Wobbly Compiz
linuxhaters.blogspot.com
linuxhaters.blogspot.com
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.
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?
Check out the Window Title Filter addon to the Scale plugin:
http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Scale#head-d1eafdeb140...
Group and Tab Windows plugin:
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.
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.
I also checked a number of his other posts, and they are pretty similar.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps it's because my group is skewed way young, but these are my peers, and they're who I get my judgements from.
I have to ask: have you really ever used Linux after, say, 1998? I ask that because in my experience (I moved to Linux by 2000) it is a rock-solid OS. It won't work with every hardware I throw at it, of course, because not all hardware is documented enough for people to write drivers for it. I have had my troubles with cheap sound cards and cheap motherboards, but, all in all, the system never, ever, gave me any headache.
In 2005, Ubuntu fried my computer and I had to hard-reset everything. So it's hard feelings.