compiz team mailing list archive

[Travis Watkins <amaranth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The thumbnail plugin hooks into the minimize window event and takes a
snapshot of the window at that time. This uses a lot of memory as it is
storing a raw pixmap (1MB per window for a RGBA 512x512 thumbnail). To
do this in the switcher plugin would cause the default setup of compiz
to suddenly use a lot more memory which would hurt users with low end
machines.

Also, each plugin would have to store its own copy of the thumbnails.
You could modify core to store them but then you have to at least
rebuild every plugin as you've changed the core ABI and you'd certainly
have to modify every plugin you wanted to use such functionality. Due to
the compiz core ABI version being the date the ABI was changed this
makes it hard to tell the difference (what if we change ABI the same day
upstream does?).

Even if such a patch was made every small change to core or one of the
plugins using this new feature would probably require tweaking the
patch. Such a significant change would also mean we could not forward a
lot of bugs upstream due to the differences. Also, when (if?) the next
compiz release comes out you'd have to completely rewrite the whole
patch anyway.

This is not a bug we can fix in Ubuntu without upstream support and
upstream does not like your proposed solution (they used it in the beryl
days and saw all the problems it caused). Even if we decided it was
worth the effort to diverge from upstream in this case it is certainly
not a papercut bug as it would require a lot of design and coding work
to make it work correctly.

** Changed in: hundredpapercuts
       Status: Confirmed => Invalid

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Alt-Tab of a minimized window only shows icon
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/402821
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