compiz - May 2006 - General compiz questions

I've been using compiz on KDE for a while now and I like the eye
candy. Thanks to all who made this possible. I'm usually a no-nonsense
guy who doesn't care about eye candy (I'm not even using a background
picture because I'm worried about the memory it'll use (on a machine
with 2 GB of RAM) :) ) but compiz stormed (sic!) my defences.

Now for my questions:

1. compiz is a composite *and* a window manager.
>From that perspective I'd like to ask why compiz has to be yet another
WM. There are lots of good, mature WMs out there and there are some more
or less powerful composite managers (CM) as well.

I would feel more comfortable, if I could use both a WM and a CM of my
choice.

So basically my question is: What parts (plugins) of compiz are part of
the WM and which are "just" the CM? Which of the compiz features,
i. e. the cube and its rotation, could be handled separately in a CM
instead of a combined WM/CM?

Are there maybe plans to separate both? In the long run, my wish for a
less monolithic solution[1] will probably make me abandon compiz.


2. Furthermore, what's planned for the k-w-d? Its source has been dormant
for quite a while now and I can find nothing on the net about the reason
or future plans. Any news here?


3. For now I have to have lots of Gnome stuff installed to use
compiz[2]. Are there any plans to move away from this wedlock?


4. Is there a roadmap for compiz? In what direction will compiz be
going? What are the features yet to come or is it feature-complete?


5. There has been some discussion about configuration and how much of it
should be exposed to the users. My personal opinion is that everything
that makes even remotely sense should be user configurable. Yes, that
means more code to maintain. Yes, it's worth it. Just my two cents.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Yes, compiz is pluggable but the integration of both WM and CM
qualifies as being monolithic, IMHO.

[2]  I know there are some third-party tools for configuring compiz and
I've tried them and none really appealed to me.

-- 
Gr??e, Wulf

Hi,
        
        1. compiz is a composite *and* a window manager.
        
        >From that perspective I'd like to ask why compiz has to be yet
another
        WM. There are lots of good, mature WMs out there and there are some more
        or less powerful composite managers (CM) as well.
        
        I would feel more comfortable, if I could use both a WM and a CM of my
        choice.
        
        So basically my question is: What parts (plugins) of compiz are part of
        the WM and which are "just" the CM? Which of the compiz
features,
        i. e. the cube and its rotation, could be handled separately in a CM
        instead of a combined WM/CM?
        
        Are there maybe plans to separate both? In the long run, my wish for a
        less monolithic solution[1] will probably make me abandon compiz.
        
        
Possibly not answering your question at all, but there were some related 
discussions at the time when compiz was first released. These were primarily
set in the context of metacity vs. compiz, but could be worthwhile for you to
have a peak at as they do tell why compiz was made in the first place. The short
version I think was that the wm and cm could not be separated in practice. Also
the
discussions reflected that extending existing wm's with cm's
capabilities was
not optimal. Of course opinions differ and a number of other wms do have/are
being
extended with cm-capabilitiesl.   

Anyway, it's a semi-long story. Don't have any links but try google and
the
xorg-list with keywords such
davidr, kristian hoegsberg, metacity, compiz, aiglx, xgl, libcm etc.

If I completely missed the nail, just ignore this mail.

Regards Bjorn