4 ms·

What are, if any, use cases where one would need a compositor? Other than transparent window decorations, wobbling windows and overlay dock? These are kinda coo

What are, if any, use cases where one would need a compositor? Other than transparent window decorations, wobbling windows and overlay dock? These are kinda cool but not worth any additional complexity or hardware resources IMHO. I have never seen any screen tearing in my life by the way. Despite I have always been generally using decade-old PCs with lowest-end (mostly built-in) GPUs and Raspberry Pi is the only way I watch TV. The only annoyance I have with Raspberry Pi is YouTube the website (not the actual video, it plays Ok) being rather slow.

vidarh 5y ago
Screen tearing is largely a software issue anyway - the moment you have hardware capable of double buffering there's no excuse for it unless you don't have sufficient memory.
Seirdy 5y ago
If you try scrolling in a web browser, especially fast scrolling in small increments, you're likely to experience screen tearing or other problems in the "smoothness". Compositors are included by default on most X desktop environments primarily for this reason. The delays and latencies for me have been noticeably lower when using Sway on ARM, which is quite surprising because I was expecting the opposite. I hadn't even tuned it for low input latency yet.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > If you try scrolling in a web browser, especially fast scrolling in small increments, you're likely to experience screen tearing or other problems in the "smoothness". Compositors are included by default on most X desktop environments primarily for this reason. I see. Curious that I have never noticed anything like this though. I have always been disabling compositors as I realized I don't really care if my panel is transparent. Perhaps the problem just doesn't affect Intel graphics (Raspberry Pi browsing is slow anyway so fast scrolling just doesn't exist there). UPDATE: I've just realized I've actually seen screen tearing many times - always within specific Windows apps ran with Wine, e.g. Total Commander.
kaba0 5y ago
Have you tried playing a video? Or moving a window around fast? Without a compositor there will be tearing on X. With a compositor, X is just a useless middleman.
- vidarh 5y ago
  There's nothing stopping an X server implementation from doing compositing natively.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Other than writing an X server implementation is akin to writing a web browser from scratch?
    - vidarh 5y ago
      There's absolutely no reason to write an X server from scratch to add native compositing support. You're also massively overstating the complexity of an X server. Writing X servers that are advanced enough to be usable is something a lot of individuals have done. It's nothing like matching a modern browser. Incidentally, if I were to try to do this today, I'd gut a proxy like Xephyr and make it rootless to support older clients, and make the main server itself only support the subset of the X protocol modern clients speak.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        > You're also massively overstating the complexity of an X server. Writing X servers that are advanced enough to be usable is something a lot of individuals have done. If so, why are we observing apparent shortage of developers to maintain the actual Xorg? I can't believe there are no people interested in maintaining it in the whole world. I thought it's so complex it just requires much more expertise and dedication than anybody is ready to invest.
        vidarh 5y ago

vidarh 5y ago

Screen tearing is largely a software issue anyway - the moment you have hardware capable of double buffering there's no excuse for it unless you don't have sufficient memory.

Seirdy 5y ago

If you try scrolling in a web browser, especially fast scrolling in small increments, you're likely to experience screen tearing or other problems in the "smoothness". Compositors are included by default on most X desktop environments primarily for this reason. The delays and latencies for me have been noticeably lower when using Sway on ARM, which is quite surprising because I was expecting the opposite. I hadn't even tuned it for low input latency yet.

qwerty456127 5y ago
> If you try scrolling in a web browser, especially fast scrolling in small increments, you're likely to experience screen tearing or other problems in the "smoothness". Compositors are included by default on most X desktop environments primarily for this reason. I see. Curious that I have never noticed anything like this though. I have always been disabling compositors as I realized I don't really care if my panel is transparent. Perhaps the problem just doesn't affect Intel graphics (Raspberry Pi browsing is slow anyway so fast scrolling just doesn't exist there). UPDATE: I've just realized I've actually seen screen tearing many times - always within specific Windows apps ran with Wine, e.g. Total Commander.

kaba0 5y ago

Have you tried playing a video? Or moving a window around fast? Without a compositor there will be tearing on X. With a compositor, X is just a useless middleman.

vidarh 5y ago
There's nothing stopping an X server implementation from doing compositing natively.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Other than writing an X server implementation is akin to writing a web browser from scratch?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    There's absolutely no reason to write an X server from scratch to add native compositing support. You're also massively overstating the complexity of an X server. Writing X servers that are advanced enough to be usable is something a lot of individuals have done. It's nothing like matching a modern browser. Incidentally, if I were to try to do this today, I'd gut a proxy like Xephyr and make it rootless to support older clients, and make the main server itself only support the subset of the X protocol modern clients speak.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      > You're also massively overstating the complexity of an X server. Writing X servers that are advanced enough to be usable is something a lot of individuals have done. If so, why are we observing apparent shortage of developers to maintain the actual Xorg? I can't believe there are no people interested in maintaining it in the whole world. I thought it's so complex it just requires much more expertise and dedication than anybody is ready to invest.
      - vidarh 5y ago