The All-Singing, All-Dancing XCompMGR

[Jon Nettleton]

>> We could reuse the work done in Sugar 0.86 when we moved to metacity
>> from matchbox. Or just use metacity which is also a compositing
>> windowm manager.
>
> Or mutter which is the replacement to metacity for gnome 3 so should
> be a reasonably easy swap from metacity and is used by gnome-shell and
> moblin/(meego).
>

Unfortunately we cannot switch to mutter as that only uses Clutter as
the compositing backend.  I know this because I am the person that
patched the XRender compositing engine out of the source :-(  This
means that mutter requires a 3-d accelerated graphics card.  This may
be possible for the VX855 XO 1.5's but I don't think the XO1's would
be able to handle this requirement.  The ARM based chips might be able
to with Clutter using the OpenGL ES backend but I am pretty sure
nobody has tested this yet.

Metacity is definitely an option, but any enhancements done to it
would need to be maintained in an OLPC/Sugar specific branch.
Choosing this option would definitely need some time invested into
running down some memory leaks and optimizing the engine.  Compositing
in metacity was always an afterthought and never 100% got the love it
needed to be used full time.  All this is fixable, just won't be done
by the GNOME guys.

Jon