Former Compiz Developer: Free Software Desktop Might Enter A Dark Age

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Former Compiz Developer: Free Software Desktop Might Enter A Dark Age

With the big shake-up this week at Canonical resulting in abandoning Unity and switching back to GNOME, former Compiz developer and Canonical employee Sam Spilsbury has shared a retrospective on his years of working on Compiz and Unity for Ubuntu...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sam-Redux-On-Unity-Compiz

[dungeon]

He, he, i am already into dark age since i hate compositors... any of them

[bug77]

No company can survive if it can't deliver. If engaging the open source community is hard (and it usually is, because of egos most of the time), companies will develop in house instead. Nothing new here, really.
Open source itself exists because it has proven it can lower costs in different scenarios. When it can't, there's really no reason to go open.

[enihcam]

I think it is because Linux has two major GUI toolkits: QT and GTK. This causes many duplicate Linux applications. For example, Totem and VLC, Okular and Evince, etc. It would be great if the whole community can focus on building one great application with one toolkit, and then developers might have more interests in migrating their applications to Linux.

Personally, I like QT and I want only one GUI toolkit in my Linux laptop, but because Chromium uses GTK2, I have to choose LXDE.

(sorry about my english as 2nd language)

[schmidtbag]

I don't think desktop environments are entering a dark age. I understand the logic behind Spilsbury's thoughts, but he's also acting like Canonical was somehow the last hope, when in fact they were probably making things more difficult for the Linux desktop (because of working on things like Mir and Unity rather than contributing to other projects). GNOME 3 seems pretty polished at this point, and though KDE still has a lot of room for improvement, it's very usable and feature-rich. Environments like LXQT aren't that complicated, so it shouldn't take much to polish them and make them work. Environments like XFCE are desirable for their stability and feature-completion; being outdated isn't much of a factor for those who use it.

I think it is because Linux has two major GUI toolkits: QT and GTK. This causes many duplicate Linux applications. For example, Totem and VLC, Okular and Evince, etc. It would be great if the whole community can focus on building one great application with one toolkit, and then developers might have more interests in migrating their applications to Linux.

Personally, I like QT and I want only one GUI toolkit in my Linux laptop, but because Chromium uses GTK2, I have to choose LXDE.

I don't really have a problem with multiple toolkits. They serve different needs and appeal to different people. As much as you like Qt, there are people who like GTK too. The differences in toolkits inspire competition, and competition inspires improvements and innovation. As with everything in computers, whenever you try creating a universal standard, unless it is better than the competition in every conceivable way possible, it will never replace anything. In other words, if someone created "the one toolkit", in reality it would become more like "yet another toolkit".

[enihcam]

It will be bright age without companies dictating open source code. As Debian user, I see redhat being my enemy when forcing crap software to Debian, pulseaudio, networkmanager, systemd, gnome3 etc. Xfce is true open source desktop and that is why it is stable, ready, fast and freely configurable.

XFCE has dependencies on gconf or dconf. so i move it from my favorite list to hate list. I use LXDE instead.

[fhuberts]

So much hate going on. What the heck are your problems?
Everyone is free to use what he wants.

Red Hat does not push sw into Debian, it's Debian that integrates that sw.
Also, in the real world innovation happens because some company is willing to pay for it. If not, then it usually takes a lot longer.

I'm a happy Fedora user and I dislike Debian since all its sw is really really old. I'm not using Debian but if you want to, by all means!

Stop bashing eachother, grow up.

[Aleksei]

So, a bloated resource hog of a DE with terrible interface will die off like it should. How the hell is this "leading to dark age of Linux desktop" is beyond me.
Hopefully people who were hacking Unity will still contribute to some DE (Gnome or LXQT/LXDE/XFCE/KDE).

[DanL]

So much hate going on. What the heck are your problems? ... Stop bashing each other, grow up.

Welcome to Phoronix.

[johanb]

Personally I am a fan of tiling window managers which I have plenty of to choose from both on X and Wayland.

What I most look forward to is how Elementary will continue to go. Personally I think they are what Gnome 3 should have been and have quite a bit nicer designs on their standard apps that just so incredibly clean. They have very few apps that are their own though and I think that they are wasting their time on their own photo app instead of simply using Gnome Photos, but I look forward to see how they will progress anyway. Gnome 3 is pretty nice nowadays also so I can't complain, it was 5 years since I last tried KDE though.