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Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

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  • Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

    Phoronix: Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

    Sparked from a posting earlier this week about Compiz likely being dropped from Fedora 17, some are wondering whether Compiz is effectively dead...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    What we could use is a decent general composite manager. Right now you've got xcompmgr, and the Cairo composite manager. The former is just a demo that can do a few functions like transparency, and the latter is pretty buggy and hasn't looked active since I learned of it over a year ago.

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    • #3
      Compiz is not dead, it's just focused on Ubuntu. GNOME Shell has Mutter, KDE has KWin4, so Compiz is focusing on Unity, obviously, with Canonical paying for the main developer. Compiz 0.9.7 has been in development for over 4 months now and will hit Ubuntu 12.04 before the first Beta release.

      It will be interesting to see what happens after Ubuntu 12.04. It's a race between Unity+Compiz and Unity+Qt (aka Unity 2D), so maybe it will get dropped later on.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by d2kx View Post
        Compiz is focusing on Unity, obviously, with Canonical paying for the main developer.
        Then why does he write on his blog "I have failed the Ubuntu community."?

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        • #5
          there is Linux Mint which has still compiz.
          MATE desktop can use compiz features and i dont really complain about the bugs. in fact im using 0.9.6 and havent countered any problems with it. tho i dont use all the features from there.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by d2kx
            It's a race between Unity+Compiz and Unity+Qt (aka Unity 2D), so maybe it will get dropped later on.
            Qt is not a window manager. As it stands Unity 2D is using tweaked version of Metacity as window manager and probably will switch to Compiz at some point or another. It was planned in the past but I guess it was pushed back.

            Originally posted by Qaridarium
            i think its clear they will go with unity 2D means QT(kwin4).

            nothing special here. the KDE dudes work hard for the good result.

            also i think its easy to port QT to Wayland display server to drop X.

            this means they drop compiz +x server in the same time.
            Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
            1. There's no problem with using Compiz on Unity 2D or any Qt application for that matter. It has also been rewritten in C++ (also used by Qt)
            2. There has been effort to port Compiz to OpenGL ES 2 which is prerequisite for Wayland support and if I'm not mistaken it's almost done.
            3. Porting Qt to Wayland has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.
            4. Unity3D is based on Compiz and as it stands there is no plans to drop it.
            5. Ubuntu has hired the lead Compiz developer and invested heavily on it.

            Originally posted by 0xCAFE
            Then why does he write on his blog "I have failed the Ubuntu community."?
            Probably because everything didn't go as well as planned?

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            • #7
              Compiz has fallen hard from its Beryl and Fusion days.

              It used to be the face of the 3D Linux desktop.

              But we can't have it anymore since Gnome 3 and Unity make it impossible to use it.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Qaridarium
                why doing unity2D? if ubuntu drop compiz they can jump on Kwin windows manager.
                Both window managers have fair share of their own problems. Large projects like Ubuntu don't just jump from window manager to window manager and like I said there's no plans to drop Unity 3D as of now and as long as it stays Canonical has to invest in Compiz. That makes the choise of window manager quite obvious for the Unity 2D as long as the remaining issues why it hasn't been adopted yet has been solved. KWin's 2D mode sucks and it's kinda important for environmet that is essentially meant for that...

                Originally posted by Qaridarium
                I'm sure they will do this after the 12.04 release.
                You should apply a little more self-criticism to your thinking.

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                • #9
                  IMHO the problem with compiz is that the code is bloated as hell and has become a nightmare to maintain.No wonder about it, the project has suffered from being the hostage of countless dev fights, a fork and a merging, then later another fork and a merging again!
                  Think about this: The dev community has gone through so many fights that caused the forking of the project (beryl and compiz-fusion) but later they merged back. Merging projects doesn't mean the code between the forks will be all compatible with each other. And what's more important, merging doesn't mean the devs will stop confronting themselves so easily to work on the project.
                  Seeing the project like that, is even a miracle that compiz is still alive today.

                  We should remember that compiz is one of the oldest compositing window managers in the history of gnu/linux. And that has a price to pay. The linux (And more specifically, the mesagl) community has changed over the years and the compiz project has to adapt every time it sees it neccesary.

                  The project needs to stop this madness of patching something made to be compatible with the now dead 2.4 kernel. More likeable, the project needs a full restart with both blobs and gallium3d in mind. There are desktops like lxde, xfce and mate which can still get a benefit on using compiz.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Teho View Post
                    Large projects like Ubuntu don't just jump from window manager to window manager...
                    You'd think that except it doesn't seem like they make decisions based on technical merit. There original move from Mutter was supposedly based upon the an engineer's discovery that mutter had fundamental perfomsnce issues thus the move to the more "mature" compiz. Of course this decision has come back to haunt them. My guess is that the real reason they wanted to stay away from mutter was that they wanted to control the entire user facing codebase (Unity). If they had stayed with mutter they would currently have ogles2 support for free, and a very good codebase for a WM.
                    As it stands now, I think moving to kwin is the logical step. It supports plenty of backends and is modular enough to provide the effects they need. However, I have doubts as to the long term ability of Ubuntu to create a viable DE. I just don't think they have the technical will (IMHO, this is b/c of Shuttleworth).

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