Unresponsive applications

[Bill Spitzak]

If the client does not respond to events in a reasonable amount of time 
the compositor can assume it is dead and do the window manipulation 
directly. Resize is not done (though the compositor could simulate it 
with scales or clipping/padding of the window).

Nothing stops a toolkit from using multiple threads so that window 
management and update continues to work even if the actual application 
code responding to a button click blocks.

I sure hope Wayland is not considering non-client-side decorations. If 
they are it will kill any possibility of Wayland actually working nicely 
and I think kill any possible future of Linux on the desktop. It is 
IMPOSSIBLE to synchronize the drawing of the contents with the border 
unless they are drawn by the same process, and I do wish the people who 
keep suggesting elaborate many-round-trip sync protocols where they keep 
adding more and more steps and latency will realize this.

OS/X and Windows draws the window borders in the client application and 
do not inform the system until both the contents and the borders are up 
to date. This is why they work and resize smoothly. The X11 window 
borders are why resize has sucked on X11 for 3 decades, and I hope 
everybody can see that an increase of machine speed of over 2000x has 
not fixed it!

Niklas Höglund wrote:
> I've got one questions about unresponsive applications.
> 
> I'm quite good at punishing computers. I've found that many
> applications stop responding when they shouldn't, for example when
> accessing the disk (say if I trash the disk a lot doing something else
> at the same time).
> 
> Last time I read about Wayland, decorations and window management was
> going to be done client side. I realize from the discussions going on
> that this may no longer be the case, but if client side decorations
> are used, how would you envisage the user interaction would work to
> allow me to minimize (or otherwise get rid of) a temporarily
> non-responding application. I'd like to be able to keep doing work in
> other apps in this scenario, or at least get to a command prompt /
> task manager so I can kill the non-responding one.
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