XFCE 4.4 has a built-in compositor

[amgeex]

I bumped into an osnews article, about the new xfce version being released, and that there was a tour for new users. I went ahead and checked out the tour, and I found out that this new version packs in its own compositor!

Quoting from the site: "This release features an enhanced compositor, supporting transparent ARGB windows, shadows, window frame transparency and much more."

What do you guys think of this? I personally think its cool. 8)

[RYX]

I used XFCE's testing version for a while (about a year ago) - the built-in compositor was really slow and cpu-hungry compared to compiz and only supported shadows back then. But XFCE is such a nice, beautiful and lightweight desktop that I'll give it another try ... (Gnome is too overloaded)

:)

[amgeex]

Yup, I'll give it a go when feisty comes out! Xubuntu its just ugly at the moment imo. :D

[RYX]

OK ... I went through the install-process (using the graphical installer) and got XFCE4.4.0 running. For some reason it uses my gnome-session startup programs and compiz gets loaded by default (which is great, but I wanted to try xfwm4 :)) ...

XFCE4.4 is great - especially the first stable version of thunar ... amazing how fast my desktop can be and how fast apps are loaded compared to gnome ... :)

I'll report back when I got the compositor running ...

:)

[RYX]

I installed xfce4.4.0 on my laptop ... The compositor is really slow compared to compiz, but the screenlets are working pretty well with it.

But from what I can say, it is no real competition for compiz ... The best idea would be to drop xfwm and use xfce4 with compiz as WM (worked best for me) ...

NOTE: all paco (http://paco.sourceforge.net/) users can monitor the install-process of the graphical installer through paco with:sudo paco -lp xfce4.4.0 "sh xfce-4.4.0-installer.sh"
Paco rules!!!

:)

[baze]

the xfwm4 compositor ist just a better implementation of the features that xcompmgr provided. I does not aim at such a high level as beryl and compiz do. That's just not the intention here.
It does support transparency and shadows, but that's it for the fancy features.
Somehow some of you thought it was sth like compiz concerning features and speed ;)

[RYX]

Yes, I think I forgot to mention that :) ...

It doesn't look like xfwm4 is aimed at competing with compiz ... and there is no need to compete anyway (we're all one family, aren't we?). For an out-of-the-box compositing desktop (the first of all) it is really enough ... it's just if it would use accelerated graphics it would be even faster than it is already.

(Didn't want to say anything bad about xfce ... :D)

:)

[baze]

btw, for the future the xfwm dev _might_ look into using glucose for some more improved stuff, but that's totally up to how glucose actually turns out and if he is still wanting to work on that stuff then.

[RAOF]

I thought that developers wouldn't "use" glucose, in the same way that they don't "use" RenderAccel or XAA or EXA now? It's just another X acceleration architecture, which only Xorg developers need to care about, right?

[flargen]

I thought that developers wouldn't "use" glucose, in the same way that they don't "use" RenderAccel or XAA or EXA now? It's just another X acceleration architecture, which only Xorg developers need to care about, right?

That's what I thought...once the drivers support it, the apps are good to go. Has there been any news on glucose? I haven't seen anything for months.

[baze]

ok, you're right, i totally misunderstood the stuff olivier (the xfwm dev) said about glucose and its benefits, i just searched in the logs for it and you guys are absolutely right :)
if the card can handle opengl, it will use benefit from glucose automatically.

but i too would like to know if anyone has heard of any news how glucose is coming forward.

[FunkyM]

Glucose's last update was months ago.
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/xserver.git;a=shortlog;h=glucose

[brian121]

Hey FunkyM, How can you make a health related glucose post in a linux related forum? You're definitely not the only XFCE user. I'm VERY strongly in favour of keeping XFCE in the book. XFCE in BLFS is a strange thing though. XFCE consists of too many separate packages that depend on each other. Although simplifying things by putting together, for example, most libraries in a single source package has bees discussed in both the xfce mailing list and irc channel, nothing seems to have come of it yet.