do you think nobody cares about that feature?

toast0 6y ago
Picture in picture videos used to be done with chromakey. Playing a video in one window on top of another window isn't some new thing compositing provides. You could do it in Mac classic or Windows 3.1 or BeOS.

CmdrKrool 6y ago

I have set up a keyboard shortcut to toggle my compositor on and off and tbh I find it tends to remain off most of the time, since I don't care for 'cool window effects' either. Most of the especially visual applications I use - eg. video players, games - tend to handle themselves in this respect, taking their steps for vsync as necessary. On the rare occasion that I'm offended by a bit of tearing I'll just activate the shortcut and then no problem. I just worry that with the badmouthing of X11 that goes around, one day this control - the ability to run without a compositor, if I want to - might be taken away from me.

cycloptic 6y ago
The X server code isn't going anywhere. Somehow I feel like it will be around forever.
- wmf 6y ago
  I predict there will be a systemd-style debate about removing X11 by 2030 and it will be completely gone by 2040 (since someone mentioned 20 years). There won't be a single non-composited OS available at all and people born after 2000 won't really remember anything else.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    There are still distributions that do not use systemd though, e.g. two that come to my mind are Slackware if you are more conservative or Void if you prefer a rolling distro. And TBH IMO the choice of window system affects way more the day-to-day operations of a desktop oriented distribution than the init system ever did, so i expect slightly more friction about removing Xorg (as a sidenote the server is Xorg, X11 is the protocol and another server - most likely a fork of Xorg - can continue providing it if Xorg shuts down).

bavell 6y ago

I also use a tiling WM (awesome) and don't use a compositor or have much interest in doing so. I do get vsync tearing though (skylake i915) and I found that running a compositor (compton I think) fixed it. Not that I use it haha.

yoz-y 6y ago

Nobody might care about the 3D cube but stuff like shadows under windows have a clear usability benefit. aka: knowing which window is on to of each other. Of course in a tiling WM you don’t care about that but vast majority of people don’t want to use tiling WMs.

mrob 6y ago
Why would I need to know the Z-order of overlapping windows? None of the windows I'm actively working with overlap (it would be too annoying to have them constantly blocking each other), and all the rest just have "background" status. I don't care how far they are into the background, so drop shadow is useless visual clutter.
- outworlder 6y ago
  Clearly, you haven't seen non-power users working.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  You are you. Other people work differently. If you want to hear how a power user uses overlapping windows I’d recommend listening to this ATP episode: https://atp.fm/96 https://atp.fm/96
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
toast0 6y ago
Windows 95 style shadows are good enough for me.
taeric 6y ago
Shadows don't need a compositor though, do they? At the least, affordances don't need a compositor. So, make the "active" border less soft and this is easily doable. (I feel like this is how things used to be?)
- yoz-y 6y ago

outworlder 6y ago

Compositors are not just about visual effects. They are also a pretty good way to leverage GPUs. If you don't care that much about latency, there's a clear benefit in never having windows getting "damaged" just because other stuff has temporarily occluded them. You will never get "ghost" images because one app has locked up or is slow. No flurry of "WM_PAINT", "WM_NCPAINT" or whatever equivalent just because you are moving windows. No matter how fast your system is, any 'movement' is much more fluid (as position changes are almost free). Essentially, having windows completely isolated from one another - except when they are "composited" back - simplifies a lot. There's a lot of cruft and corner cases that you don't have to care. There are features that can enhance usability that are trivial to do with compositors but difficult without - for instance, showing a window "preview" when you are switching apps or when you mouse over in the taskbar. While you can do this without a compositor, you can get this very easily and for almost 'free'. And, as you point out, you can post-process and apply whatever effects you want. But this is a minor detail and was used initially as a selling point. Of course, for a tiling window manager none of this matters as they never overlap. But most users don't use tiling window managers.

toast0 6y ago
> If you don't care that much about latency, there's a clear benefit in never having windows getting "damaged" just because other stuff has temporarily occluded them. Isn't that why X11 provided an (optional) backing store?
badsectoracula 6y ago
> They are also a pretty good way to leverage GPUs. Compositors do not do much GPU leverage outside of drawing a bunch of textured quads for the final image, but those textures are assembled on the CPU (some toolkits have GPU backends but even that goes back and forth the CPU because not everything is done though the GPU). It would need a big rewrite of the GUI stack to actually take advantage of GPUs with whatever service/server handles it to have a full scene tree with all the contents of the desktop resident (and whenever possible, manipulated) in GPU memory. As things are nowadays, however, at best you get a mix of the two (and that itself isn't without its drawbacks too).

sjy 6y ago

How many windows do you tend to have open? I find it quite difficult to use a tiling window manager when you have more windows open than you can display on screen. I recently switched to PaperWM and I find the animated transitions between workspaces, and the ability to scroll through windows tiled across a rectangle that exceeds the dimensions of my physical screen, to be a big improvement compared to my previous setup with sway. I’d really like to get 60 Hz window resizing as well, as in iPadOS’s split screen, but even compositing tiling window managers like PaperWM and sway struggle with this at the moment.