So Compiz/Fusion has gotten increasingly mature within the last few months, and the first demo of MPX+Compiz is up on YouTube. Also, a Compiz Fusion-based LiveCD (w/ Slax and GNOME) is in the works.
But what caught my eye in particular with all this hustle and bustle was this forum post by Oasisgames from May.
Well, I think he has a point. A DE that builds off of a generic (and immensely popular) window manager like Compiz/Fusion by default could get a head start in comparison to the competing desktop environments which use their own in-house compositing window managers:
- Xfwm (the first in-house WM with compositing capabilities) is used by XFCE
- Metacity is used by GNOME
- KWin is used by KDE
There aren’t that many other compositing window managers still in development, and the above-mentioned have only recently begun to expand their expandability in response from Compiz. Thus, Compiz is usually used to somewhat replace the default WMs in the above desktop environments.
But if those who’d wish for a Compiz-based desktop environment were to pick a widget toolkit, which one would they go with?
Well, at the moment, the dominant WTs in Linuxland are GTK+ and Qt: Qt4 was released last year (and with it, eventually, the controversial KDE4), and a GTK+ 3.0 is being currently discussed (and with its arrival, hopefully, will come GNOME 3.0 or GNOME 2.30…whatever).
Qt is seen as being much more young, hip, fresh and portable (and, much earlier on, proprietary and corporately-hogtied to Trolltech, now Nokia), while GTK+ is usually seen as the bothersome, doddering old coot that refuses to die (oh, and the developers of which complain “NO maynnnne…GTK+ 3.0 will break ABI stability, why can’t we stick with old faithful and just chill….”), but is cheaper to use.
For this reason, while Qt is almost exclusively identified with KDE, GTK+ is a tad bit more widespread, being used by GNOME, XFCE and ROX Desktop.
Oh, and it is used by the Cream Project, which plans to integrate Compiz-Fusion in the future.
I like how some free software engines are becoming more like modular commodities that can be used in a wide variety of settings. With Xandros buying Linspire (which bases their OS on Ubuntu) and potentially establishing Ubuntu (at a relatively infant stage in comparison to older proprietary operating system platforms) in the netbook market, and KDE and Apple’s WebKit becoming an extremely popular web rendering framework on a wide variety of operating system platforms (both FOSS and non-FOSS), the fact that free software falls into place for the purpose of longevity (in comparison to the proprietary, closed source software that is usually here today and gone next year) and still allows for a wider range of flexibility and extensibility makes it valuable for those who may prefer to take a different, more personally-appealing route with their own computing experience.
Also, someone’s finally developing a Linux take on Cover Flow: Gloobus.
