Compiz 0.8.10 Released

[Awesomeness]

No one of the people claiming to be the official Compiz maintainer is telling the truth. http://www.compiz.org still links to http://cgit.compiz.org/ as official repository. Upstream Compiz is dead.
All three Compiz variants (incl. Canonica's) are forks.

[lem79]

The 0.9.XX series was a clean(Spamzilla rewrite), extremely well documented(Spamzilla and Canonical efforts), and well tested (Canonical Testing Software Efforts). The 0.8.XX series is "a big mess of code that actually works with a mess of patches..."

Spamzilla? heh, not sure if trolling or honest mistake, but .. smspillaz is the name Sam Spilsbury uses. He has a blog here: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/about/

[johnc]

The 0.9.XX series was a clean(Spamzilla rewrite), extremely well documented(Spamzilla and Canonical efforts), and well tested (Canonical Testing Software Efforts). The 0.8.XX series is "a big mess of code that actually works with a mess of patches..."

I have to throw my anecdotal hat into the ring and say that compiz from about 12.04 on has been much worse for me than the prior iterations. Though I think that has less to do with Sam's work and more the effort to shoehorn Unity into a compiz plugin. Compiz on 11.04 (which is 0.9.4 I think) is pretty solid for me. I didn't have too many issues on 10.10 but it did crash on occasion. No more than it does on 14.04 today though. And even still on 14.04 I can not minimize all windows without hanging the system. (Which is a pretty basic desktop feature I think?)

[dh04000]

Spamzilla? heh, not sure if trolling or honest mistake, but .. smspillaz is the name Sam Spilsbury uses. He has a blog here: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/about/

My bad, I say "spamzilla" when I read smspillaz. It's a weird habit of mine. Yes, I meant smspillaz.



sm--sp--illa--z => sp--sm--z--illa ==> spamzilla (drops the S and adds an A) my brain does weird things sometimes.

[dh04000]

I have to throw my anecdotal hat into the ring and say that compiz from about 12.04 on has been much worse for me than the prior iterations. Though I think that has less to do with Sam's work and more the effort to shoehorn Unity into a compiz plugin. Compiz on 11.04 (which is 0.9.4 I think) is pretty solid for me. I didn't have too many issues on 10.10 but it did crash on occasion. No more than it does on 14.04 today though. And even still on 14.04 I can not minimize all windows without hanging the system. (Which is a pretty basic desktop feature I think?)

Back in my hayday of using compiz 8.04 to 10.04, I used to have between 3-6 crashes a day, especially when playing flash media. I was using a ATi X1400 then. Now-a-days on an optimus system (intel 3000 + nvidia 540m) I have a random lock up maybe once a month and a videogame related crash 1-3 times per month. Seems much better to me, but it might be hardware related. Whats your hardware?

[johnc]

Back in my hayday of using compiz 8.04 to 10.04, I used to have between 3-6 crashes a day, especially when playing flash media. I was using a ATi X1400 then. Now-a-days on an optimus system (intel 3000 + nvidia 540m) I have a random lock up maybe once a month and a videogame related crash 1-3 times per month. Seems much better to me, but it might be hardware related. Whats your hardware?

I'm on a Core i7 870 and a GTX 570, but I think my crashes are related to games too because that's when I see them the most. Or XBMC when it goes fullscreen.

[Edogaa]

That wasn't my point at all. I didn't say that at all. This comment is 100% you. I don't know why you would think rewriting an entire application in C++ makes it stable and crash proof either.

The stability came due to the huge effort to fix up the code base by Spamzilla WHILE he was porting it to C++ and the efforts of testing by Canonical over the last ~3-4 years. That was the point I was making. Spamzilla ported to C++ from C because (1) He knows C++ better than C and (2) The old C base was so badly documented and messy that it wasn't worth saving, so why not convert to a code base that he understood and do a better job? At the time Spamzilla was the SOLE developer since everyone else had abandoned the project. He basically had free rein over the coding decisions. Until Canonical wanted to do Unity 7 on Compiz, Spamzilla was alone and must people on Phoronix/Community thought that Compiz was going to die.

There you go, a little history. Your welcome.

I was making fun of your original statement being overly simplistic. Not whether they actually improved it or not, so idc.

[psycho_driver]

Just Why? Why the old un-maintained 0.8.XX series? Why not fork the cleaned up and modernized C++ based 0.9.XX code base? You know, the one that doesn't crash 3 times a day like I remember the 0.8.XX series did.

Maybe for people like me who are still using the 0.8 series? I switched from E17 to compiz + cairo-dock (+ rox) a couple of years ago and have been very happy. I would have upgraded to the 0.9 branch but several of the plugins that I use are "among the handful" that haven't been ported to 0.9 yet.

When I was using the nvidia 334 drivers I had very good stability. My desktop would be up for a month or two at a time before restarts. My system would hit 6+ months of uptime. When I recently upgraded to the 346 drivers I experienced some crashing but by switching my app switcher plugin and turning off mipmaps in the window previews plugin it seems to have made everything stable again.

I'd be happy to see the 0.8 series continue development, as after fifteen years of using linux I feel like I've thrown together the perfect desktop for my purposes. Or, if the plugins I use ever get ported to 0.9, I'd probably give it a try.

PS - I'll always use something written in C vs. C++ if I have a choice and they're comparable feature-wise.

[dh04000]

I was making fun of your original statement being overly simplistic. Not whether they actually improved it or not, so idc.

So... you are wrong and you are a dick. Gotcha.

[dh04000]

I'd be happy to see the 0.8 series continue development, as after fifteen years of using linux I feel like I've thrown together the perfect desktop for my purposes. Or, if the plugins I use ever get ported to 0.9, I'd probably give it a try.

Do you know how to code? If so, want to take a crack-at-it? smspillaz has said for years that these plugins could be ported if a community member wanted them, but he thought that the unported plugins were so messy and hacky and unreadable that he never bothered to try. Which is why they are unported to this day.