Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

[Teho]

If they had stayed with mutter they would currently have ogles2 support for free, and a very good codebase for a WM.

Mutter was forked for Cinnamon so I doubt things would have gone that smoothly; the control is definetly an important factor and communication between Gnome and Ubuntu doesn't seem to work at all...

I do see moving to KWin as a best option from technical standpoint as well as deprecating Unity 3D in favour of Qt. If Canonical goal is to conquer all the possible formfactors they really should just go with Qt/KF as a base. But again I doubt that that's not going to happen.

[Elv13]

Compiz is not the original (linux) composite manager, Kwin was with KDE 3.2 in tendem with the first Xorg release (when XFree was king). That code have been dropped for KDE 3.8(Krash2) and rewrite for 3.9(KDE4 beta). It was based on a KDEified version of xcompmrg. Of course, this was before XGL/AIGLX/NVIDIA-TTP so the number of effect was limited to compositing, transparency, shadow and little more.

[not.sure]

Again? Another flame war inciting nonsense "article" to drive clicks and ad revenue?

[hechacker1]

Yeah, I don't really see a problem with compiz. It's feature rich, more so than any other windowing manager or compositor.

It doesn't really make sense to start over unless the code base is just unsustainable.

Yes it has bugs, but only if you use obscure compiz plugins. It's been working great here along with VMware gallium drivers.

What is a shame is how the various compositing managers conflict. I'd like to have a compiz backend along with cinnamon as the front end. Or mix XFCE's simple window manager along with compiz.

[bug77]

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.

Harsh words for the software that put windows to shame for many years in the looks department.
For some reason, the leading window managers have chosen to implement their own compositing engines. Inevitably, this means a much narrower audience for Compiz. From there, there's not a big stretch to predict Compiz developers loosing interest and the project stagnating. I'll always have fond memories of Compiz and my friends faces whem I showed them Linux can look 10x better than Windows.

[liam]

Mutter was forked for Cinnamon so I doubt things would have gone that smoothly; the control is definetly an important factor and communication between Gnome and Ubuntu doesn't seem to work at all...

I do see moving to KWin as a best option from technical standpoint as well as deprecating Unity 3D in favour of Qt. If Canonical goal is to conquer all the possible formfactors they really should just go with Qt/KF as a base. But again I doubt that that's not going to happen.

Cinnamon forked mutter b/c of small differences in opinion. They weren't serious technical reasons (http://forum.pinguyos.com/Thread-Cin...nome-3?page=13) according to that. So I don't think we can extrapolate much from that. The Mint guys aren't about to take on a full on FORK (as in major changes, rather than a moving set of patches with frequent upstream sync) of a WM.
I agree that Ubuntu would be best served by moving completely over to a QT base, but not b/c it CAN be used at multiple form factors, but simple b/c the codebase would be easier to manage. EFL seems to be the best choice for embedded devices (even ignoring the Tiago change, EFL is pretty dominant in that whole area), but its stack isn't as comprehensive as QT's, and I don't see Ubuntu as a company that can build infrastructure level services.
From 30 000 ft it seems as if Ubuntu is losing mindshare which was its biggest commodity. If they want to remain a strong desktop force they have to get that back (or at least have the perception that they have it back).

[Elv13]

Cinnamon forked mutter b/c of small differences in opinion. They weren't serious technical reasons (http://forum.pinguyos.com/Thread-Cin...nome-3?page=13) according to that. So I don't think we can extrapolate much from that. The Mint guys aren't about to take on a full on FORK (as in major changes, rather than a moving set of patches with frequent upstream sync) of a WM.
I agree that Ubuntu would be best served by moving completely over to a QT base, but not b/c it CAN be used at multiple form factors, but simple b/c the codebase would be easier to manage. EFL seems to be the best choice for embedded devices (even ignoring the Tiago change, EFL is pretty dominant in that whole area), but its stack isn't as comprehensive as QT's, and I don't see Ubuntu as a company that can build infrastructure level services.
From 30 000 ft it seems as if Ubuntu is losing mindshare which was its biggest commodity. If they want to remain a strong desktop force they have to get that back (or at least have the perception that they have it back).

Ubuntu Netbook was based on EFL before it moved to Qt. It is why they given up and rewrote the thing.

[bwat47]

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).

Agreed. Mutter was pretty slow in its early development, but ubuntu's decision to up and drop it was extremely shortsighted. Mutter has improved massively and gnome-shell runs super smooth (smoother than unity) on the machines I've ran it on. Mutter is also leaner and more modern. Unity really could have benefited if they stuck with it imo.

Compiz strength is in the tons of plugins it has, but unity doesn't use most of them anyway, and playing around with ccsm can break unity.

[ninez]

One thing to note about Compiz development is that it no longer happens in GIT. All of it is happening in BZR from now on.

I would hardly say that compiz is dead though. I'm running Compiz-0.9.7 in Archlinux right now.

Compiz is fast and stable over here ~ but i am using Nvidia + only the plugins that i need.

I've also been experimenting with Cinnamon/muffin ~ but much like GS - i experience xruns / glitchyness when using either actitives (in GS) or the 'scale' plugin (in Cinnamon). Compiz still works the best for me in this area (although, it used to cause issues way back when).

It'll be interesting to see what the cinnamon devs do over time... for me Compiz' selling points are the vast array of 'useful' plugins, that pretty much have no counterparts are found in GS/mutter/Cinnamon/muffin. Although, KDE/kwin has similar features - it's way too much bloat and i don't want to pull in kwin on a non-kde desktop -> although i could be wrong, and someone can correct me if i am wrong -> it probably has some hard dependencies of KDE related packages.

cheerz

[Suzuran]

I wonder if some masochist will create a Unity clone as a (set of?) Gnome-shell extension(s).