

Wobbly Compiz - critic
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2009/01/wobbly-compiz.html

======
decode
I know it's stupid to respond seriously to a comedy troll piece, but I can't
resist:

Were there people that thought Compiz would make lots of people adopt Linux?
That's kinda silly.

I like Compiz. It makes my desktop look nicer than Windows or OSX. But that's
not why it's cool.

Compiz has two different kinds of plugins: pure eye-candy toys, and useful
stuff. The wobbly windows, rain effect, and fire plugins are toys and are fun
for about 5 minutes. You enable them to see what clever people can do to your
desktop on modern hardware. Then you disable them.

In the second category are actual useful plugins. Virtual desktops are
fantastic, but I've found it hard to explain the concept to non-technical
people. Show them the Cube plugin for 10 seconds and it makes complete sense.
The Zoom plugin is great for people with bad eyesight. Also, if you come
across a flash video you can't fullscreen, just zoom in so it fills the
screen. I do this with Pandora when I'm not using the computer so I can read
the song and artist information from across the room. The Scale plugin is
better than Exposé. The Group and Tab Windows plugin introduces new and useful
ideas to window management.

Compiz is cool because the developers can be creative and experimental with
new UI ideas. Maybe some of them don't end up working out (e.g. writing on the
backs of windows seems like it might be really useful, but I've never found a
good use for it), but some of them have changed how I've thought about the
desktop interface.

~~~
unalone
Some of that made a lot of sense - I didn't know Compiz added zoom, I thought
that was built-in, and I agree that the default Linux multiple-desktops system
lacks a good visual metaphor.

Out of curiosity: how does Scale work? What does it do that's better than
Expose? And what is the Group and Tab Windows plugin? Is there a site that I
could read up on all this in one convenient place that includes screenshots?

~~~
decode
The wiki at compiz-fusion.org has good descriptions of many of the plugins.

Check out the Window Title Filter addon to the Scale plugin:

[http://wiki.compiz-
fusion.org/Plugins/Scale#head-d1eafdeb140...](http://wiki.compiz-
fusion.org/Plugins/Scale#head-d1eafdeb1408a0c789843e7e99e8bb3ff7951937)

Group and Tab Windows plugin:

<http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Group>

------
Tichy
Yawn - wasn't there another article on HN recently that explained how hate
articles always get 100 times the traffic as love articles? Don't fall for
this troll...

~~~
unalone
I wouldn't call this a troll. It's spitting mad, it's definitely a hate
article, but it's constructive criticism. It's _rude_ , but it's constructive.

~~~
Tichy
What is his point, that there are useless open source projects? There are
countless open source developers, no wonder some of them are doing useless
stuff. I don't see why that should diminish the work of the ones doing useful
stuff.

~~~
unalone
No. His point is that Linux users _tout_ Compiz as the big thing. I've had
Linux users tell me that OS X is ugly compared to Compiz, like it's some magic
bullet. Linux users tell people to convert so they can _get_ Compiz. A friend
of mine in high school would preach it all over. And it's worthless technology
that just lost its lead.

The point of his blog is to try and get the people working on Linux to _make_
useful stuff. He criticizes the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff that gets
lots of attention.

I think that's worth having a link to here. It makes an important point, and
it was an entertaining read besides.

~~~
Tichy
I am a Linux user and I never cared for compiz, so I consider your point
refuted.

~~~
unalone
Sigh.

His point _isn't_ that Compiz is the only thing Linux has to offer. His point
is that it's brought up as a major feature of open source, and that it's bad.

Look, I don't care that you disagree. You're allowed to disagree. My initial
point was that he wasn't trolling, he was making good points that just
happened to be coated in vitriol. Hacker News-worthy, in other words. I think
the fact that we're arguing about this shows that there was at least a hint of
truth to what he said.

------
marksutherland
Sigh. Why submit this pointless troll of an article when the LWN article it
cites has actual information, content and details?

~~~
unalone
Because it makes good points. This is one of my favorite blogs to get articles
from. The guy is a ranter, absolutely, but he isn't just trolling. He's almost
certainly a long-time Linux user with experience developing. His blog isn't so
much Linux hatred as it is hatred for a lot of the stupid stuff that gets
thrown about in its name.

I used to use Linux, but left because it really wasn't stable. It messed up
repeatedly, I couldn't get sound to work after a week's trying to fix it, and
in the end I decided that Vista was worth keeping around. The Compiz argument
is one of the ones that I most hate: the people who like Compiz are the people
who think that people use other operating systems for flashy effects. Not
true. The best effects are only minimally flashy, but the real flash comes
from doing something _meaningful._ (Case in point, the way OS X has a search
bar in Help that will take you directly to menu commands. It wows friends that
I show, but it's not graphic-intensive at all.)

Sometimes it's good to have open hostility in a blog post, especially if it
_does_ cite its sources. This isn't about the news of Compiz closing. This is
about how awful a lot of core Linux groups are, and how the Linux masses
preach stupid, wasteful things instead of the parts of Linux that really
matter. That's a message the community needs.

~~~
Tichy
But the Linux masses DON'T preach stupid wasteful things. So some developers
decided that compiz matters, and they poured some time into it. Doesn't make
them "the Linux masses".

~~~
unalone
See what I said to your other reply. Compiz is a Big Thing when it comes to
promoting Linux (especially Ubuntu) as an operating system. It's always said
something to the effect of, "Do you like that Vista and OS X look fancy! Look
at Ubuntu! We wobble your windows! We have a spinning cube!" I once
reinstalled Linux just to try it out, because a blog post that I read said
that it set the standard for all operating systems. Compiz is a big name, and
it's stupid wasteful, and it gets preached.

There _are_ good Linux things, and the blog has actually focused on some of
them before. But for every darling project that works well (say, Firefox),
there are a ton that are either bloated (OpenOffice) or broken (Pidgin) or
just wasteful (Compiz).

~~~
Tichy
_Some_ people care for compiz and spinning effects - and look at the market
share of Apple... But I simply don't like your generalizations. I agree that
efforts on effects would be better spent elsewhere - or at least they should
do it right. Maybe if the compiz effects would actually look good and be
useful, they would make people switch to Linux. I don't know, but you yourself
admit to having tried Linux just because of compiz. So maybe it matters after
all.

~~~
unalone
Apple doesn't make wobbly windows! For the most part, they don't include
effects without actual, right-there performance impact! I don't want to debate
this here, because I've debated it far too many times, but the genie effect
lets you see where your window's headed, the bouncing icon on the dock shows
you what program needs your attention, and the only irrelevant special glitzy
feature I've _ever seen on my Mac_ was the ripple that Dashboard shows you
when you add an app, and I have Dashboard disabled. Also? When Apple does add
a feature, they have a team working on it, so that if somebody were to quit
their job it wouldn't fall apart.

 _Maybe if the compiz effects would actually look good and be useful, they
would make people switch to Linux. I don't know, but you yourself admit to
having tried Linux just because of compiz. So maybe it matters after all._

No. You should not market an OS based on a pointless feature that adds nothing
but strain. You should sell your OS on what it lets you _do_. For Linux,
advertise the application repository, how easy that is. Advertise the multiple
desktops. You probably know better than I do what's good in Linux. But don't
advertise a feature that adds nothing functional, wastes graphic space, and
apparently was dependent on one person anyway. That would be like when Apple
released their "web clips" for Dashboard, if they hadn't actually added the
clipping feature and had only added the feature that lets you pick what the
clip looks like, and then touted that as a big feature.

~~~
Tichy
"You should not market an OS based on a pointless feature that adds nothing
but strain."

You said yourself that you consider the effects of OS X useful. So if that is
true (a big IF in my opinion), then it follows that there could also be useful
effects for Linux. That the compiz developers focussed on the wrong kind of
effects doesn't invalidate effects in general.

I never had the impression that compiz was hailed as the new killer feature of
Linux, so I don't understand your enthusiasm for the article.

~~~
unalone
If you don't think OS X's effects are useful, provide counterexamples.

I didn't say effects are invalidated. When did I say that? I said that "a
pointless feature that adds nothing but strain" is something that should not
be marketed, in the quote you took yourself.

The guy who posted about why he liked Compiz made a good argument. He listed
features that actually make sense to have. I think zoom should be built-in to
an OS. I like the idea of the window-sorter that Compiz apparently has. But as
somebody who casually reads Linux articles, the two things I hear are wobbly
windows and spinny cube. Those are bad things to announce.

 _The article is about Compiz._ I don't know why you're trying to make this a
discussion about effects in general.

 _I never had the impression that compiz was hailed as the new killer feature
of Linux, so I don't understand your enthusiasm for the article._

I'm enthusiastic because I _do_ have that impression. I read about it more
than I read about any other Linux thing beyond the flurry of articles about
what's-it, Oxygen, when KDE 4 came out. I might have that name wrong. Compiz
is what people focus on. And I'm enthusiastic about this article because its
point is that it should not be emphasized, and that a core OS feature
shouldn't rely on one central guy.

~~~
Tichy
OK then, who is focussing on compiz - the Linux develors and Linux users, or
the outsiders who write about Linux. I am guessing it is the latter, which
again invalidates the articles point.

~~~
unalone
As I said earlier: I've got a handful of friends that use Linux, and when we
discuss OS Compiz invariably comes up. In college, Linux users always bring up
Compiz.

Perhaps it's because my group is skewed way young, but these are my peers, and
they're who I get my judgements from.

