The “Break it Down” Blog

After much debate it looks like the Ubuntu committee has voted to have Compiz turned on by default in the 7.10 release.

NOTE: Compiz is the compositing technology that allows for the eye-candy effects like 3D desktops, fading-windows, transparencies, etc.

For the folks saying “it’s about time!” the problem is that Compiz has never been 100% stable due to some problems with 3D drivers. In the past ATI and Intel. Apparently the new ATI drivers much improve this situation while the Intel drivers still lead to incompatibilities and rendering problems (like playing a movie back on a 3D desktop).

The Intel driver uses the EXA rendering framework, which is making a lot of progress but isn’t quite to the production-stable stages yet, so the problems with the Intel drivers will likely need to wait for another 6-month release cycle of Ubuntu before all is right in that world.

At first when I read this I thought it was a dumb move, and that Compiz should be turned off by default but simply left in the Control Panel to easily be enabled by users that wanted it.

However, we have been on the cusp of “almost ready!” in the Linux desktop community for… 10 years now approximately. And the only way things are going to get better is to start riding the edge of innovation harder and pushing things out that may not be entirely ready JUST to get the bug reports and momentum behind a project in order to polish it up and make it ready for prime time.

When you consider what comes out of Microsoft every year, Compiz is likely more than ready enough for prime time… and having it go live by default in Ubuntu 7.10 will ensure that the level of testing, bug fixes and triage will increase 10-fold to make an excellent release in the following release of Ubuntu (8.04?). So I support the move.