Games will have to specify this too? Some of us are stuck with buggy drivers (ever heard of GMA500?) However, you can set compositing for specific applications. With those settings in place, compositing will be disabled whenever that application is running. Kde 5.6 is giving me some headache. a multihead setup. Not so legacy system, but with compositing it is unacceptably slow. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. 4. I may be missing something, but why are having compositing on and playing an HD video incompatible? Of course we cannot demand from our users that they know about it and can handle it. What happens when an application requests to turn off compositing and then crashes? KDE is an open community of friendly people who want to create a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. Nothing horrible, but some of the users would rather prefer no effects at all rather than having them choppy. Slide-back and cube animation (not cube) are the only ones where it may make sense to consider turning it off. Note: The Meta key listed in some shortcuts is a generic name. Alternatively, for a more minimal Plasma installation, install the plasma-desktop package.To enable support for Wayland in Plasma, also install the plasma-wayland-session package. I can also predict that any discussion on the subject will be useless… Thats going to be fun . Is there a stable API for such things or the programmer has to make up his own mind how to solve things? Working GPU-decoding of videos is another corner case, sadly. You now have the possibility to move clips and compositions with your keyboard. Basically yes, but in practise no. You will find that a wealth of preconfigured shortcuts offer … 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. backbuffering was designed for low memory chips) But it is not our fault if users want to run the latest software on old hardware. KDE is an international and diverse technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Without compositing it is snappy. So we give for the unexperienced users the overall best choice but keep the ability to control every aspect for the advanced users. If you want to investigate what is causing wakeups and if we can reduce them this is highly welcome. When composite is on, I have at least 60 wakeups/second coming from the driver (measured with powertop) on idle and an increased estimate of power consumption. If you’ll keep the API, and also the shortcut (ctrl-alt-f12), then why remove the configuration option? In order to be able to type Umlauts I have to press the compose key+shift+'+vowel. so a way to let a normal user do this from a gui for a problematic app should be a priority too. Some day we have to start thinking about not supporting legacy hardware. I thought the decision on the mailing list was to keep the option but also allow people to turn off desktop effects while keeping compositing. What, however, does affect performance on my system is GPU-accelerated HD video decoding along with compositing. You can now use tab to swit… To the naysayers: kwin will have the API to disable compositing, so you’ll always be able to do it. I did not see any consensus on the mailing list that we need to turn off the effects. I use Lenovo T400, Intel Integrated Graphics 4500MHD. Flash finally got support for hardware-accelerated video on Linux and HD HTML5 video is becoming more and more popular. I agree with all the proposed changes (thank you for implementing this and for continuously improving kwin!!!) While Plasma completely supports being without compositing, the world looks different with the two new Desktop Shells to be released this month. not fullscreen but just too expensive (for your particular system) is rather a job for the rules. In my opinion, the best would be the possibility to choose between “Disable desktop effects”, “Always enable desktop effects” and “Smart usage of desktop effects” (the latter being your current proposal). so you will have to patch every game out there to support the new standard? Those trying to learn how to move more efficiently through the Plasma desktop, check Global shortcuts, as this area houses all the different keyboard combos related to that. In advance I think you can’t. But disabling blur causes Plasma to render a different set of SVGs, so whether there would be an advantage is not possible to be said without very good performance testing (which in case of blur depends much on hardware and drivers). Shift Switch I think that the change in functionality (switching from shift to classic) is more a problem to the usability than some five seconds on battery. That was definitely rude, I also apologize if I seem to don’t valorize yout work, you do a lot of awesome stuff, but as everyone, you can make mistakes, and thats why we are here, to help discuss these stuff, and decide who is the one making the mistake. So the GPU is completely free for VLC. I too have been seeing compositing shutting off quite a bit, but I figured it had to do with me … Additionally i think that this is the wrong aproach to do something that forces every game to change their code. KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.20.0. likely takes more than the inability to configure your GPU. both at the same time requires two instances of kwin, ie. Since last year when i bought new pc i never used kde without compositing, altough the option to disable it manually should always be here, sometimes when you update drivers compositing can crash your xserver because of buggy driver update and without having option to disable it, that would be impossible to investigate the problem. If the compositor should be disabled while a fullscreen application such as games or video is used it is better to disable compositing either through the shortcut Alt + Shift + F12 or since 4.7 (Released July 2011) through a window specific rule for the window. I look forward to see it in action . however there’s either compositing or there is not. a) you can not only OVER- but also UNDERclock your GPU Just use the Alt-Tab keysequence and keep the Alt key pressed. With OpenGL there is – it is a technical limitation on X. 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. And before you ask, no, the "disable compositor for fullscreen windows" is disabled, and this happen with mpv on windowed mode! 92 119 Wed Jun 21, 2017 11:16 am Mamarok: KDE Brainstorm User-submitted ideas for KDE desktop and software. So yes there is a high level API and that’s why I want to get it to NETWM to have it cross-desktop. To do it, select a clip in timeline and use the "Grab Current Item" (Shift+G) function from the Timeline menu. that might be true in modern systems, but in my netbook, basically every game looks slow with compositing, even kollision, though it’s just a bit. Linux kernel 2.6.37, actual x.org and intel driver. Concerning application shortcuts: I don’t think that is a useable approach, rules framework is sufficient. And how you plan to solve that? The second part Thomas has been working on is allowing applications to block compositing. That’s good, but please don’t remove the option to disable compositing. Yes thanks Martin, for leaving that post up there so the rest of us can see the Martin, big respect for you staying so calm – I really feel sorry for what some people state here… And believe me, many many people (including me) really apreciate what you and others are doing! This doesn’t help for things like games or Full-HD videos as there the impact is the compositing and not the effects. Of course KWin will only allow compositing on systems which support it. Click Global Keyboard Shortcuts on the left pane 4. I personally doubt that turning compositing off will save battery, but will cause a further drain. Instead of showing you icons or very small previews of your applications, it arranges them in a grid so you can quickly choose the right one. This is costly and will most likely drain more battery than using compositing. The block is implemented through an X property. we are also working on providing a better compositing experience with bad drivers. any interested developer would certainly be more then welcome. I think that category is designed by packagers and game developers, so disabling compositing here might be enough. all quite stress the GPU and -depending on the driver- take more or less power. Collaboration between Qt and KDE. KDE's software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows. I don’t say there is increased power consumption with compositing off, I say there is power consumption when turning compositing off. However, you can set compositing for specific applications. So this is really a corner case for which manual switching is enough and I don’t want compositing disabled for any other case automatically whenever some random application decides it’s OK. KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed … When compositing is needed, it is on, when compositing is bad at the moment, it is off. In my humble opinion both are fundamentally flawed concerning the fallback to no compositing. does okular have a nice ascii text read mode?) Click with your right mouse button on a window decoration or use System Settings to access the new and easier configuration of KWin. If KDE is run remotely via an XDMCP session it performance is bad, really really bad. Since last year when i bought new pc i never used kde without compositing, altough the option to disable it manually should always be here, sometimes when you update drivers compositing can crash your xserver because of buggy driver update and without having option to disable it, that would be impossible to investigate the problem. Cookies help us deliver our Services. Release service 19.12.2 Full Log Page - KDE.org I am looking forward to such improved ways of desktop compositing . That depends on how Firefox implements it, but in general I would say that Firefox should never set the property. KDE Community forum announcements. The blocking property allows a window to block compositing e.g. You can for example use the Present Windows as the effect for window switching. Back in the days I chose to use KDE 3.x instead of Gnome because whenever I wanted to tweak my desktop there was an option in the GUI to do it instead of having to change an obscure option in an obscure configuration file located in an obscure location (or in the obscure gconf-editor; someone will create a kconf-editor if options keep disappearing from the GUI ;-). In the future people will have hardware which will run smoothly with compositing turned always on (even when watching videos or playing games fullscreen), so “Always enable desktop effects” will be the ideal choice for them. Compositing is re-enabled when the last matching window terminates. Even if I were an idiot, I do not consider idiocy as a reason to kill oneself. There still is the window rules system which lets you overwrite the application’s wish. By changing KDE's System Settings. Therefore we need a bettter system. This is what Thomas has been working on lately. So this is really a corner case for which manual switching is enough. I’m not sure i understand. Just a short note on compositing and battery usage: I have a shitty NVIDIA GPU in my laptop that stays at it’s highest power use when compositing is on but can go to 2D mode when compositing is off. Even stupid people have a right to live. If you just set a normal window to fullscreen nothing will change. This way everyone is happy, even if drivers are the best in the world and the software workd good everywhere, there will be people that will prefer a few less fps for being able to press alt tab to the desktop from a game and have a compositing desktop to chat with game companions for example. In the System Settings window, click Shortcuts and Gestures. Maybe an option could also be added to application shortcuts so that you can select wther compsiting should be turned off for that application? Rules by application seem nice, but they are very undiscoverable, maybe put a default rule for all menu items which are included in “games category” in kickoff? i dont want to wait 2 or 3 years for it to happen when i need it to do it today. So for me, and some other dual monitor setups it effectly means no compositing if my fullscreen app says: no compositing Even in Windows you can disable compositing. 4771 19254 Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:28 am Lachu Tutorials & Tips User-submitted information on installing, configuring, and using KDE. Go to the "Appearance & Fixes" tab The only effect where it might make sense is for example blur when running out of battery. Type "gg:kde4 visual guide" to search Google for "kde4 visual guide". Of course it did. Another example are fullscreen applications. 1-mergin disabling and suspending into suspendig good if you face high frequent updates) I'm not sure if you can set a rule to disable compositing whenever any window is maximized. Bookmarks can be accessed via shortcuts. As i am running the fullscreen most of the time it reduces to: no compositing at all. And turning off the cube effect if cube is not used is rather useless. Re: KDE global shortcuts have stopped working I noticed a strange thing today. In theory I like the setting that turns off window compositing for performance when games are running, but it doesn't discriminate between a windowed game (where compositing still might be nice to have) and a fullscreen game where composting is completely useless. Also there are a LOT of games that are closed (everything from id software, world of goo(in the past), and LOTS of games) and you can’t patch those, yes you can tell them to update the games but in the case of semi-old games(again doom3) most companies don’t even remember having sold those games, they are past stuff. First of all he removed the difference between disabled effects and suspended effects. Thanks. Is that always the case? So what’s the problem? In general it’s a damp stupid idea to use compositing on a remote desktop. I think years, so manually disabling should definitely don’t die, maybe it’s use could be minimized with that wine patch and making compositing off default for (fullscreen) games in kickoff. KMail > select and OK > repeat for other programs you wish to run automatically every start. On my old pc that was the case – radeon 9600 pro didnt made all of the animations smooth, so at some points i needed to disable it just to make desktop snappier. I play complex 3D games on my desktop with (metacity’s) xrender compositing, and my current experience with gnome shell is that it doesn’t slow down my 3D apps at all. As those are pure animations. It also requires an OpenGL compositor (in that case Compiz). Type "wp:kde" to open Wikipedia's page about KDE. So no, these effects do not take resources or hurt the battery life when they are not being used, the problem is that many of the effects will be used while doing ordinary tasks on the computer. The plugins do and Quake Live is a full-blown 3D fullscreen game just as QuickTime is a full-blown video player – both are just embedded in a web browser for interaction with a web site. While using Gnome (2.32), the performance is fine and KDE applications like kontact, can be used normally. Well, Firefox itself doesn’t. to 1: I plan to drop the functionality chechs. On the other side, speaking of desktop in which you never need to disable compositing, im already having it. 1-Don’t disable the shorcut (alt shift f12) if one window turns off compositing it will of course affect all screens. I haven't changed anything lately in my system, I just update packages everyday on my Fedora 33 KDE install. “Please turn compositing down (implementation is vague here, but I guess you could swap to XRender, or turn off heavy postprocessing such as blur and the like). I hoped the discussion in the mailing list gave a good result, but it doesnt seems so. Just press Alt+Shift+F12 (or for the more technical users: use a script to change the state through DBus) to suspend compositing. Sorry if i dont get it, but Beat Wolf asked about games and you answered about wine … there is something i dont get. KDE Applications 19.04.1 Full Log Page - KDE.org If you disable effects it will just suspend them and the effect system will be in suspended state after a restart. If so, how can I help? Dude, you are a fucking idiot. Now things are getting more and more windows like, configuration options disappear, and most stuff becomes automatic, with no workaround when automatic fails. Mozilla Firefox Disable smooth scrolling Just wanted to say my appreciation for your work dude.. So sometimes they crash but since Firefox itself continues to run, compositing is off until FF is closed and restarted. I remember Windows Vista/7 is doing the same turning off aero when playing a movie in fullscreen or playing a game (at least that’s what i remember, haven’t been using windows for a loooong time). Currently KWin supports unredirecting of fullscreen windows. There are a lot of usecases where people won’t want apps to disable compositing, please think about it. The OpenGL context is removed, the effect system turned down and you have the plain old X desktop. My GPU is also a few years old already. This blog post is in fact a direct consequence of the discussion of the mailing list: we need to have a proper infrastructure in place to go the way. It really depends on what the effect is doing and you need to know the implementation of the effect (which I know). If GPU decoding and compositing clash, act according to a pre-set rule of either disabling compositing or or switch from GPU decoding to CPU decoding. Looking at the openSUSE games repository, it looks like it has over 200 Linux-based OSS games. (PowerVR should currently be the king of the hill, but they do afaik only power ARM devices) , Oh, and Martin is perfectly right about plasma. KWin Now Supports Suspended Compositing « Linux « Technology « Theory Report, Welcoming a new OpenGL Compositor « Martin’s Blog. When you say that there may be a increase in power consumption with composite turned off, what support do you have for that? sort people you have to deal with. Press J to jump to the feed. except the removal of the “Enable desktop effects” check box in the GUI. KDE is an open community of friendly people who want to create a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. To the KDE project core staff: get a better developer for KWin, please. Though the last piece might turn out difficult. Windows has an API call for it, so all it needs is to implement that in wine and all games using the API call on windows will be ready. I've just installed Ubuntu 19.10 with KDE Plasma and the Sweet theme. So I would expect that web browsers would routinely need to set the property since it would routinely need to display HD video. Imagine a user notification would pop up. Lastest free radeon driver. 2. I know it doesn’t directly apply to full-screen video, but I thought the consensus on the mailing list was to implement this option, and it is related to the general topic. What about the option discussed recently to turn off desktop effects while leaving compositing on? Timeline Edit Mode - Normal Mode. The same is true for if you use, for instance, shift switcher for your default application switcher, wobbly windows when dragging windows, darkening non-focused windows, and the slide back effect when changing window focus. Using kwin --replace results in a second instance being started. “Please unredirect me” After the upgrade i found that playing some video with mpv disable the kwin compositor. Screen freezes, kwin_x11 takes up 100% of one cpu core and becomes "unkillable" (except with -9). As soon as you would switch to fullscreen, VLC would set an X property to tell KWin “now please don’t composite”. A good example for that is turning compositing off to save some more minutes of battery. Plasma 5.17.0 Complete Changelog : KDE.org Bluedevil Pluralize the i18n() message. queries. 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. KDE Applications 18.04.0 are now released. This mode can be entered at all time by the Shortcut Alt+Shift+F12 and in the General Desktop Effects settings through option “Enable desktop effects at startup”. Martin Graesslin has been proving his uselessness and stupidity for too much time. That is, permanently enable or disable compositing, if one so wishes, despite the performance hit. Under “Component”, select “Plasma”. Once you got that under control, you can provide patches to improve kwin, demonstrate your advanced skills and one day take over maintainership – what btw. KWin also supports no compositing at all. That’s a difference of >5W. I meant in the grand scope of things I do on my PC, it’s a corner case. Block compositing. These shortcuts will allow you to use your KDE desktop without touching the mouse. Disable Timeline Preview 20. Concerning a more fine grained approach is probably not a good idea as I doubt that most devs know the exact difference between unredirected and (in case of KWin) suspended compositing. Under Windows compositing is re-enabled then but there are a few cases which make that automatic procedure that looks great on paper a mess in reality. Now KWin supports the solution for this: suspending of compositing. Your reply was spot on for that particular case Now what is the difference to the unredirection, you may ask? Removing the option to turn on/off composition isnt good idea at all. so this means i will need to keep turning it off manually for a specific game / app that doesnt play well with effects…. There doesn't seem to be a dedicated shortcut for this, and as this post suggests, the default behaviour seems to have changed in recent versions.. I don’t think that watching Full-HD videos is a corner case any more and I don’t think it is acceptable for the average user to know that there is compositing it all. If you notice tearing while playing video, check about:support and Ctrl+F to search for HW_COMPOSITING. While Compiz nowadays supports non-OpenGL I do not know how good this is and whether Unity supports it. well I think we can patch the five games that actually run on Linux without Wine. with xrender compositing there is no performance impact. Click the KDE Kickoff menu and select Configure Desktop. FYI Aristotle thought that every body tended naturally to be at rest because he saw that every body in motion eventually stopped. Most of the time i got a fullscreen video on one monitor and everything else on the other. The same is true for watching Full-HD videos: often graphics cards are not powerfull enough to do both compositing and GPU accelerated decoding. no, not at all. So can’t we just leave opengl compositing on and forget it? for all those cases there is the windows rule frameork and there is nothing wrong about sharing those rules over collaboration services. I personally doubt that turning compositing off will save battery, but will cause a further drain. If you use your keyboard frequently, using these can save you lots of time. For example under Windows some web browser plugins always disable compositing (QuickTime and QuakeLive come to mind). If not, has anyone clocked if there's even a significant performance difference when compositing is running alongside a game? This should make everything more clear to the user. But when a while ago KDE couldn't stand up from sleep so I rebooted my system and now compositing is disabled on start of KDE. At least not from developers knowing about how the effect and compositor in fact interact. I don't see any bar that lists open windows. Still people might prefer that 5 seconds of battery life, it might not make sense for you, and I respect that, but it makes sense for a lot of people, so leaving the option is still a good idea, even if it is just 5 seconds, and even if it’s just placebo effect. Everything is still with VLC. Click "More Actions" Configure Special Application Settings. Blocking compositing for “normal” clients which are esp. After reading all this and specially the discussion, i predict this to become a disaster. The users won’t have to care about the state anymore and an ugly hack like unredirection of fullscreen windows can be removed. kde/linux sux…”), (2) the uncomposited notifications that appear when you are watching a video fullscreen look different than the composited notifications in other situations (“that notification looks so ugly when watching stuff fullscreen; kde/linux sux…”), (3) there is no compositing on a remote desktop (“why does my desktop look different when I access it remotely? Please stop going all gnome on us, removing configuration. And I know that is only a small fraction of the Linux games available (I think the Packman repo had at least that many games that were not also present in the openSUSE repo). 1. You say that the average user should not be aware that there is such a thing as compositing and I agree with that, but I wonder: how is that realizable when (1) compositing from time to time gets so slow that it gets disabled (and the user experience is: “suddenly the desktop looks so different and why does all of a sudden ‘present windows’ not work anymore? (Turn off the compositor, select a rather expensive Gtk+ style like orta and drag a window across such gtk+ window to _see_ what i mean) and you’ll pay the server roundtrip anyway (and on /every/ pixel row/column), Of course fancy things like transparency, shadows, *blurring* etc. In my case I’d rather see the CPU take over decoding the video than to have the negative side effects of disabling compositing (ugly desktop, ugly fullscreen controls, flickering). How is that possible, you might ask? In general compositing should save you some battery, since you’ll unlikely have active server backbuffering on todays Xorg – the compositor does the job anyway (and does it better. Be sure to check their shortcuts for a detailed listing. Concerning patching when new technology is around: that is the normal way to do such things. martin’s assertion. But only when the video is run in fullscreen and then they only need to set the property on the video window and not on the main window. As explained here, you can open a new session (=tab) by sending a qdbus command. First of all we would need to know if turning compositing off helps. I hope it will be possible to nail the state of compositing state regardless of the applications’ wishes. The rules however allow you to downforce the flag and ideally there will be a way to configure the blocking related to fullscreen windows (ie. There’d be no big deal to turn the bool into a flag but the client should not care about “how the window wants to be composited” – it should just know: here i am, i run the show, i’m expensive, please turn expensive stuff off cause it’s pointless anyway. But maybe I am just stating my idiocy again . People with lousy hardware will choose “Disable desktop effects” and the others will like “Smart usage of desktop effects”. How about dual monitor setups with that aproach? Let’s say we want to watch a video in VLC. 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. you could say: “every fullscreen window shall block compositing, but not ” – we may need a “fullscreen” match in the rules dialog).