[Xfce4-commits] r27940 - xfdesktop/trunk/src

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Fabian Nowak wrote:
>>> Today, with compositing, the amount of pixmap memory used has
>>> increased a lot so I guess the driver was modified to support larger
>>> amount of pixmaps. Still, we may still have the problem with lower end
>>> video cards, dunno.
 >>
>> Ah, I see.  Well, double buffering fixes a lot of flicker/repaint
>> issues with the icon view -- not sure if they're my fault and the
>> double buffering is just hiding bugs, but...  we'll see if people
>> complain, I guess.
> 
> Considering all my rather old PCs with TNT2, GeForce2, at least I would
> be very happy to find an option for switching double-buffering off,
> which could have a well-describing tooltip on which systems it might
> make sense trying to switch DB off, i.e. architecture of the graphics
> board and amount of video memory.

The problem is, if you turn DB off, the rubberbanding looks awful.  I 
mean, it's gross, seriously.  It doesn't paint properly.  At all.  And 
maybe that means I'm doing something wrong, but I checked, and my code 
is very similar to what GtkIconView does, so I'd be surprised if that 
were the problem (though an interesting test would be to turn off DB on 
GtkIconView and see if the same drawing issues show up).

> Thinking of 3rd and 2nd world countries, I think you can't assume people
> running Xfce to have good graphics boards -- Xfce might be their choice
> as desktop system just because of the anciently low hardware
> requirements and smooth behaviour on older systems.

Well, remember, we turned DB off initially back in the end of 2003 or 
so.  A bit has changed since then, and a low-end graphics board *today* 
might be ok with DB turned on.  Back when I started out as xfdesktop 
maintainer (early 2004), I rewrote portions of it, and forgot to disable 
double-buffering initially, and I didn't have any problems on my TNT2 
Ultra.  (And when I bought that card back in 1999, it cost more than an 
entire present-day low-end Intel motherboard with Intel graphics that 
would still beat the pants of my TNT2U.)

If there are *actual problems*, I'd be willing to revisit this, but as 
far as I'm concerned, this is idle speculation and not worth discussing 
without some real-world cases of brokenness.

	-brian