Compositor instability.

From: Unkmar via chugalug 
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First: Why am I babbling? I wanted to try out hudkit. A webkit
click-through transparency overlay. My error message was:
Your screen does not support transparency.
Maybe your compositor isn't running?

Short take: I don't have a solution. And I have a strong love/hate
relationship with compositors. Because, I've never seen a stable
compositor.
---=[ Love/Hate Rant Below ]=---
I will start with some positives of a compositor.
Pros:
Apparently, Using a compositor can cure screen tearing.
Lots of action pizzazz is possible. Actions such as Open, Close,
Minimize, Maximize windows can have fancy effects. Scroll onto the
scree, Burn off of the screen. Fold into paper plane and fly off of
the screen, Bounce as it goes full screen, Wobble as you drag a window
around.
Transparency effects. You like having a video playing or something
else playing under you Terminal. Many terminals allow for alpha
blending type of transparency. You can see that video playing shaded
through/behind/under your Terminal.

I avoid using compositors. So I can't think of any other Pros.
Cons:
Unstable! I've never seen a stable compositor.
For a compositor to do all its fancy, You have to work through it.
Your apps sit on it.
In fact, generally the entire Desktop environment sits on top of it.
One moment everything is fine, you have a browser, 3 terminals,
possibly a chat app or two open. Maybe you are busy working in GIMP or
Blender. You decide to minimize or close the chat app or one of the
terminals. And then the compositor crashes. It wouldn't be so bad if
you just Stopped getting fancy.  But nope, Your entire desktop tends
to rely on it. SO, your panel vanishes, wallpaper vanishes. Heck,
possibly all your open programs crash as well or maybe they are still
open. But navigation is broke because desktop environment is gone.
Hotkeys are broke, Your menu system is gone. Effectively, even if your
apps are still open. At best, you can save and close one by one and
logout/login to restart the compositor.

-- Lucius L. Hilley III - unkmar



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From: Dave Brockman via chugalug 
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I think with the amount of pain and manual config you are going 
through... maybe you should give FreeBSD a shot....

With Gratitude,

Dave Brockman
Senior Network Engineer
Gig City Cloud, LLC






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From: Unkmar via chugalug 
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Meh, the struggles are normal for me. It is what happens as you try new
things. The secondary keyboard I couldn't figure out before. I like LXDE
and LXQt had a missing feature that was important to me. So, I avoided it
until now.

I have a brand new video card with new PC and that often poses problems in
Linux. I knew but before I started that this was going to be an uphill
battle and for most of it, I have attempted to take the easiest path for me.

I am not sure, but I believe I once attempted a FreeBSD install while
working with Mike. The install was easy enough. But, the system file layout
& package management was foreign enough to leave my head spinning. I
literally just didn't know configs were. Granted, that was about decade ago.

-- Lucius L. Hilley III - (sent from phone)

On Thu, Feb 6, 2025, 18:00 Dave Brockman via chugalug 
wrote:



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From: Unkmar via chugalug 
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I was also still very fresh to Linux at the time.