Re: [Consortium] Benefit of Compiz to audio work?

Hi Cory, I'm sceptical about that, because drawing windows shouldn't be causing xruns if the system is set up properly. I believe JACK Meterbridge uses libsdl for drawing the meter needles efficiently, but I believe most free software audio apps don't do much in the way of graphics acceleration (yet). I can think of a number of drawbacks to using Compiz on audio machines though: 1. Reliance on proprietary drivers for systems that otherwise don't require them. OpenGL is unusable if you don't have hardware acceleration, and not everyone has a Matrox card. 2. Requirement for energy-hungry 3D cards (some of these cards need more electricity than CPUs which are perfectly usable for audio work). Apart from any environmental or cost considerations, more energy = more waste heat = more cooling noise. Which is bad in the studio, of course. 3. Electrical waste mountain. There are millions of machines out there which are perfectly (re)usable as audio workstations, but make Compiz a *requirement* for using free software, and they'll have to go into landfill. Y'know, both OS X and Vista have gone down the power-hungry, new-hardware-or-forget-it route, and I'm not sure we need to follow them there. Cheers! Daniel