Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/remove-remote-eye-candy
Created: 2006-06-06 by JackWasey
Contributors: JackWasey
Packages affected:
Summary
Don't use eye-candy in remote desktop sessions.
Rationale
Connecting with FreeNX or VNC is a common task for sysadmins, and a growing use case for home users who connect to their home machines from work. These protocols do not perform well with fading, shading, transparency, shadows, etc., and they are completely incompatible with fancy XGL and Aiglx. Remote sessions should be flagged as such and drop to a lower level of eye-candy. This could be on or off, or depend on connection speed, but in any case, hardware accelerated rendering would have to be disabled.
Use cases
- Preston does all his personal email and web surfing over FreeNX on his home computer due to restrictions at work. However, his KDE desktop is so full of bling that it degrades performance signficantly. With a remote login to an Edgy Eft desktop, most effects are disabled automatically, and his experience is improved.
- Christina is a Compiz/Xgl hacker, but finds out that Vino can't open a VNC session on a hardware accelerated desktop, but with Edgy she is able to get a new FreeNX desktop session without fancy rendering from her remote location.
- A school has 30 LTSP Edubuntu terminals. With five users logged in, they get more eye candy because there is sufficient bandwidth. When there is a full class, eye candy is reduced (during/before session startup?) because of bandwidth constraints.
- Rose finds that the admin task she wants to perform is only possible from a GUI app, but she is dialled in to her machine on a slow PSTN connection. Her desktop settings are resource intensive, but her freenx session is very usable, especially after many desktop effects are turned off.
Scope
Any remote desktop protocol would benefit.
Design
Does freedesktop.org have a spec of how to discover whether a session is remote and/or bandwidth restricted?
1) Tag eye candy options according to their weight. 2) Decide the threshold (default setting, user setting, and/or bandwidth dependent) 3) Inform window manager at session startup of remote status and settings 4) WM decides what to render 5) Bandwidth change provokes DBUS event: WM changes amount of bling on the fly?
Implementation
Could a desktop 'theme' be designed for optimum remote usage?
Things to drop or limit
- Window and menu opening and closing effects
- Shadows, transparency
- Desktop background (VNC already drops this?)
- Non-uniform areas of colour, e.g. gradation in colour of window title bars. They do not compress well.
- Anti-aliased fonts in desktop and applications.
- (? smaller window frames altogether)
- Screensaver
- (? switch user option, hibernate, etc. should be absent or carry additional warnings for remote users)
Code
Data preservation and migration
Outstanding issues