
Apology from Compiz maintainer - Garbage
http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/
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gregschlom
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."

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rbanffy
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.

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keithpeter
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.

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a_a_r_o_n
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.

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sp332
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 :)

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jerf
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.

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sp332
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.

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jodrellblank
"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)".

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jebblue
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.

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comice
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.

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pottypoop
rewriting compiz in c++ was exactly when it died

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billpatrianakos
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.

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

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keithpeter
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-...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/87287/can-i-uninstall-compiz-if-
only-using-gnome-shell)

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

FWIW, I'm a GNOME release team member.

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keithpeter
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.

