Compiz Will Not Be Ported To Wayland

The Compiz window manager is not going to be ported to Wayland. The lead Compiz developer also sees no reason to continue the compositing window manager's development beyond maintenance purposes.

It was posted at the end of December, but it hasn't been widely shared yet and Phoronix readers continue sending in this link: Sideways. Sam Spilsbury, the developer formerly employed by Canonical to work on Compiz since they use it as the window manager for the Unity desktop, has basically thrown in the towel once again.

Spilsbury basically sees no reason to continue developing Compiz. "I think it is fairly obvious at this point onwards that as a project in itself, its no longer viable to continue development of compiz. Lots of people still use it though, so its is worth maintaining for those that use it, but nothing more than that."

Spilsbury says that there's nothing really special about the Compiz compositing engine, there's no reason to have another window manager that is practically the same as all other window managers, and that maintaining Compiz for Ubuntu/Unity is very hard.

He views this fragmentation problem as a very bad thing. "This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the linux ecosystem. Its not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software’s greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."

Finally, he says he will not port Compiz to Wayland and doesn't recommend it to anyone. "Reimplementing an entire compositing engine and window manager just to get the functionality that people liked in compiz doesn’t make any sense. I cannot, in good conscience, continue a project in such a direction that would add more fragmentation to the ecosystem, and potentially see new developers pitted against each other. As such, I do not have any plans to “port” compiz, the project, to wayland, and I won’t advocate for anyone else to do it that way."