Arch Linux

b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

The state of compiz

I noticed there are 0.9.7 packages of Compiz in AUR. Has anyone tried them out? Are they as usable as the 0.8 series in the repos? What is the state of affairs on Compiz Fusion these days anyway? I'd upgrade if it could fix some of the bugs in the 0.8 version, but I wager there are reasons why they aren't in the repos. How much new stuff is getting introduced in 0.9.x? Seems like its been ages since I last saw an exciting new plugin developed for compiz.

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: The state of compiz

Nothing's really happening with Compiz right now, at least not as far as the website shows.  Seems the lead developer has become pretty much the only developer and, having signed on with Canonical, has been focused more on Unity integration than overall development and maintenance.  Some people have already declared the project dead, since it hasn't had a serious update/commit in almost two months.

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pogeymanz

Member

Registered: 2008-03-11

Posts: 1,020

Re: The state of compiz

Nothing's really happening with Compiz right now, at least not as far as the website shows.  Seems the lead developer has become pretty much the only developer and, having signed on with Canonical, has been focused more on Unity integration than overall development and maintenance.  Some people have already declared the project dead, since it hasn't had a serious update/commit in almost two months.

This is incorrect.

Compiz is being actively developed, just in Launchpad. Go to launchpad and search for compiz-core and you will find it. It's updated every day.

The development was taking place in both Launchpad and Git for a while, which proved to be too big of a hassle, so it moved to Launchpad only. Unity is a plugin for Compiz, so while a lot of energy is going towards developing Unity, it is in no way excluding Compiz from being used in other environments.

The 0.9.x series was declared to be development versions. The next "release" version will be 1.0.0, which will be included in the Arch repos. I think it was a management mistake to make the decree that 0.9.x was not intended as a release because now people think Compiz is dead since there hasn't been a release in forever.

I ran the 0.9.x version of Compiz for months and it worked very well and has some tangible improvements over the 0.8.x series, including natural scale layout and more customizable alt+tab thingy.

The reason I went back to the repo version was because gtk-window-decorator was buggy in the last few builds I did. Though that was still the git version, so I haven't tried 0.9.7. I bet it's better by now.

EDIT TO DIRECTLY ANSWER OP: The only reason the 0.9.7 version is not in the repos is policy only. The .9.x series is not considered a "release version" by the Compiz devs, and Arch doesn't put "pre-release" versions in the official repos. The 0.9.x versions I used were generally nicer than 0.8.x. Compiz is coming along nicely.

Last edited by pogeymanz (2012-03-16 19:40:30)

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: The state of compiz

This is incorrect.

I stand corrected.

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b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

Re: The state of compiz

Thanks pogeymanz.

I'll take new 0.9.7 version for a spin, see how it feels.

b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

Re: The state of compiz

compiled the 0.9.7 ubuntu version, and so far it is not usable at all. No window decorations, windows blink when being reloaded, can't drag windows across workspaces and right-clicking anything causes the wm to re-load and/or simply crash without ever getting around to doing whatever the rightclick was supposed to do.

Last edited by b9anders (2012-03-17 00:24:49)

pogeymanz

Member

Registered: 2008-03-11

Posts: 1,020

Re: The state of compiz

Interesting...

I haven't install the ubuntu versions before. I always used either the -dev or -git versions. You shouldn't use the -git version anymore, obviously.

I tried compiling the -dev version and it worked just fine. The only thing that didn't work was CompizConfigManager. For some reason, it didn't save any changes I made to the configuration. I didn't play with it too much, but I wonder if the version number needs to be bumped (0.9.5.92) or if you could just dump a hand-written .ini file in the ~.config/compiz-1/ directory...