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Comment by alexanderh | Hacker News Reader

For me its all about the performance issues.

To design responsive web applications, you need to see the (browser) windows content on re-size. This is not default in Ubuntu/Unity, you cannot see a windows contents when you are resizing. You can enable it, but its slow and not very useful. The content in a window needs to re-flow fluidly and quickly, especially the browser.

Its as simple as that for me. Until Ubuntu has hardware accelerated window re-sizing, i simply cannot use it as a development platform. Responsive Webdesign isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and responsive apps/websites are a chore to effectively debug on Ubuntu compared to other OS's

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Sounds to me like you have a particular and isolated use case. You describe a web developers problem, rather than normal use case.

Reflowing to the window, as you drag a corner, seems computationally expensive and a waste of time IMHO. It can occasionally have it's uses. I've always thought the default should be resize and reflow on resize release.

If people really care about responsive design and window resizing then they would probably happily forgo tabs and instead use windows. I'd rather this, but the window manager needs to be competent. (I'm not sure how much lighter tabs are compared with windows - system use wise ?)

In Xfce I'm happy to have the browser not draw the window as I move it. Just outline the window.

You can resize and reflow under Gnome3. (Alt+F8 is the keyboard shortcut.) Can you really not resize windows under Unity?

I see responsive websites reflowing quickly when I change the browser window size using Ubuntu. I don't see the problem.

What version of Ubuntu? Last time I tried was 12.04, and even with a proprietary binary graphics driver properly installed, it was very slow and un-usable.

If this is something they've fixed in more recent version, color me excited to try Ubuntu again.

But I've definitely seen others w/ this same issue: http://askubuntu.com/questions/297146/live-window-resizing-i...

I'm running 12.04.1 at the moment. On a Thinkpad t60, which came out in 2006 or so. The screen redraws as fast as I can move it. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I don't use Unity or any other desktop environment.

Use the responsive view tools in Firefox and Chrome.

I'll have to check these out, but I'm assuming these tools just help you view various anchor/media query points, it's not exactly what I need.

I need 100% fluid reflowing of every single pixel of width, not just where the media queries are. My designs always come out much better when I optimize this way.

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