MATE Tweak / Compiz / Older Graphics Chipsets

Hi Folks,

I want to resell some older PC’s which were originally sold with Windows XP to run Ubuntu Mate.

However, i’ve noticed that machines which have Intel 8xx (Intel Extreme Graphics / Extreme Graphics 2) cannot run Compiz. Attempting to change to Compiz would be difficult for a novice user of Linux to undo.

But the option to change to Compiz is still present in Mate Tweak on these machines.

Is it possible that in 18.04 this option could be removed on machines with these chipsets? Either automatically by detection of these older GPUs by PCI ID or as a configurable option via dconf / gsettings?

What would also be great is if Compiz could be automatically enabled on capable hardware and Marco otherwise - I hope i’m not asking for too much.

Every user has a different preference when it comes to video compozitor. Compiz will not work all the time as intended so that’s why is not enable by default. About making a detection part to it will not be viable because if they change something in the code that will consume like 3% more resources they need to test again all the video cards and update the list with working graphics cards, other problem will be :moneybag: to test every video card…

I have a simple suggestion, put together a test bed PC you don’t mind fiddling around with and try a few things like installing the full OS image then removing compiz, or do a piecemeal install starting from Ubuntu core without a desktop, then install mate-desktop-environment-core (which doesn’t look like it installs compiz).

The user can’t select the problematic compiz compositor option if it’s not even installed right?

If you can’t run MATE without compiz, or if doing so breaks the MATE Tweak tool, file a bug report, because compiz should not be necessary to run MATE (ARM versions of MATE, for example, run fine without compiz).

Also, have you looked for another Intel video driver? - because unless those machines are a century old, there may be an alternate video driver available that will fix OpenGL so compiz will run without crashing. For example, I have an Intel Atom notebook with a puny N450 Atom CPU that is eight years old, but with the proper video drivers and some minor tweaks it has always run compiz fine.

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The problem all round seems to be lack of older test hardware in the hands of the developers.

Someone needs to stop buying them new machines :wink: Or make them stop throwing the old ones away!

At this point, for GFX, it’s a three horse race - ATI, Nvidia and Intel. Accelerated VIA S3 support died in 16.04 it seems - the Xorg packages are there but there is no matching DRM Kernel module facepalm

Also, yeah, i845 / i865 chips have accelerated video (e.g. DVD playback) just fine but no compiz. Ubuntu Mate welcome doesn’t work either, again as it needs newer OpenGL support. So I just install it on those machines. I should really hide the ‘Gaming’ section on the ubiquity slideshow on those machines in case buyers get their hopes up :wink:

I thought getting away from Unity would be easy, and open up more choice on older hardware … Still at least MATE proper renders to good ol’ Xlib … for now !