I know it's stupid to respond seriously to a comedy troll piece, but I can't resist:
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.
Some of that made a lot of sense - I didn't know Compiz added zoom, I thought that was built-in, and I agree that the default Linux multiple-desktops system lacks a good visual metaphor.
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?
Yawn - wasn't there another article on HN recently that explained how hate articles always get 100 times the traffic as love articles? Don't fall for this troll...
What is his point, that there are useless open source projects? There are countless open source developers, no wonder some of them are doing useless stuff. I don't see why that should diminish the work of the ones doing useful stuff.
No. His point is that Linux users tout Compiz as the big thing. I've had Linux users tell me that OS X is ugly compared to Compiz, like it's some magic bullet. Linux users tell people to convert so they can get Compiz. A friend of mine in high school would preach it all over. And it's worthless technology that just lost its lead.
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.
You don't think it's possible to find loads of other people saying the same thing? Go on slashdot, and you'll see his points every time some kind of linux fanboyism pops up. Maybe there is something constructive in mixing it up with gems like "freetard" and random expletives, though.
I also checked a number of his other posts, and they are pretty similar.
I'm pretty tolerant of random expletives. And you find good comments in a lot of places. I'm certain I've seen Reddit comments linked as stories here before. But his blog is pretty consistently worth reading, he's got a very good mind for technical details, and he knows what he's talking about (look at his post about registries, for instance).
Ok, I'll give him a bit more rope. Personally, I'm just really turned off by this article, though. It's like someone constantly telling someone they'll fail until they get discouraged and do fail, and then congratulating themselves on their insight. But, I know you have a different perspective on such caustic communication, which perhaps I should adopt.
Because it makes good points. This is one of my favorite blogs to get articles from. The guy is a ranter, absolutely, but he isn't just trolling. He's almost certainly a long-time Linux user with experience developing. His blog isn't so much Linux hatred as it is hatred for a lot of the stupid stuff that gets thrown about in its name.
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.
But the Linux masses DON'T preach stupid wasteful things. So some developers decided that compiz matters, and they poured some time into it. Doesn't make them "the Linux masses".
See what I said to your other reply. Compiz is a Big Thing when it comes to promoting Linux (especially Ubuntu) as an operating system. It's always said something to the effect of, "Do you like that Vista and OS X look fancy! Look at Ubuntu! We wobble your windows! We have a spinning cube!" I once reinstalled Linux just to try it out, because a blog post that I read said that it set the standard for all operating systems. Compiz is a big name, and it's stupid wasteful, and it gets preached.
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).
Some people care for compiz and spinning effects - and look at the market share of Apple... But I simply don't like your generalizations. I agree that efforts on effects would be better spent elsewhere - or at least they should do it right. 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.
Apple doesn't make wobbly windows! For the most part, they don't include effects without actual, right-there performance impact! I don't want to debate this here, because I've debated it far too many times, but the genie effect lets you see where your window's headed, the bouncing icon on the dock shows you what program needs your attention, and the only irrelevant special glitzy feature I've ever seen on my Mac was the ripple that Dashboard shows you when you add an app, and I have Dashboard disabled. Also? When Apple does add a feature, they have a team working on it, so that if somebody were to quit their job it wouldn't fall apart.
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 should not market an OS based on a pointless feature that adds nothing but strain."
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.
If you don't think OS X's effects are useful, provide counterexamples.
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.
OK then, who is focussing on compiz - the Linux develors and Linux users, or the outsiders who write about Linux. I am guessing it is the latter, which again invalidates the articles point.
As I said earlier: I've got a handful of friends that use Linux, and when we discuss OS Compiz invariably comes up. In college, Linux users always bring up Compiz.
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 used to use Linux, but left because it really wasn't stable. It messed up repeatedly"
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.
I have Ubuntu installed through VMware right now, to try it. Exact same problem I had with previous versions: the audio card doesn't work and I've tried but it won't fix.
In 2005, Ubuntu fried my computer and I had to hard-reset everything. So it's hard feelings.
I guess the VMWare audio-card problem is more a VMWare problem than a Ubuntu one. What kind of computer did you have back in 2005? I have never heard of anything like it.
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.