Re: Before anyone asks for screenshots of the Flame...

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Re: Before anyone asks for screenshots of the Flame...
by S. on Monday 26/Mar/2007, @01:42

> I admit I know next to nothing about this sort of thing, but there seems to
> be some NIH going on.

Hi,

This is a valid concern, but in this case, I think, unjustified.

First of all, KWin does a HELL of a lot more than Beryl -- other posters in this thread have touched on it a little. It would theorically be possible to patch up Beryl until it could do all that KWin can, but that would probably require more KDE integration than the Beryl guys would allow.

Secondly, Lubos Lunak, KWin developper extraordinaire, did look into making KWin compatible with Beryl plugins. As it turns out, however, the implementation of Beryl's plugins might... possibly not be as modular as one might want, and they go poke into the depths of Beryl too much to make compatibility with KWin an option.

So at this point, it boils down to either using Beryl (and abandoning all that makes KWin nifty), which you can already do, mind; or prettifying KWin up to Beryl-ish standards.

However... I wonder to what extent it would be possible to split the functionality -- window /management/ and window /effects/ -- between Beryl and KWin. Lubos, in case you're reading this -- hi! -- would it be possible to have the effects part of Beryl stripped down to a DBus server, that would be able to process such requests as 'do THIS_OPERATION on THAT_LIST_OF_WINDOW_IDS'? That way, KWin could still manage WHAT is being done to windows, which it is awesome at, while Beryl would see about HOW to do it.

Is that a pipe dream?

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Re: Before anyone asks for screenshots of the Flame...
by Matt on Monday 26/Mar/2007, @07:49

I believe that is how Compiz and Beryl already work. Each has a window manager (compiz and beryl respectively), and each has a window decorator (e.g. gnome-window-decorator and kde-window-decorator for compiz; emerald, aquamarine, and some other gnome one for beryl).

Although, that is the opposite of what you would want because the window decorators they use are most likely very dependent on their respective window managers in the first place.

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Re: Before anyone asks for screenshots of the Flame...
by Sutoka on Monday 26/Mar/2007, @08:25

Thats not exactly what he was asking about. The window decorator ONLY decorates the windows (draws the border). It doesn't actually do any managing. And before compiz the development was happening in GLcompmgr (I believe that was the name), which was independent of the window manager (mostly what S. was asking for), but apparently the developers agreed that it wasn't practical (too slow) to have them separate programs that communicated via IPC.

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