7

I am still using Ubuntu 12.04, mostly because of the 'Gnome Classic without effects' desktop provided by gnome-fallback-session.

I like to use a non compositing desktop, as compositing seems to introduce slight latencys and slightly raised battery use in everyday use.

I tried the Gnome-Shell, Cinnamon and Unity on Ubuntu 14.04, but none of them can be run without compositing it seems. Xfce and LXDE do, but both are not so well featured or integrated as the heavier ones.

So is there any way of running a modern desktop without compositing?

dronus
  • 821

2 Answers2

4

howtogeek has this to say about it:

Use a Non-Composited Desktop

If you do want to play 3D games in windowed mode and get maximum performance, you’ll need a non-composited desktop.

If you’re using Ubuntu 12.04, you can select Unity 2D on the login screen. Ubuntu 12.10 users will have to use a different desktop environment, as Unity 2D is no longer available.

Unity and GNOME Shell don’t allow you to disable compositing, although many other desktops do. You may want to try Xfce, KDE, or another desktop environment – just ensure you disable compositing in the desktop you choose. (Perform a Google search to learn how to disable compositing on your desktop of choice.) You’ll lose the fancy graphical effects, but windowed 3D rendering will speed up.

It mentions 12.10 but you can read this as "12.10 and newer".

The link has several desktops listed but I would start with XFCE if I was you. Mind though: compositing will be enabled on first install and you need to turn it off yourself. Regarding the 2 mentioned in the article, xfce and kde:

Community
  • 1
Rinzwind
  • 309,379
0

So thanks to @Rinzwind's answer and comments on it, I figured out that Metacity is still around in vanilla Ubuntu 14.04, and can be installed by installing 'gnome-panel'.

The provided 'Gnome Classic Fallback (Metacity)' session does not use compositing, looks mostly like Gnome 2.x, and sports all current Gnome tools like settings center, providing for example a working up-to-date display settings panel like gnome-shell would do. The settings even allows the placement of the old-school panels to other screens etc., so they actually provide more options in respect to Ubuntu 12.04.

This way, almost all Gnome features are available besides the gnome-shell itself on a non-compositing desktop.

dronus
  • 821