[Bf-committers] Linux, Windowed by default (patch, needs discussion)

D.J. Capelis djcapelis at gmail.com
Tue Apr 10 19:05:53 CEST 2007


On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 02:54 +1000, Campbell Barton wrote:
> Chris Want wrote:
> > Campbell Barton wrote:
> >> Hi, We need to discuss making windowed default on linux (rather then 
> >> fullscreen)
> >> - obvious reasons, make it easy for the new user and advanced users 
> >> can make it fullscreen if they like.
> > 
> > I see this as a non-issue (other than "change for the sake of
> > change") and I vote to keep things the way they are.
> > 
> > Chris
> 
> Okay, here are my arguments... ;-)
> 
> * change for consistency
>    - Blender is the only app that runs fullscreen on my system by default)
>    - Blender runs windowed on other popular OS's

To me, a consistent choice across all platforms is the most important
issue. A user should be able to move from platform to platform and not
immediately notice the difference just from starting the app.

We're missing some consistency across platforms and that's fine to some
extent, but with something like this it's just rather blatent.  All of
the platforms we run on have window managers that are capable of
managing windows and do their job well, so I don't think we really have
to worry about distinguishing based on the platform's WM support.

It would be cool if the rest of the platform managers could chime in on
whether they want to move to one mode or another on *all* platforms
instead of just discussing this on a platform-by-platform basis.  Or is
linux the only one that does fullscreen?  (I thought it was just windows
that did windowed, but I've certainly been wrong before.)

> * Change to make it easier for newbe's,
>    - a good first impression is
> important. not that it hides their system tray, clock etc.
>    - Sure the distributions can have a .desktop file with -w but for the
> users that download the linux binary, they will unpack an run.
>    - Newer users who download are also not so likely to look into.
> command line options, let alone make their own .desktop file or launcher 
> script.
> 
> * many users run windowed anyway, I have a wrapper script to start
> blender that does this.
> 
> 
> Good defaults are important because most people wont change them.

~D.J.



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