Okay so here's my thought: Obviously drop 2D support. That is a hell of a relief to be able to do.
We don't really have anyone to do the work it's going to take to get Mutter/Muffin up to speed. The animations are just lame, I wouldn't want to ship it. However Compiz is a dead-end in the long term as well. We're going to have to move away. So what path from Luna to Luna +1 is going to 1. Be easiest for us to code and 2. Piss of our users the least. While we're thinking about that, we do have a bit of an ace in the hole. I know it would suck a lot, but we could consider delaying Luna until after 12.10 in order to inherit LLVM pipe and also to have the time to get Mutter/Muffin up to speed. Best Regards, Daniel Foré El may 15, 2012, a las 6:50 a.m., "Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <ser...@elementaryos.org> escribió: > Hello guys, > > I've got an inconvenient truth to report. It seems we cannot provide a decent > unaccelerated fallback for Luna. Here's why. > > We have more and more things based on Clutter. Ubuntu's current softpipe > fallback is miserable in terms of performance and downright buggy to the > state of unusability. On the other hand, Ubuntu 12.10 is going to have > llvmpipe and they're going to actually use it for Clutter, so no more > untested & unused softpipe. > > So we have to either delay integrating the greeter till 12.10, or we have to > drop support for systems without hardware acceleration from Luna. > > Right now maintaining an unaccelerated fallback means using a different > window manager and using a different X compositor. This means we have two > completely different codepaths that try and fail to mimic each other. That > ranges from look and feel inconsistencies in workspaces to focus behavior > inconsistency and, worst of all, hackish workarounds in Slingshot and to some > extent Wingpanel to support 2 different WMs. Finally, it limits the amount of > features we can implement to the greatest common denominator of features of > the two WMs, or rather, the features they happen to implement consistently. > > The only way to get rid of that situation is to use only one WM and/or only > one compositor. > > I've poked around with various WM and compositor combinations, and the only > fallback WMs+compositors we can use are Metacity and e17. Those are the only > software compositors I'm aware of that do not suffer from tearing - all > Xrender-based compositors do because Xrender is not vsyncable by design and > cairo-compmgr also does in my tests, though I have not interrogated cairo > devs about vsync. > > So even if we drop the greeter, for unaccelerated fallback we can either use > Metacity with its bugs in unfocused theming, inconsistent focus behavior, > slingshot hacks and miserable workspaces overview imitation, or we can use > e17 for which we don't even have a theme port and which uses custom toolkits > which are not consistent with elementary theme. Neither option is > satisfactory IMO. > > So let's drop systems not capable of 3D acceleration for Luna and inherit > fallback support via llvmpipe from upstream in 12.10. We can look into > releasing a 2D remix of Luna after the initial release. > > Given hardware acceleration, we have the following WM options for Luna: > Compiz 0.9 - miserable in terms of performance and has downright glitchy > rendering for popovers, including Slingshot. > Compiz 0.8 - won't have unfocused theming and aerosnap, but given the fact > that we still have GTK2 apps in the OS, e.g. update manager, I'd rather not > push unfocused theming just yet. Especially since it's not very useful in its > current form anyway - seeing windows without a single sensitive control just > freaks me out, especially if it's a dialog. > Mutter - has really cheesy animations, which we can't fix unless we write a > plugin to it. No aero snap without a plugin either. No workspaces overview. > elementary theme has some kind of antialiasing under it, but it doesn't feel > right. > Muffin - somewhat configurable variation of Mutter with support for > workspaces overview. Could use more investigation. > E17 - it has decent compositing, it even works great in pure software via > evas without any llvmpipes. Doesn't have expo or workpaces overview, but at > least provides smooth transitions between workspaces, of which Mutter isn't > capable OOTB. Has its own custom toolkit, which has very snappy animations > even in software rendering and can use opengl too, but has nothing to do with > OpenGL. (No "let's switch toolkit" discussions please!) > From the list above the only viable options are Compiz 0.8 and Muffin, given > that we're not going to hack together a mutter plugin for Luna, though I > believe we'll have to do that eventually. Muffin may provide a more modern > look and feel but we have less control over it than over Compiz. My attempts > to integrate Compiz 0.8 have hit mystery bugs, so I'm leaning towards > investigating Muffin now. > -- > Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff > OS integrator @ elementary > > -- > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~elementary-dev-community > Post to : elementary-dev-community@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~elementary-dev-community > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
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