There's New In-Fighting Over The Future Of Compiz

[soreau]

Cat got your tongue?

You paint a vivid picture but a picture is worth 1000 words.. do the math. 3,600,000 wpm @ 60 hertz, right?

[Slartifartblast]

Watch this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYo49R_ZS0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msvOUUgv6m8

Don't read too far into it or you will simply go mad! </Cheshire Cat>

[MoonMoon]

I had a good laugh reading this stuff: "Hey, you can't just come in and change stuff without discussion or vote. By the way, I declare myself maintainer without any discussion or vote and of course it will go under the umbrella of my dead Wayland/Weston fork, also without discussion or vote."

Looks to me like the average attention whore, Michael, please stop with putting such people under the spotlight giving them what they want.

[jimbohale]

Given that the compiz clones that KDE and Gnome are working on are already orders of magnitudes more bloated, and are still not there in terms of eye candy and accessibility features, this is good news.

Drama is part of the compiz tradition, so that's ok. smspillaz, come back, too!

LMAO you literally could not be any more wrong. Mutter and whatever KDE's was called (I forgot) are infinitely less bloated and less shit than Compiz. Compiz can't exist, it's literally a hack.

[soreau]

... Compiz can't exist, it's literally a hack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDdXERlftgk

[asdfblah]

I agree that compiz should be killed. Wasn't Ubuntu going to use Qt? Why not to use KWin directly?
@soreau: go visit a doctor, man...

[drspinderwalf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDdXERlftgk

I enjoyed having compiz around for a while back in the day. I really enjoyed a lot of the functionality that it brought me, the visual cues, and the extra "oomph" to give my desktop a real good feel. Doing cool things like scrolling at the edge of the screen to switch workspaces. Blurring/dimming unfocused windows. Setting opacity on windows so you can work with one over a larger one. Really cool stuff.

However, Compiz is so old and ugly I'd rather take it in the back and shoot it. Just looking at that video brought back so many horrible memories of bugs and breakage. Even that itself is showcasing tons of bugs.

I can't list a single mutter bug that affects me off the top of my head. Not saying it's perfect, I'm sure there are bugs to fix, but I don't think there was ever a time when compiz was ever polished for me. Always dinged around the edges at best but typically half-broken. Compositors have grown up. I no longer have to invoke compiz --replace all the time. I can just use my effing computer.

[yash]

So hate, much hate WOW!

This is kinda off-topic but I think I need help..

I see lot of people hating compiz and I'm thinking about having a compiz standalone desktop.
I see youtube videos and many of them look awesome. I've never used compiz before.
So, if compiz is lighter than gnome and KDE, does a lot of stuff itself(Wallpaper, screensaver, transparency, ...) so you don't have to install shit load of stuff.
If people who enjoy using compiz love it then it must not be that buggy?

Handles video playback better than anything else, very low tearing compared to Mutter. Then what's wrong? why do I see so much hate for compiz.

I'm not asking you all to love compiz but I want to know what all things are wrong with compiz? How much my decison to move to compiz is stupid?
Considering I'm not gonna use toomuch compiz effects and I even hate the desktop cube. Just some woobly windows, transparency, Genie-effect, ...

[BwackNinja]

Compiz lives in a world of its own, where people actually believe that they know what they want better than the computer that's sitting in front of them does or the developers behind it all. We're largely back to a two-party system. Gnome does things one way and KDE does it another. XFCE4 and now MATE are for the minority who don't like the changes done everywhere else. LXDE seems like a strong project, but it's identity has undergone some big fundamental changes. Enlightenment does interesting things, but is it's own insular community and has a toolkit that no other desktop projects use. Lightweight window managers and tiling window managers are still a solid niche for those who really know what they're doing but all have an uncertain future given an eventual migration to Wayland. Unity has its merits, but ultimately succeeds more because it's the default experience in Ubuntu than anything else. I remember when you could expect that someone's Linux system had personality beyond their choice of wallpaper.

It's far too easy to forget that very few people know what they're doing or want to learn. Gone are the days when blog posts about configuring Compiz/Beryl/Compiz-Fusion/etc and a zillion desktop widgets all made with different frameworks were a dime a dozen with power users and eager novices reading and modifying their own systems. The times when you could expect a user to have the associated configuration utility installed are nothing more than a nostalgic dream. And yet, I still look with that nostalgia and admit, it's hard to call Compiz bloated when it ran great on machines built the better part of a decade ago with a driver situation that makes today look like someone's poorly grounded fantasy. The project was healthiest when there was the most fighting and forks. That meant that people cared and went pretty far with their own ideas of how things should be. It was terrible for everyone involved and complicated for the users, but it was exciting.

The only thing more depressing than the sad state of Compiz, and how it has been stagnant for so many years, is that it is still the most advanced and most highly configurable compositing window manager that exists - and the kicker is that it does it all while being desktop agnostic to an unmatched degree. I still use it - standalone, not with Unity - and I fear the day when I can no longer justify its continued use. This news post and the associated actions are unfortunately the best things to happened to the project in a long time.

Also - have a shameless plug from my blog complaining about this more: Where did the power users go?

[johnc]

This is kinda off-topic but I think I need help..

I see lot of people hating compiz and I'm thinking about having a compiz standalone desktop.
I see youtube videos and many of them look awesome. I've never used compiz before.
So, if compiz is lighter than gnome and KDE, does a lot of stuff itself(Wallpaper, screensaver, transparency, ...) so you don't have to install shit load of stuff.
If people who enjoy using compiz love it then it must not be that buggy?

Handles video playback better than anything else, very low tearing compared to Mutter. Then what's wrong? why do I see so much hate for compiz.

I'm not asking you all to love compiz but I want to know what all things are wrong with compiz? How much my decison to move to compiz is stupid?
Considering I'm not gonna use toomuch compiz effects and I even hate the desktop cube. Just some woobly windows, transparency, Genie-effect, ...

Well both old and new compiz have had bugs, that's for sure. But I've never really found it to be as bad as many say. At least when it crashes it gets reloaded now.

But my answers to your questions are basically two-fold. First, most people like to go with the "establishment" choices in a lot of these things. So for window managers that means what is shipping with KDE or GNOME. There is an implicit acceptance bias that if the opinion-makers have chosen x to be the "official" software package, then there must be a good reason for that... because people smarter than us have deemed it so, so we should believe it too. For the sake of argument I'll leave off the likely fact that the most popular end-user desktop uses compiz for its window manager. Popular opinion prevails over popular practice.

My second answer is that contemporary man is now almost completely steeped in the philosophy of modernism. It pretty much permeates every avenue of thinking today. So that means, quite simply, that since mutter is the all new hotness, then it must be better than whatever we had yesterday. Compiz -- like GNOME2 -- is old. And old means outdated. Being old is a sort of heresy in the mind of a modernist. It must be cut off -- excommunicated. That is why you have people pleading to have "old" tech like compiz, X, etc. "to be killed". It is the same idea that throws off the religion of our ancestors -- primitive ideas of a primitive people -- as we replace it with new ideas. We're smarterer now. We know better how to live. We are better. We're better because we're newer.

And so this is why if, e.g., GNOME announced tomorrow that GNOME4 is coming and GNOME3 is now deprecated old cruft, you'll have the throngs coming out here to talk about how old and out of date GNOME3 is. And people would be baffled to find that a person could find anything of value in ancient GNOME3. We have GNOME4 now! It's so much betterer! And it's betterer because 4 > 3.

Now it is true to say that compiz may not have kept pace with some advancements, such as video driver changes, as it did not receive much development attention in recent years outside of Canonical, which has poorly shoehorned Unity into compiz. People can say that it looks "out of style", but that is a criticism of the DE / theme, and not the window manager. Perhaps the "effects" are now considered verboten. But that is more about changing fashions, and we all know that fashions are not established bottom-up but rather top-down.

The problem I have with the idea that software should be terminated after x years of development and we should move on to the new thing: the Linux kernel is getting pretty darn old itself. Probably older than X -- which, as we know, is a practical mortal sin to defend around here -- and yet everyone thinks the Linux kernel is the bees knees. Shouldn't we by now be looking to replace it with something all new from the ground-up? Or is this the one instance where the modernist is able to admit that evolution is better than revolution?