[clug] Remember this?

[Michael Cohen]

Randall,
  I too thought the whole compiz thing was eye candy. I was using
window maker for about 5-6 years. I gave metacity a go in the days
when gnome used it by default, but metacity really doesnt compare to
window maker lacking in even basic functionality.

In the past year I started using compiz and I initially thought i was
a bit of eye candy.

But im surprised to find that some of these effects are very very
useful. The window rules plugin for example can position windows in
specific places (I use it to run emacs in a terminal with no
boundaries, title bars etc so it takes the full screen). The zoom
plugin is very useful in presentations were you can zoon on specific
text. Alt tab is more useful since you can see the contents of each
window you tab through in real time (dont need to read title texts).
Most important to me is that compiz is still designed to be driven
100% from the keyboard unlike other GUI frameworks. I rarely need to
use the mouse to switch desktops, raise windows etc. It is efficiently
designed.

Granted some of the effects are fairly pointless but they are very
fast to run due to dedicated hardware support (im surprised how well
it works on bottom of the line intel chipset laptops). So its not a
big performance hit. It does have a memory hit though - you better be
running at least 2gb ram (Amazing to think of emacs these days as one
of the smaller apps at 23mb rss its about 15th on my machine right
now, with firefox and xorg 160mb each and compiz 36mb - where are the
days of emacs being huge and bloated?).

Its certainly a good thing that metacity is no longer the default
gnome window manager.

Michael.

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Randall Crook <rcrook at vtown.com.au> wrote:
> Mike Carden wrote:
>>>
>>> Also makes you wonder how much more data from all the useful scientific
>>> projects out there, could have been process with the wasted CPU and GPU
>>> cycles it took to do those really useless effects.
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, you start giving people desktop effects like those, and they
>> might start wanting to use computers for something *other* than
>> processing scientific datasets. Ought to be a law against it.
>>
>> I'm just glad all those GPU designers had all those scientific data
>> crunchers in mind when they designed their fast and inexpensive
>> processors.
>>
>> And I hear now some people are wanting to use *portable* computers!
>> What's wrong with a proper mainframe?
>>
>> Now you kids, get offa my lawn.
>>
>>
>
> use them for what part of benefiting the human race?
>
> Face Book?
> Social Networking?
> Web 2.0?
> for increasing the literacy of the human race?
> for bringing the world together and destroying war and hatred?
> for making the world such a nicer and safer place to live in?
> enhancing the worlds culture?
> enhancing true knowledge?
>
> Yes I can see how wobbly windows and cubing the transition from one desktop
> to the other is making a massive difference to the human race.....
>
> Excuse me for thinking that the eye candy was nothing more than just eye
> candy.
>
> Randall.
>
>
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