Apology from Compiz maintainer | Hacker News Reader

Apology from Compiz maintainer

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52 pointsGarbage22 comments

Reminds me of Donald's Knuth quote:

"My main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TeX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do."

Lots of things suck. Compiz is not among them. It may not be perfect and may be unstable under some specific conditions, but it works here and works well.

Yes, you are right.

What I think might be happening is that because Ubuntu loads compiz by default now, those 'specific conditions' might be seen a lot more than before.

Compiz is cool, but ... Since moving to an LXDE-based environment, I have really enjoyed not seeing my desktop. All I see is what I'm doing.

One random thing I liked doing with a compositing window manager is to put a music video behind my browser window, and then reduce the opacity of the browser slightly. That way I can read, and watch a video at the same time :)

The thing that I've used comviz/compositing for is multiple desktops and Firefox; it used to be that redrawing anything in Firefox was about a 2-second operation and by far the most painful part of desktop switching. Compositing means I'm not redrawing, just shifting it in.

Other than that... it's neat, it's nifty, but when you get right down to it it's still pretty much a parlor trick. I'm yet to see a really critical use case that it meets. If Firefox gets to the point where the redraw pain isn't there for me I'd shut it off entirely.

Well I think the lack of redrawing is great. I can move, minimize and restore windows without triggering their UI threads at all, they don't stutter to redraw things. It means I get to have live thumbnail previews of all my windows without slowing anything down (it just reuses the same off-screen buffer).

And Compiz isn't just about compositing gimmicks. I like that I can hold the Super button (the "Windows" key on PCs) and scroll to zoom in, or click and drag to take a screenshot of any part of the screen.

Compiz is an important part of the default Ubuntu Unity desktop. Ubuntu is approaching the 12.04 release which will be a long term support release, the first with desktop support for five years. The release schedule is at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseSchedule

I think it is only the 11.04 and 11.10 releases that have had compiz enhanced desktop as the default - thus no doubt exposing a lot of hardware and graphics driver issues for the first time to a wider range of users.

I can see where 'pressure' might be coming from, but I hope there is also some help on offer from stakeholders as well!

I find compositing to be quite useful on a few scenarios. Hovering the icon over a program in the task bar makes it simple to quickly monitor the operation of a terminal app or what have you whilst reading something in a web browser without having to go through the trouble of rearranging your windows around. Also, the semi transparency while moving windows makes it easy to just click on the title bar and see what's going on in a window underneath. I love the scale effect where you can mouse to a corner and all of your windows show ike on Mac osx. That is a boon for window management when you have a lot going on. I also like the ease of compiz's zoom effect. Makes "full screening" flash videos much less of a hassle. Its the little things like all of these that add up to a great user experience for me from compiz.

Cool for you (really). For me, that's worse than multi-tasking. It's muddy-tasking. :)

But I tend to max every window I open, except for terminals which are set to 80 god-given columns.

You might like a tiling window manager if you happen to be using a large wide screen format monitor. If you use a small screen laptop, disregard this!

Tried one; I'm not. I do; thanks.

"I tried to reverse out of the driveway without hitting your cat. I failed. I hope the incidence of cars reversing over cats can be lowered in future."

Its not an apology or a direction, its mostly useless. Cut out the failure and self-flagellation stuff, cut out the need to apologise, cut out the hand waving, keep the aclnowledgement of problems, add some direction.

"I acknowledge Compiz isn't stable enough. I can/can't make it better and this month I (step down/commit to doing X/ask for guidance)".

I think he's being too hard on himself. Compiz is amazing. Unfortunately FPS dropped in my games since Compiz was introduced in earlier Ubuntu versions so I don't run Unity I run Unity 2D which brings back my FPS to what it was but it uses Metacity so no fancy effects any more. I'd say focus on performance and get it back to what it was in Ubuntu 10.10 and that would be huge.

I don't know if he's being too harsh on himself or not, but this kind of public apology feels like a good thing to me.

It's a bit of a clean-slate. A great starting point for fixing the problems.

Too many people are quick to be defensive, slow to admit problems and slower to apologise.

rewriting compiz in c++ was exactly when it died

I use compiz on my Crunchbamg box and think its great. I think he's being too hard on himself. That said, its really refreshing to hear someone say "I screwed up" in the sincerest terms possible. Sincere apologies are in vogue right now but even so many of them still drone on and still have some type of spin. This was short and directly to the point. Best apology ever.

After reading this I get the sense that he doesn't feel confident in his ability to maintain compiz and if that's the case I'd wonder why he doesn't seek out someone else to take over. I'm not suggesting he should but if he really doesn't think he can do well for the project then it's time to get so,e fresh blood in there. He says he hopes for more contributions which is great so the way I take is this: if he isn't confident in his ability to move compiz forward then let someone else take over - if he does believe he can improve it then he needs to quit being so damn hard on himself.

I'm completely out of this scene for 2yrs... Is gnome3 built on compiz?

Gnome 3 is a set of libraries that provide various functions on top of X. On top of Gnome 3, you need a graphical shell of some kind.

Shells include: Gnome Shell uses mutter as its window manager and Unity (Ubuntu) which uses compiz as its window manager.

If you want a standard Gnome desktop (e.g. Fedora 16) then you don't need compiz, but you will end up installing mutter.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/87287/can-i-uninstall-compiz-...

No, GNOME 3 includes GNOME shell. GNOME shell is not optional.

FWIW, I'm a GNOME release team member.

OK, thanks for feedback, so a more correct way to answer this question would be...

Gnome 3 is a set of libraries that provides a desktop environment including Gnome Shell, the default GUI supplied by Gnome that uses the mutter window manager. Fedora 16 live CD provides an example of a 'standard' Gnome 3/Gnome shell environment. {needs a sentence on indicators/notifications}

Ubuntu 11.10 onwards are releasing a subset of the Gnome 3 packages with their own graphical shell called Unity, which uses the compiz windows manager. Unity packages also add a different indicator system for notifications. Gnome Shell and Gnome Shell Session can be installed on Ubuntu which provide the full Gnome environment as an alternative when logging in.

Is that closer to the truth? I need some words to describe this accurately as I'm writing about this stuff. Any publicly accessible roadmap for Gnome Shell would help, I think everyone on this forum accepts that Gnome 3 and Unity are works in progress and I certainly look forward to future iterations.

For technical or political reasons?

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