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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Aaron J. Seigo on Wednesday 30/May/2007, @10:17
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the answer is quite straight forward:
- kwin works everywhere (degrades gracefully on less capable hardware), beryl doesn't
- kwin is a production ready *window* *manager*, which means it has all sorts of window management oddities fixed; take a look at the handling of transients in the code to see just how crazy this is. how lubos maintains his sanity i'll never know ;)
- kwin has various kde integration features and we can continue to maintain that easily
- it is easier to add what beryl has on top of the above than it is to add the above to beryl
- we all share the benefits of what is going into the shared infrastructure (x.org) so it's not all lost efforts
and if you care .. s,beryl,compiz,g |
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Michael on Wednesday 30/May/2007, @13:10
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I'm using Beryl for quite some time now and it works so flawlessly with KDE that it just seems like a duplication of efforts to implement all those effects again in KWin. Everything in Beryl just seems to work. What are those "fringe-cases"? Why is it I never experienced those? Just out of interest: Could you or some other expert give an example of one end-user-understandable thing that wouldnt work right now in Beryl and couldnt be easily implemented? What are "transients"? Please don't get my wrong. I'm not trolling here but I'm really interested in technical behind-the-scenes info on what makes KWin so special so maybe I can appreciate it more in the future ;-)
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Aaron Seigo on Wednesday 30/May/2007, @13:45
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> Why is it I never experienced those?
they are called "fringe" for a reason. a production window manager that is relied on as heavily as kwin is needs to be solid in all cases. these include all sorts of things such as the handling of certain types of java windows, apps that try to self-manage their windows, etc.
> What are "transients"?
windows that only exist in conjunction with another window; e.g. a warning dialog associated with a main window.
you also seemed to have skipped over the "works on all hardware" bit.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by dude on Sunday 03/Jun/2007, @09:26
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Your arguments are convincing me, Aaron.
I'm glad to see this feature additions now happening in KDE's own window manager. That's for sure the most logical thing to happen.
But imagine for a moment that something "bad" had happened to Lubos in the last 6 months (the infamous "bus case"... or that he got fed up with KDE4 coding... or $whatever): who would then have taken over kwin maintainership (*and* kept his sanity)??
And would Lubos have felt so much incentive and/or inspiration to defend his kwin territory's supremacy if there would not have been the challengers of compiz+beryl?? :-)
So, to me, it looks like it was not bad at all to have seen that crazyness of the "competing" window managers' speedy feature additions happening in the last year or so (and see them being able to work with KDE3 just fine), and experience a serious "migration" of the more playful and adventurous-minded section in our user base over to the camp the competition (using a non-KDE window manager to run their KDE desktops).
Beryl+compiz certainly didn't hinder kwin's development, and provided a lot of examples (to follow as well as to avoid). So hats off to them!
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by kwilliam on Wednesday 30/May/2007, @14:21
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Some examples of how KWin is better integrated with KDE than Beryl are:
* the KDE Desktop Pager doesn't work with Beryl (at least it didn't originally - there's a patch available now I think). The "single desktop 4x as wide" paradigm threw it off.
* KWin has a DCOP interface, allowing other KDE programs to communicate with KWin in a standard way. KWin 4 will probably use DBus (DCOP's successor) now that the rest of the Linux world has caught on, but DCOP was around for years before DBus.
* I personally experienced a lot of problems with Beryl+KDE. The window decorations would disappear for no reason, windows wouldn't get focus events properly (I would have to hit F12 *twice* to bring the Yakuake console to the front), etc. So maybe Beryl worked perfectly for you, but you were one of the lucky ones. I wasn't, so I'll enjoy Kwin.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Chaoswind on Thursday 31/May/2007, @00:06
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> * KWin has a DCOP interface, allowing other KDE programs to communicate with
> KWin in a standard way
Hm, I checked KWin's interface with kdcop, but only found some neat things for configure the desktop and opacity. So, is this really all, or is there somewhere a switch to expose a mighty interface for poweruser and their scripts?
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by gnumdk on Thursday 31/May/2007, @00:10
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To use kwin with dcop, just call dcop on an window, not on kwin...
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Chaoswind on Thursday 31/May/2007, @00:18
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What?
I can't call dcop a window. I can only use the interfaces, exposed by the applications, and there is nowhere an advanced window-managing interface to found.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by tendays on Thursday 31/May/2007, @11:25
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As far as I know you can't address an arbitrary window. However all kde applications have a dcop module (or whatever that's called) that corresponds to their window.
For instance if I type dcop konsole-4414 konsole-mainwindow\#1 (4414 being my konsole pid atm)
I get a list of 135 functions, like setSize, focus, maximize, raise, etc etc.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Chaoswind on Thursday 31/May/2007, @12:15
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Exactly. But not every application is a kde-application. And in fact, there are also kde-application which does'nt offers this interface, ktorrent oder dialogs for example.
So, a complete scriptable interface, for every window, would be nice. I know, there exist wmctrl, but this prog has limits.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by litb on Wednesday 06/Jun/2007, @01:16
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your problem with yakuake not showing up immediately is probably because you first start kwin, and then replace it with beryl at the time yakuake is already up. i had the same problem and i solved it by writing a file ~/.kde/env/use_beryl in which i wrote the single line KDEWM=/usr/bin/beryl . (and remove beryl from autostart after that manually!) startkde will source that file and will read that variable to start beryl instead of kwin. that solved all the windows-are-not-working-for-me problems i had before.
but, nevertheless, i also think it is right to extend kwin instead of using beryl, which still has alot of problems. :)
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Diederik van der Boor on Thursday 31/May/2007, @01:13
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> I'm using Beryl for quite some time now and it works so flawlessly
> with KDE that it just seems like a duplication of efforts to implement
> all those effects again in KWin. Everything in Beryl just seems to work.
> What are those "fringe-cases"?
What's broken in 0.1:
- focus stealing prevention
- OpenOffice dialogs
- starting windows as minimized (e.g. for chat clients)
- re-focusing existing windows from the application itself.
- good positioning like kwin does.
- handling modal dialogs on top properly with focus events.
- displaying modal dialogs in the alt+tab bar.
shall we continue..? :-)
I actually get bug reports for things in my application which are caused by Beryl.. :-|
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Davide Ferrari on Thursday 31/May/2007, @01:18
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And don't forget all java apps! Beryl simply show a grey window with no widget/text in it.
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by naibed on Tuesday 07/Aug/2007, @12:05
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Try export AWT_TOOLKIT=”MToolkit” to solve this "grey-windows" problem under Beryl/Compiz :)
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Marsolin on Thursday 31/May/2007, @12:48
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I don't know about what makes KWin better, but Beryl still has a lot of problems. I have been unable to getting is working on my system no matter what driver I use. Having the interface build in as part of KDE without extra setup would be nice.
Chad
http://linuxappfinder.com
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Re: Aquamarine + beryl
by Jucato on Wednesday 30/May/2007, @17:43
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And may I add that Aquamarine is just a Beryl window decoration that allows you to use KWin window decorations and nothing more. It doesn't magically make Beryl behave more like KWin. It just makes Beryl *look* like KWin.
I guess the greatest loss for me when using Beryl is the lack of integration with KDE. That's a very big loss considering that one of the reasons I use KDE is the integration. Hopefully, KWin 4 will give me that bling I want without sacrificing the features I need.
Kudos to Seli and company! Great job!
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