I applaud Sam's words.
However, I wonder why it occurs NOW. In the past, I have had the feeling Compiz took years and years and years to stabilize, and never really reached a mature state. Now that it seems Canonical puts big $$$ into its development (and now that Compiz is an essential part of their desktop and plans), it seems weird.
IMHO, Mutter has been in a better state for quite some time already. Why didn't they just wait a little more, before ? Now, it seems way too late to make such a decison. Better late than never ? Probably, but users will suffer from that, again.
+1 about fragmentation issue (as a clueless user, granted). If think even a user can realize that, even more than a developer actually : he or she just have to USE several combinations of distros & environments to stumble into tons of different problems and notice that some components are not maintained properly here or there ; that some features are much more advanced here or there... And that, overall, everything works "ok-ish" which is OK for most of us because we are patient / use OSS out of principles etc. but not enough for the rest of the world.
Canonical could have made a difference by supporting massively GNOME for instance. They chose to make their own shell and shopping lenses instead of fixing essential existing stuff (to be fair, it's not that black or white, they also do)
However, I wonder why it occurs NOW. In the past, I have had the feeling Compiz took years and years and years to stabilize, and never really reached a mature state. Now that it seems Canonical puts big $$$ into its development (and now that Compiz is an essential part of their desktop and plans), it seems weird.
IMHO, Mutter has been in a better state for quite some time already. Why didn't they just wait a little more, before ? Now, it seems way too late to make such a decison. Better late than never ? Probably, but users will suffer from that, again.
+1 about fragmentation issue (as a clueless user, granted). If think even a user can realize that, even more than a developer actually : he or she just have to USE several combinations of distros & environments to stumble into tons of different problems and notice that some components are not maintained properly here or there ; that some features are much more advanced here or there... And that, overall, everything works "ok-ish" which is OK for most of us because we are patient / use OSS out of principles etc. but not enough for the rest of the world.
Canonical could have made a difference by supporting massively GNOME for instance. They chose to make their own shell and shopping lenses instead of fixing essential existing stuff (to be fair, it's not that black or white, they also do)
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