Gala

Gala drains my laptop battery.

Asked by Matthis R

The title is a bit overdone, but hits the nail.
When using a non-compositing WM (like xfwm in an xfce session) the laptop consumes arround 6.8-11.x watts while browsing, writing etc. - no heavy load stuff.
With Gala on the other hand it consumes 9-16 watts in the same situation which means considerably less runtime on battery.

I understand that Gala is compositing and that it simply needs more ressources: but since there's no real option[1] for gala I would like to ask if it is possible to have a Gala fallback that is not composite (e.g. "turn off" all effects)?
Maybe "Gala-Energysaving" or "GalaGreen" for the marketing guys ;-)

Regards,
Matthis

P. s.
[1] Of course I COULD use "xfwm4 --replace" - but that is not really integrated and breaks all shortcuts

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Tom Beckmann (tombeckmann) said : 		#1

As mutter's only purpose (the wm on which is gala built) is to provide metacity with compositing (pretty much at least), you don't have this option. Your only possibility would be to fallback to metacity, which would be done by changing the wm in /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/pantheon.session, but you'd not get the workspace switcher and all other features of gala then anymore.

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Chris Wilson (ickle) said : 		#2

This is more of a driver bug than a bug in the gala compositing manager. If you can quantify activity vs power consumption (and it sounds like you can), then we [speaking with my Intel hat on] would welcome bug reports against the driver.

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