
Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says
he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? [...] None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist [...] This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."
Member since:
2005-09-01
It's about 2 things:
- wasted effort (as author notes WM is much much more complex to get right than it appears)
- bugs, inconsistencies, and variances in implementations that cause headaches to application developers.
What the author suggests is not forcing simple functionality set upon everybody throat but simply promote the common (hard) part to a common system library / service that could then be extended implementing different policies people need.
Wayland, being the new, virgin ground is the best opportunity for that.