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The Hildon Desktop application
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The hildon-desktop process acts as a compositing window manager for all
applications. All screen painting, including painting of X windows, is
done through the Clutter canvas library and OpenGL ES v2.0 API.
Compositing means that hildon-desktop tells the X server (through the X
Composite extension) to draw all windows to an off-screen buffer,
instead of drawing them directly to the framebuffer. This allows hildon-
desktop to modify window contents before drawing them onto the screen.

In Leste, compositing is used to implement window transitions and
blurring of the screen. Hildon-desktop handles all mapped windows as
Clutter actors, which are objects usually containing an OpenGL texture.
As the window manager hildon-desktop will reparent application windows
to decorate them with the application title bar and close button.

Task launcher and Task switcher (aka. Dashboard, Task navigator) are
implemented by the hildon-desktop process. Task launcher is a menu the
user can access to start new applications or bring running applications
on top. Task switcher is a view to switch between running applications,
some of which might be ’background killed’, which means that they appear
running to the user but really have saved their UI state and are started
by hildon-desktop on demand.