First There Was Compiz, Now There Is Compiz++

[phoronix]

Phoronix: First There Was Compiz, Now There Is Compiz++

First there was Compiz, a compositing window manager that brought very interesting desktop effects to Linux, and then Beryl came about as a fork of Compiz before it ultimately turned into Compiz Fusion. Today though, on Christmas eve, the world can now meet Compiz++. Compiz++ is a branch of Compiz that brings several new features to the table and there are huge changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njk1Ng

[EmbraceUnity]

I have a feeling that KWin's work has been instrumental in all of this. The fact that they are switching to cmake makes this pretty obvious.

I wonder if compiz will be replacing KWin in the future? Perhaps it can replace Metacity too. That would be a really great thing for the linux community. Or at least this modularization should make it much easier to share code between the projects.

Granted, it would be trickier to share with Metacity since it doesn't use C++.

Considering how many distos dump metacity for compiz, it would make perfect sense for GNOME to dump it too, and for all of us to rally around one window manager.

[jijitus]

Just like with KDE 4, if it's not stable enough it won't conquer users. I hope a new architecture will fix all glitches and bugs that plague Compiz Fusion today.

[panda84]

No Composite required, possible X Render backend, C++, CMake... is it Compiz or KWin? :D

[d2kx]

I think KDE users will stick to the amazingly fast developing KWin4 which works quite well already. Compiz(++) will become the standard for Gnome though, I guess.

[deanjo]

I think KDE users will stick to the amazingly fast developing KWin4 which works quite well already. Compiz(++) will become the standard for Gnome though, I guess.

Not to mention KDE4 is pain free to get setup and use. Even works great in KDE3 when using kwin4 for your Window Manager.

[audi100quattro]

"Compiz++ also introduces support for tiled textures, which allows larger pixmaps to be supported whereby its broken into smaller textures to avoid such limitations."

Does this mean I can use compiz++ on my 9500 with two 1440x900 screens and not get everything past 2048th pixel go black when I start it?

If true, I can't wait for this to hit the sunrise or x11 overlays in gentoo. This is what has been holding back my use of compositing. I used compiz when I had only one monitor, and then quit using it when I got two. :(

[Vadi]

I wonder how C people will react to this.

[RealNC]

I wonder how C people will react to this.

It's sad to see so many people doing development for the sake of C than the other way around.

[_txf_]

It's sad to see so many people doing development for the sake of C than the other way around.

yeah,so true. To me, opengl always seems to make more sense in c++ than in c. Likewise for gui toolkits, and no gobject does not count as an oo language

[Vadi]

The vala and gobject stuff is rather neat actually. It's more about a cross-language thing than centered on C.

[RealNC]

IMO, a developer shouldn't become a "fanboi" of a language. The language shouldn't matter at all; pick the most appropriate one for a given project.

Unfortunately, many people seem to believe that "the best choice" is always C and have become quite obsessed with it. That shouldn't happen. Perhaps it's because C is all they know and try to hide that fact.

[Vadi]

Well, if C is all they know, then obviously it's the best choice.

[RealNC]

Yes, but they don't come forth and say it. They just go into arguments of why C is better than C++ instead of saying "I never learned C++".

[Kjella]

IMO, a developer shouldn't become a "fanboi" of a language. The language shouldn't matter at all; pick the most appropriate one for a given project.

Unfortunately, many people seem to believe that "the best choice" is always C and have become quite obsessed with it. That shouldn't happen. Perhaps it's because C is all they know and try to hide that fact.

Given the scope of the standard libraries, learning debugging and other workflow I find that most developers couldn't and shouldn't try to be good at more than a few. I've meddled in many languages from assembler to Java, but the only one I know really well is Qt/C++, not even C++ in general and I'm still constantly learning from that.

If you're designing up a large project where you'll be staffing up people with the right skills, then the project should decide the language. If it's already a given that you'll be the one doing the work, then the wrong language is often the right choice.

I'm sure I've done things that are easier done in other languages, but what I do works well and with a lot less effort than trying to figure out a new language. Of course, if I constantly found myself doing something my language of choice isn't suited for, things would be different.

[Tomservo]

The reason why a large majority of the *nix world has a hard-on for C and dislikes C++ is because former has a stable ABI and latter doesn't.

Unless the C compiler you're using is broken, you can link any shared object compiled with whatever C compiler. Try this with C++ and you're in a world of hurt, requiring you to use practically more or less the same compiler release as the rest of your shared objects or static libraries to avoid any troubles.

That and language bindings.

[Vadi]

This apparently isn't an 'official' version either, just by one of the prominent devs. The fact that he kept it under wraps for months doesn't make much sense either.

[sabriah]

Just like with KDE 4, if it's not stable enough it won't conquer users. I hope a new architecture will fix all glitches and bugs that plague Compiz Fusion today.

I hope you meant KDE 4.0, because I have yet to find a glitch with KDE 4.1. It is very good, and, from what I have have heard, KDE 4.2 will overcome my only real concern; it will allow desktop icons.

KDE 4.x (x > 1) is really nice.

[RealNC]

KDE 4.1.3 here. I'm not using it much though :P There are some glitches I'm not able to solve. Font rendering is messed up with DejaVu Sans:

http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/3844/kde4dv7.png

There are sound problems with OSS4 too and kwin crashes sometimes on logout. Also, when I login, some application pop-up from nowhere even though I closed them before logging out. And Yakuake pops up even though I didn't press F12.

[sabriah]

KDE 4.1.3 here. I'm not using it much though :P There are some glitches I'm not able to solve. Font rendering is messed up with DejaVu Sans:

http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/3844/kde4dv7.png

As I run Iceweasel, I missed that... ;)