Enabling Compiz by default?

[Ioannis Nousias]

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 11:59:41AM +0100, Ioannis Nousias wrote:
>   
>> If there was a "huge increase in power consumption" then a MacBook's 
>> battery would only last for an hour. A GPU is better in handling the GUI 
>> than a CPU is, even with current graphics cards that do little about 
>> power efficiency.
>>     
>
> On a modern graphs card the 2D and 3D parts of the chip are normally fed
> so that one or both can be power managed internally. Apple have simply chosen
> to design a system a particular way and ensured that the battery life is
> acceptable operating that way.
>
>
>   
Not really. A good example is the Dell XPS M1330 with a 6-cell pack 
(53Wh at 11.1V) and the LED back-light and the MacBook with a 55Wh at 10.8V 
battery. These are 4800mah and 5000mah respectively. Very similar specs 
in terms of graphics cards, CPU, screen, etc. Both give you the typical 
of around 3-4 hours of operation (official rating of up to 6hours).

Another good example is iPhone with OS X and Quartz, which delivers 
excellent battery times.

Even though you might argue that these sort of comparisons aren't 
particularly accurate, I don't think there is something that suggests 
that Quartz is less power efficient than something like Xorg+metacity. 
And I will continue by saying that, even if compiz isn't there yet 
(which I think it is for some), I'm sure this can be true about 
Xorg+compiz as well.

In my opinion, Fedora should promote a modern window manager for the 
desktop domain. It will definitely attract new users and it certainly 
offers usability features that are so much needed, which should be there 
right out of the box.

-Ioannis


PS: I think arguing about power efficiency is a little bit hypocritical. 
Fedora, as any other distribution I've seen, comes with all these little 
services and daemons that want to access your hard disk all the time, 
just to say hello ;) The result is you can't have your HD in 
standby/sleep mode. And not to mention the annoying screen savers that 
are enabled by default, which keep the CPU busy (some of them take it to 
the extreme) and are far from 'saving your screen' ;)