Ubuntu Prepares To Kill Off Metacity, Ups Compiz

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Prepares To Kill Off Metacity, Ups Compiz

Ubuntu has bid farewell to the Metacity window manager now that the Ubiquity installer has basic support for Compiz...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIzODY

[talvik]

Metacity is rock solid

Metacity is the most reliable WM on Linux. It's the WM with the best behavior and compatibility with apps and toolkits (probably because everyone targets it).

Compiz on the other hand, you can only rely on it crashing at least once a week. Couple it with Unity and you get crashes half dozen every day.
Compiz can't even handle windows focus properly, let alone multiple monitors.
I tried Compiz from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.10, I never used it daily because of bugs with multi-monitor. My favorite is one that moves the window to a random workspace, hunting that window is so much fun. I have been subscribed to this bugs for more than a year, every month or so it is marked as fixed and then reopened.

[timofonic]

Maybe I'm too much paranoid, but Canonical decisons about Ubuntu make me think it is a conspiracy plan to destroy Linux.

Things are done too bad in the basic common sense way, even if they don't have so much qualified developers in the team.

That's why somewhat improved "forks" like Linux Mint work better than Ubuntu..

[d2kx]

One year ago, Sam was a bit depressed because Compiz did not work as good as he wanted. 12 months later and he, Daniel and others turned it all around and Compiz is now a highly performant, good working solution. The remaining bugs will be dealt with soon.

[bwat47]

One year ago, Sam was a bit depressed because Compiz did not work as good as he wanted. 12 months later and he, Daniel and others turned it all around and Compiz is now a highly performant, good working solution. The remaining bugs will be dealt with soon.

It has gotten a lot better, all crashing issues seem gone for me now (used to crash randomly a lot in 12.04). The only big remaining performance issues it seems to have is window resizing in normal mode (its really laggy on pretty much any video card I've tried, thats why ubuntu has to use the rectangle mode by default), and the blur effect is VERY slow on certain cards (I have a laptop with intel ironlake and the unity dash is totally unusable with the active blur on. the card is only ~2 years old.) It runs butter smooth on sandy/ivybridge though.

The only remaining bugs I had are fixed in an SRU update coming soon (compiz grid plugin wasn't working with gedit and some other apps, and window titles weren't showing in spread). Added the SRU ppa and everything works perfectly now . I am slowly starting to like compiz again, its starting to shape up. For a while it was pretty bad though (especially on 11.04 and 11.10)

Compiz also seems to work better with newer intel cards than mutter and kwin. Both mutter and kwin have bugs where you get tearing on fullscreen video, even with vsync and compositing on. It can be worked around in mutter by disabling culling and clipped redraws, but doesn't seem to be any workaround for kwin atm. With compiz I get no tearing out of the box, I only get this issue in compiz if I have unredirect fullscreen windows enabled, and in this case its not the fault of compiz, its the fault of the intel driver not being able to vsync without compositing.

[blinxwang]

Maybe I'm too much paranoid, but Canonical decisons about Ubuntu make me think it is a conspiracy plan to destroy Linux.

You're thinking of the Miguel De Icaza and the GNOME design team.
They've been dropping basic features left and right for everyone because they "don't work well with touch" and fucked up the workflow into a true Fisher-Price abortion of a DE. Unity is clunky, heavyweight, uncustomizable, and (as of this post) invades your privacy, but you don't need to delve into the registry to enable minimize and maximize buttons or install 5 extensions to restore sane functionality.

[timofonic]

You're thinking of the Miguel De Icaza and the GNOME design team.
They've been dropping basic features left and right for everyone because they "don't work well with touch" and fucked up the workflow into a true Fisher-Price abortion of a DE. Unity is clunky, heavyweight, uncustomizable, and (as of this post) invades your privacy, but you don't need to delve into the registry to enable minimize and maximize buttons or install 5 extensions to restore sane functionality.

So Ubuntu devs are simply inept? That's a too much simplistic thinking.

Mark Shuttleworth is not a newbie in this industry, I'm sure he must have a very interesting agenda...

And yes, Miguel De Icaza was too obvious to not know it.

Gnome Design Team decisions are too absurd too. They are extremely similar to the way the Windows 8 interface is, they want to convert computer uses into retards only able to use TabletPCs.

[F i L]

Gnome Design Team decisions are too absurd too. They are extremely similar to the way the Windows 8 interface is, they want to convert computer uses into retards only able to use TabletPCs.

No, they just realize the large majority of computer users out there (aside from Linux users) are computer illiterate. So they're attempting to make Linux easier to use for all. Don't get me wrong, not all Gnome designs are good... maximizing core-app windows removes the window bar, for instance.. that's annoying, and difficult to understand from a layman's point of view. No visible taskbar is another issue (although it's fixed through an extension). However, most of Gnome design and core application are good and work well. Dynamic activity management is great in Gnome Shell (and friends: Cinnamon & Gala).

[chenxiaolong]

It seems that they are only going to be dropping the metacity binary. Compiz still links against the libmetacity-private0 library

[89c51]

You're thinking of the Miguel De Icaza and the GNOME design team.
They've been dropping basic features left and right for everyone because they "don't work well with touch" and fucked up the workflow into a true Fisher-Price abortion of a DE. Unity is clunky, heavyweight, uncustomizable, and (as of this post) invades your privacy, but you don't need to delve into the registry to enable minimize and maximize buttons or install 5 extensions to restore sane functionality.

I don't think De Icaza even touches gnome or uses Linux these days. As for the folks that develop the UI/UX in gnome i won't disagree that they are complete morons.

On topic. Canonical seems to have an agenda on where it wants Ubuntu to go and certain apps/infrustructure that pushes. They made their choice. I am over ubuntu and i don't think i will ever get back to it.