general Ubuntu lightdm/compiz fullscreen issues?

[axfelix]

Hi folks,

I'm curious whether this is generally regarded as a known issue, or if people just try to avoid Ubuntu's compiz stack these days as it's less and less well-maintained and no less fiddly. It seems like there are still a fair number of Wine games that work perfectly windowed under Ubuntu's default desktop, and have several gold and platinum entries in the appDB when running on non-compositing desktops like xfce or lxde, but react poorly (e.g. detaching input, white screen, some combination of the two) when fullscreened under compiz. Sometimes this is a matter of the game not working at all in fullscreen; sometimes it works in fullscreen only if you're able to edit the ini file so that it starts up that way, because it doesn't tolerate being toggled in-game.

It seems like this isn't a problem with Wine and compositors in general; my other machine runs Arch/Gnome 3.16+ (with clutter/gdm), and I don't encounter these issues, and I'm not sure what the situation is with KDE. Generally speaking, then, I'm wondering -- is this just an issue with compiz? I have the feeling this might not be widely acknowledged to a point where anyone is working on it because many people who'd encounter it assume they're doing something wrong, whereas many avid users of Wine for gaming seem to prefer legacy non-composited desktops due to a perception of performance issues, even though this may no longer be the case other than for Ubuntu/compiz.

Thanks!

PS: I just tried out the CSMT patches for the first time and I'm super impressed -- a lot of recent-ish (2011-2013) DX9 games have much better performance and fewer glitches!

[dimesio]

Compositors in general are known to cause problems in Wine. Fewer people are reporting problems than used to, but that may be simply because everyone knows it's an issue. The recommendation to disable desktop effects has been in the FAQ for years. http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-db2fa15 ... 768ec6ec47

FWIW, I use KDE, and disabling desktop effects is the first thing I do on a new install, not because of Wine, but because they make the whole environment slower and less stable.

[axfelix]

Thanks for the quick response! I know I'm in a minority of wine users saying this, but I will admit that "don't use desktop effects" isn't a satisfying answer for me -- I used OSX between 2006 and 2013 because Tiger running on a first-generation Intel Macbook blew me away, and I actually like aggressively modern composited desktops for the most part (as I mentioned, my other environment runs bleeding-edge Gnome 3). Part of my being back to running Linux is because I need a dpkg-based distro for work stuff, hence Ubuntu. I don't think there's even a concept of disabling "desktop effects" in Gnome 3 because it's so compositor-centric, but I will say that KDE Plasma 5 is one of the nicest-looking "flat" desktops I've ever seen, and I'd seriously consider switching on the Ubuntu box (whether or not it's still possible to disable compositing, as I imagine you were talking about KDE4, I expect that KWin compositing still probably causes fewer compatibility issues than compiz) if someone were maintaining upstream Plasma 5 packages for 14.04, as that's the machine I'd be wanting to play games on anyhow.

If nothing else, I guess this is another instance of wishing Ubuntu weren't so popular and prominent in people's minds, since I'm a little tired of the "compositing is slow and unstable" mentality (granted, I'm running a fairly powerful 2500k/970 machine so I can get 60fps/1080p in virtually all dx9 titles I've tried in wine-csmt even with compiz), and I think it's probably worst there by a fair margin.