Realist Anew

Rather than reply to the comments left on my last post I’ve decided to write this so more people will see the answers.

First of all, my source of info is me. I’m on the compiz team in Ubuntu.

We’ve fixed the Intel driver so compiz+video works there unless you have a 965 (x3000 or x3100). If you have one of those compiz will refuse to start now. That is actually how we are dealing with most of the driver and/or hardware problems right now. We’re just blacklisting cards that have been known to have problems.

So, you shouldn’t have to worry about what happens when compiz isn’t supported on your card or doesn’t work right. In that case you’ll just get metacity. It’s not the greatest solution but it’s what we have to work with until proper fixes are done in the drivers.

The only hardware known to work with compiz is newer (2000 or later) ATI, Intel (other than 965), and nVidia. It might work on others if you use Xgl but those are the main ones. I doubt it’ll ever work on Via stuff, the driver situation there seems pretty bad.

On the other hand, we’ve done a lot of work over the past few weeks to get things working. Java apps, for example, should work now. We closed about 60 bugs in a week. Most of them were little annoyances, some were worse. A particularly bad one that is now fixed is gnome-screensaver not being able to lock the screen properly when compiz is running. I think we fixed the screen redraw issues after xrandr rotation but I’m not sure as my hardware does not support xrandr.

Another good thing, nVidia released the 100.14.19 driver which finally fixes the out-of-memory problems with texture_from_pixmap (black windows). Seems to also fix the problems with black screens after VT switch. All around it’s a pretty solid driver. We’ve also fixed the bug in Xorg that made nvidia+compiz+3d app crash the X server. nVidia should be working great now so long as your card is supported by the 100.14.19 driver.

Finally, Kubuntu will not be using Compiz. They are waiting for KDE4 which will have its own compiz-like compositor in kwin.

I hope this clears everything up.

Wow, I haven’t posted anything here for awhile.

Anyway, in a Technical Board meeting yesterday it was decided that we will have Compiz enabled by default in Ubuntu 7.10, barring any obscene blowups before the beta. Woohoo! I spent a couple hours today going through all the bugs open against compiz in Ubuntu and most of them seem like small problems. Worst case scenario the person can’t get compiz working at all but that’s to be expected.

While I was going through the list of bugs I pointed out some of the more annoying yet simple looking ones to upstream and we’ve already got fixed for them in gutsy now. I’ve got about 12 bugs I’ll be dealing with in the next few days. About half of them are little configuration tweaks so that’s obviously not something for upstream. The rest are just an excuse to get back into the actual compiz/compiz-fusion code again. I’ve spent so much time dealing with users and packaging I haven’t had much time to actually write some code. We’ll see how it goes.

So, now is the time to file bugs if you have them. Don’t wait until after the beta (beta freeze is the 20th) to jump in and start complaining.