I have a dream: a dream of an always composited desktop. There are use cases for using compositing and there are usecases for not using compositing. For the user it is very difficult to know what he currently needs and can do a very bad job at deciding himself. A good example for that is turning compositing off to save some more minutes of battery. I personally doubt that turning compositing off will save battery, but will cause a further drain. How is that possible, you might ask? When compositing is turned off, Plasma starts to change the backgrounds of all SVGs causing in the worst case a re-rendering of all of them. This is costly and will most likely drain more battery than using compositing.

Another example are fullscreen applications. Currently KWin supports unredirecting of fullscreen windows. This means the screen is no longer composited, but the resources, that is the OpenGL context and the effect system is still running. For applications like a web browser or an office suite it is completely useless, while for OpenGL applications like games just unredirction might not be enough. If you have one of those awesome drivers not supporting two OpenGL contexts at the same time, you might see either artefacts or a crashing KWin. For games there is only one proper solution: turn off compositing. The same is true for watching Full-HD videos: often graphics cards are not powerfull enough to do both compositing and GPU accelerated decoding.

Now KWin supports the solution for this: suspending of compositing. Just press Alt+Shift+F12 (or for the more technical users: use a script to change the state through DBus) to suspend compositing. The OpenGL context is removed, the effect system turned down and you have the plain old X desktop. Of course we cannot demand from our users that they know about it and can handle it. Therefore we need a bettter system.

This is what Thomas has been working on lately. First of all he removed the difference between disabled effects and suspended effects. If you disable effects it will just suspend them and the effect system will be in suspended state after a restart. This should make everything more clear to the user. The second part Thomas has been working on is allowing applications to block compositing. This is pretty awesome. Let’s say we want to watch a video in VLC. As soon as you would switch to fullscreen, VLC would set an X property to tell KWin “now please don’t composite”. KWin will suspend compositing and keep the state untill no window blocks compositing. So the GPU is completely free for VLC. Now what is the difference to the unredirection, you may ask? Imagine a user notification would pop up. With unredirection compositing would be started again, causing an ugly flickering and taking away important resources from VLC. With the new solution a notification would not cause a restart of compositing. Everything is still with VLC. On the other hand a web browser would not block compositing as that is not what the user wants. Here we need the complete advantage of a composited system as it’s not a single task such as watching a video or playing a 3D shooter. I really hope that video players, games and Wine pick up our new property and we will also recommend it as an additon to the NETWM specification.

Though the last piece might turn out difficult. While Plasma completely supports being without compositing, the world looks different with the two new Desktop Shells to be released this month. In my humble opinion both are fundamentally flawed concerning the fallback to no compositing. My biggest concern towards GNOME Shell has been from the beginning that it requires OpenGL (I talked about that part with Owen Taylor at GCDS). There is no fallback except GNOME Panel. Which at least looks for me unacceptable to switch the desktop shell just because you want to watch a Full-HD video. Now Canonical did the same fundamental mistake with Unity. It also requires an OpenGL compositor (in that case Compiz). While Compiz nowadays supports non-OpenGL I do not know how good this is and whether Unity supports it. Currently the fallback is also GNOME Panel, in future maybe Unity2D? Plasma on the other hand just needs to switch the rendering of SVGs (which is part of the style) and will lose some functionality, such as thumbnails in taskbar tooltips, Present Windows effect or Desktop Grid. The basic working with the system remains the same. Another big thumbs up for getting the right abstraction layers.

Now with Thomas work I am confident that we will be able to remove the UI to turn on/off compositing in maybe 4.8. It will just not be needed any more. The applications will take care of providing the right user experience to the users. When compositing is needed, it is on, when compositing is bad at the moment, it is off. The users won’t have to care about the state anymore and an ugly hack like unredirection of fullscreen windows can be removed. I am looking forward to such improved ways of desktop compositing 🙂

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