Compiz Gets Thumbs-Up for Gutsy Gibbon 303
Da Chronic writes "After a vigorous debate at the last Ubuntu Technical Board meeting, the board decided to ship Ubuntu 7.10 with Compiz enabled by default. The decision was made despite the fact that Compiz still has some significant issues relating to drivers and Xorg. 'For instance, there are some problems — like accelerated video playback issues with Intel drivers — that can only be resolved by using the EXA accelerated rendering framework which is still not ready yet. When asked why Intel isn't addressing the driver issue, technical board member Mathew Garrett explained that "Intel are working on the basis that composited desktops won't be ready for rolling out until EXA is stable enough anyway, so it's not a concern [for them].' In the end, all but one member voted to include Compiz in Gutsy."
and Compiz is what again? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:and Compiz is what again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep up with the times or use Google/Wikipedia when you don't know what something is (like you just did).
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Re:and Compiz is what again? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's neat, but I suspect that it's not very well engineered. [ohloh.net]
Re:and Compiz is what again? (Score:4, Insightful)
These are nitpicks and serious bugs I've found while testing for a few hours. Most are already in launchpad. Bugs don't go away because you don't like me. If you want people like me to go away, report and fix bugs. There's nothing wrong with the software existing -- it's a great tool to experiment with, and impress people. And it's certainly better than what Vista provides. I just think it's important to provide people with a flawless experience out of the box, and let them explore the more adventurous packages Ubuntu provides at leisure.
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What's worrying me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's worrying me... (Score:5, Funny)
anonymous anorexic anacondas
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You don't think users will use a 3D accelerated desktop? Forget the breathtaking effects this brings, the performance makes 2D X look slow and crappy.
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I have to agree with GP. In my experience, although the 3d effects aren't implicitly useful, they tended to make my computer FEEL more interactive, and I tended to feel less tired after using the computer.
Which I guess sounds weird. Maybe I can get a government grant to study wobbly windows.
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my turn,
asexual alcoholic amoebas
altruistic arthritic arachnids
dude.
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Compiz is...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps giving a brief description of what Compiz does in the article is in order?
Don't get me wrong, I would consider myself a fairly adept GNU/Linux user, but that does not necessarilly mean I know everything
Help computer...
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Compiz is a compositing window manager that includes a number of highly sophisticated visual effects like window shadows, transparency, and desktop zooming.
Now, you're right they probably should have put a description in the summary, but then they wouldn't give people (like ickypoo a few posts up) a chance to get a cheap +5, Informative with a Wikipedia link.
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sorry.
Re:Compiz is...? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll forgive you this time, though.
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You must be new here.
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You must be new... Ah, yes you've already admitted that. The GP (that means 'grandparent post' in /. speak) was being silly, although this is a prime example of 'never a truer word spoken in jest.' Most people on /. find it very difficult to admit when they're wrong, that's why that post has been modded-up: 'funny'.
There are a number of other things you should know about /. particularly all the in-jokes: Natalie Portman, hot grits, in Soviet Russia [wikipedia.org], Steve
Re:Compiz is...? (Score:4, Funny)
Never Ever Read the Articles.. That is for people with time to spare, and we are busy geeks..
Never Admit Being wrong, Just post that your being misunderstood, and what you were trying to say was....
If there have been more than 4 articles about google or apple this week, we hate them!
If the day ends in "Y" you hate microsoft
Corollary to above, If you post a genuinely well thought out, insightful comment about maybe MS is not all that bad This time you will be marked as Troll or Flamebait.
If a post is made by a "4 digit" user, even if they claim the Iraq war was started by Ceasar in 42BC, for control of the moon and the entrances to the caverns beneath the earth were the Hobbits live, you may never comment against them, or mod them down..
Funny Beats Intelligent comments any day.. (see this comment for reference, which is also a reference to the next rule!)
Last and most important, always try to Karma Whore!
Re:Compiz is...? (Score:5, Funny)
It's like Beryl. Hope that helps! ; )
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And Beryl? It's just another name for Compiz.
Any more questions?
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Desktop cube, see-through windows, other desktop effects (but not with the detailed configurability of Beryl)
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or the stability of all of those window managers that don't do the worthless fancy stuff.
Re:Compiz is...? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fbk52Mk1w [youtube.com]
Re:Compiz is...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You got that right! The reason I adopted Linux all those years ago was because it was robust and efficient. I could (and did) compile my kernel to remove unnecessary support for processors I didn't have, SCSI drivers, etc. And now it seems to get more and more filled with bloat and toys like this. I started using Ubuntu about a year ago, just out of laziness, really. But I think I'll go back to Debian. It just feels less flabby and I don't spend my time removing music players I don't want that came by defa
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With Linux, you at least get a chance to find a distro without it, or be able to remove it completely .
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Bloat++ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because then you have to manage the bloat of having two similar systems that are almost but not quite identical.
What part of using your card's 3D acceleration to make your whole desktop faster (and optionally prettier at the same time) sounds bad to you? This is almost universally a good thing.
s/compiz/kwin/ (Score:5, Funny)
Thankfully, you're using KDE, so you'll have at least 8 checkboxes to disable it.
PureEyeSugar (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bloat++ (Score:4, Informative)
As to removability, I would assume a single apt-get call or a couple clicks in a graphical window manager will remove Compiz completely. (You'd sudo the tasks if you are not root.)
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Re:Bloat++ (Score:4, Informative)
The idea is that no one needs to be root except to run particular commands (using sudo or gksudo). If you do need to run root you will create the root password and log in as root and be able to shoot yourself in the foot if you point the run in the wrong direction (ie: rm -R
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Type your password once.
Type the new root password twice.
Done.
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I imagine it would be easy to remove if they just gave us the root password.... (or am i getting my distros mixed up?)
sudo passwd
Now you have a root password.
Still, to disable Compiz all you'd have to do is click on "System"->"Preferences"->"Desktop Effects" and press the "Enable Desktop Effects" toggle button. No password required (it's a per user setting).
If you want to completely remove Compiz from the system, just click on "System"->"Administration"->"Synaptic Package Manager". Type in your password, and then do a search for "desktop-effects" and "compiz-core" (all over compiz packages depend on this, s
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Hopefully between maturing of this software, and ATI opening their drivers, stuff like this should'nt be an issue for tooooooo much longer.
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Very inconvenient.
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seemed to fix it for me
I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
But then, I now use wmii [suckless.org] almost exclusively, if I'm not just using plain ol' screen [gnu.org].
damn, you be a good poster and go check your links and there goes that frsit psot. oh well...
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever.
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I agree 100%. I've been running the Compiz with heaps of features turned on, on my old machine which is a Athlon 1.9GHZ with 512 RAM and a GForce MX-440 graphics card. (see full specs here [blogspot.com] (see PC called Number2))
While the specs for my 'number2' machine are pretty good compared to what some people are running Linux on, there probably at the lower end of what 'the average Ubuntu user' has, or at least what is being sold with Ubuntu pre
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Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever.
Gutsy doesn't expose the control panel by default. Their default mechanism simply provides a radio dialog with three options: no effets (this turns off compiz), some effects (this enables compiz, but with most features turned off) and lots of effects (this turns on most of the effects that aren't outright disruptive to users who aren't expecting them).
I would have preferred something between that and the settings manager. I'm also not pleased with being unable to find the window decoration controls (I thin
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But I don't think it really solves the problem of dragging stuff around with a mouse and the other problems with a traditional WM model. This tiling thing with good keyboard control has blown my productivity through the roof... now if I could just get off
I'm currently running a d
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much of a meaningful answer, but then again when posed like this it's not really a meaningful question.
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But then, I now use wmii almost exclusively, if I'm not just using plain ol' screen.
damn, you be a good poster and go check your links and there goes that frsit psot. oh well..
Keep in mind that Ubuntu is all about ease of use
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Ubuntu is not so much about ease of use, it's the desktop that has the main influence independent of distribution.
The success of Ubuntu is in the ease of installation.
So even with on Ubuntu it is possible to see beauty in Blackbox or WM, just easier to get it up and running.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing really holding it back is the stability issues (my desktop has no problems, but my laptop crashes at least once a day with it enabled). It doesn't hurt to install it and give it a try-- if you don't find it useful at first but it runs stable, then leave it installed-- you might come back and find it useful someday.
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I've actually been waiting for it to stabilize and for Compiz and Beryl to quit arguing amongst themselves for just this reason. The eye candy is nice, but I just want
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
It makes things more responsive... (Score:2)
This makes the whole machine feel more snappy when you move windows around.
Spinning windows also stimulates normal users drool glands. Doing it better than Vista is a good thing (and let's face it, that's not hard to do).
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It didn't actually do anything to improve my computing experience other than look cool. That makes it mostly a waste of electrons, IMO.
I find it (Beryl in my case) to accelerate most things I do on the desktop.
/.) finally grasped the concept of having multiple tasks open at the same time when she saw them in 3-D on the cube.
Switching between open windows is clearly more agile.
The most remarkable thing I noticed is that my GF (yeah, OK this is
Previously she would routinely close one application before opening the next, now she just flips between them.
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My main problem with it is that it kills all the 2D acceleration on my old Radeon. I tried turning on the EXA stuff but that only made it _worse_!
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... Recently I started using a tiling window manager (Ion - http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/ [modeemi.fi]) and my productivity has gone through the roof!
Its a question of which mode works for you. I found myself running through various incarnations of traditional WM using xfce, kde, fluxbox, icewm for a longtime, etc and then stumbled onto wmii. I discovered that what I'd been trying to do with the other WM's was already done with a tiling WM. That is I was trying to increase my screen real-estate by decreasing the size and effect of everything else. I thought for a while that transparency was the key to this and it did help, but wasn't the solution.
So so
to boldly go... (Score:3)
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No, it can use a floppy to load extra drivers if you need them. I've never had to do so. Whereas in the average Linux installer, if it doesn't come with the drivers already bundled, you're just SOL.
It would have been nice if the installer kernel were able to read USB thumb drives, but reinstalling isn't somethign I do often enough to care.
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No, you can use a floppy/cd/dvd/hd to load extra drivers during the install on common Linux distros like Fedora. Did it with some DPT scsi raid controllers around when Red Hat 5.x was hot. There are several other ways to install drivers from outside the distro-kernel tree. Patching the kernel source with develope
well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Does Beryl = Compiz now? (Score:2)
I really liked it, but there were a lot of problems - nothing insurmountable, but it did take a lot of work searching through forums and playing around with configurations to get everything the way I wanted it. There were stability issues, but I was using a lot of
Re:Does Beryl = Compiz now? (Score:5, Informative)
So, Compiz + Beryl == Compiz Fusion.
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On I8K/GeForce2Go? (Score:2)
I thought it would work in 7.4, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Maybe I'm not just setting it on right. I just want to offload some X processing from my CPU to my graphics chip, to make the workstation run faster overall. I don't need the fancy tricks to work, though it would be nice to try them once.
Is there a list of testing progress per graphics chip somewhere?
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Compiz doesn't actually do that in practice yet. On a reasonably modern CPU + GPU combo it won't slow you down, but the current version doesn't speed you up compared to a traditional window manager. Further, your graphics card (GeForce 2 Go) is old enough that it would have to offload a significant chunk of the rendering work to the CPU anyway.
Based on the last benchmarks I saw, the minimum
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The box I'm using at the moment has a GF4 MX440 card (Athlon 2600+) and it's pretty snappy with Gutsy and Compiz Fusion.
some one has to say it (Score:2)
XGL or AIGLX (Score:2)
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So as far as I know, it will ship with open-source Intel and ATI and binary NVIDIA drivers by default, with Compiz activated on all cards that support it.
View from the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that I evangelize Linux but since it is free, and I do teach it I find it very convenient to be able to just furnish them a copy on the spot. Flashy sells. It sells cars, bombers and hookers why not use it to sell an OS? Before anyone posts a response about bloat please remember that these are primarily 15 year old kids and the concepts of bloat are just academic to them. They won't care about bloat until they are running their own network.
Re:View from the bottom (Score:5, Funny)
They won't care about bloat until they are running their own network.
Or until they find it in one of the hookers you mentioned.
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Interesting idea....what if we were to use hookers to market our favorite Gnu/Linux distros... But hold on a second: People are just going to see through whatever superficial "Candy Coat" we wrap around the OS, right?
Nevermind. Just put some pics in the default install and you'll have hordes of teen boys installing Ubuntu in no time...
A Compo-whating Window Manager? (Score:2)
I still read that as "A Composting Window Manager".
I guess it depends on what kind of windows you have open.
Stability Now (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu is cherished by new-to-linux users as being zero-configuration and extremely hardware-compatible. Now they are introducing features which may fail to work with certain hardware. Why on earth would they do this?!
Why is it Intel's problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
So why does Intel need to address anything?
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So if a company wants their driver in the Kernel they will have to not just release the documentation but dedicate programming staff to the project. So they pretty much have to make the same effort as they would with a closed source driver but also prepare the documentation, manage the open source contributions if they get any, and make sure that their software is legal
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On the flip side, it's becoming easier and easier to get involved, for those who are interested. XFree86's pr
Compiz-Fusion is of value even without the fancy.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have not yet used compiz-fusion, although I have made sure the graphics card and the freebsd+xorg installation are prepared, when I do I sure hope that it is fairly simple to install a configuration that can be stripped down, so only the the cpu+mem eating code that are needed to render window, toolbar, systray and alike are active, making it efficient. Then I hope it is also easy to enable/disable simple features that suits my liking, with and option to save and switch between different profiles.
But I still wonder if what I dream of is simply a fairytale, or whether this can be expected?
Yikes (Score:5, Interesting)
New users (Ubuntu's target, I believe) will try Ubuntu, see this thing crashing all the time, and think "why did my geek friend tell me this Linux is more stable than Windows? My XP doesn't crash once a day."
One dev said "if we don't get it out there at some point it'll never get good enough." I don't see how foisting it on new users will help get it into shape. Are the Compiz-Fusion devs not busy enough already? There are apparently already KNOWN ISSUES that aren't being fixed, so how is turning it on by default going to improve anything? It surely will not generate better bug reports--new users will not know Compiz-Fusion is the problem; how are they going to bugreport it?
I hope Compiz-Fusion shapes up soon or that Ubuntu reverses itself; if not, this release will be a slide backward for many users--it will resemble Vista: a release with lots of paint, but with no improvements under the surface.
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
The basic idea here is that by shipping it with bugs, you'll motivate a few people who wouldn't have otherwise used it to investigate. In some cases, this is true. But realistically, we're not sitting on a pile of unused openGL / video driver development talent. Any such slack was picked up by Intel and put to work on what they felt pressing, and as such is not available to meet Canonical's unpaid requests.
We don't even know how bad it is
There are 150 open bugs against compiz, and only 3 labelled critical. But we really don't know how perception of compiz affects bug reporting. We know not all bugs found are reported by it's finder. It's possible that compiz is known to be unstable and rather than report, people just disable and get on with life, assuming compiz stability will continue to be a back burner issue. Dropping compiz into gutsy by default would likely expose more users to bugs.
This exposure is theoretically what testing is for, but for various reasons, hasn't come to fruition. One is that upgrades don't enable compiz. Another is that people come to testing not for Ubuntu's sake but for theirs. They're interested in significant new software, or preserving some hardware compatibility.
Or it's simply possible that that's all the bugs there are. But I doubt that.
However
Ubuntu does have a significant support structure in place capable of dealing with all but the most egreious failures (think broken X server pushed out). Launchpad does a good job of searching for duplicate bug reports to bring people together, and test workarounds / patches. It's also got a way to attach to upstream bugs to follow on with. This is good because compiz's bugzilla is a nightmare.
Xubuntu (Score:2)
Also, while many people seem sceptical about stability I guess we will just have to wait and see how well they handle the cases where 3D acceleration is a problem. I.e, will it be careful about enabling it if a proprietary driver is needed? How well will the crash handler manage to respond if it doesn't work etc... Under the assu
There are, or will be, oher ses for this technolog (Score:2)
Re:i for one (Score:4, Funny)
We set AC up with the perfect opportunity for a Goatse Gibbon, or a Gutsy Goatse, or a Goatse's Guts, and he swings and misses.
*sigh*
General public (Score:5, Funny)
Actually I love Ubuntu and am looking forward to upgrading to Gutsy when it comes out.
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Just because many of the people who post on the Ubuntu forums are noobs doesn't mean that the distro itself is only for noobs. Sure, Ubuntu is just Debian with lazy defaults - but for many applications that happens to be exactly what is needed.
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My guess is that they'll be using a reasonably stable version of compiz. What's wrong with the one click disable system they'll have, anyway?
As for Dapper being more stable than the releases since, that's by design. The next extra-stable release (version 8.4, code name "Hardy Heron") will come out next April.
Re:This is just typical stupid Canonical thinking (Score:5, Informative)
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Say what? Who doesn't have even a basic 3D accelerator, these days? I mean, sure, Ubuntu *could* tailor their distro to the few people out there still running Mach64 cards, but why would they bother?
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Re:Ubuntu (Score:4, Informative)
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Microsoft gave me $$$
Yer Maw (Score:3, Funny)
Mainly because I doubt there's anyone out there that *doesn't* know that his mom sucks