Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?
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Compiz was released in 2006 and is still maintained. Unity7 was released in 2010 and is still maintained. My question is why Wayland and Lomiri are so far away in terms of functionality, plugins etc. compared to tech made 20 years ago.
Are we building on top or reinventing the wheel?
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@shano Because Wayland is relatively new compared to X, which is a better comparison to Compiz although they're still not exactly 1 to 1.
As for Lomiri, it was developed from the ground up. Most of its major components were new. Unity 7 on the other hand was built over GTK/Gnome as far as I know. Also, it was dropped by Canonical on 2017 and picked up by UBports who's a very small community/foundation with a lot less money than Canonical.
Also, your question is a bit weird since it's expected that an older tech has more features and better developed than new ones since they have more years to develop. I mean what do you expect?
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@kugiigi Technology tends to evolve based on what's already been achieved. So for example when we talk about Wayland 20 years later than Compiz of course it is expected to be more feature rich and better while it's barely comparable as of yet in terms of effects, plugins, modularity etc.
Speaking about Lomiri surely the new stack and platform means starting from scratch but if you have the prototype of what has to be achieved and surpassed it's only natural to expect for example simple things like menu category drawers to be done years ago. From what I see the main effort is porting the new tech but that doesn't stop UI from evolving separately if only in QMLs and UI/UX sketches.
In conclusion comapred to early 2000s progress nowadays everything seems non-innovative and slow to come.
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@shano said in Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?:
Compiz was released in 2006 and is still maintained. Unity7 was released in 2010 and is still maintained. My question is why Wayland and Lomiri are so far away in terms of functionality, plugins etc. compared to tech made 20 years ago.
Are we building on top or reinventing the wheel?
From what I see, Lomiri is not reinventing Unity 8, it is Unity 8.
I downloaded the Lomiri source code and counted roughly 18000 commits between 2013 and 2017 (end of Ubuntu involvement) and 1400 commits between 2018 and 2025. The main reason is probably that Unity was a business project with serious resources behind it, while Lomiri (the new name for Unity 8 since 2020) is an open source project with a few part time volunteers. Also, it may be that there was so much work in Unity that there is not a lot of new development necessary, the bulk of new work being in other parts of the full (and huge) smart phone stack. I did not count but I think that a large part of these 1400 commits are just translations.I don't know Compiz but I tracked the project in its last hideout on Gitlab and counted about 30 commits in last 5 years, 20 of them in 2020. It's maintained in the most limited sense, there is almost no development.
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Compiz and Unity 7, as far as I know, where not used in the phone/table form factor. The design of Unity 7 was going in that direction, but the phone always used Unity 8 and the Mir compositor (Compiz and Unity 7 were on traditional xorg as far as I know).
On the other hand, Unity 8 and its successor Lomiri where focused on the phone/table form factor, there has been much less investment to make it operative for the computer desktop.
So I think Compiz/Unity 7 vs. Unity8/Lomiri is not a completely valid comparison.
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@gpatel-fr Thanks the commits history reveals quite a lot. What's interesting is that if we take specific aspects like the menu drawer, the compiz window manager settings Unity 8 is far more limited compared to Unity 7. This doesn't seem like reusing what was there but rather excluding large parts of it. The parts that made it unique.
The functionality that Lomiri has for desktop as of now is not much more different than a KDE theme. Very few new effects, lots of existing ones missing. The whole layout just seems bland like a Word/Excel stylesheet rather than something building on the Unity 7 design and presenting new concepts on top.
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@wgarcia Seems like a valid argument. There is so much effort going towards the mobile form factor that it's lacking in new fresh ideas simply because all resources is focused there. I also maybe overestimated the resource of UBports but I always thought that as a company behind it all you have to do is make it easy to work on for open-source developers - updated documentation, up to date tools to get started. While they are full on developing themselves while the tools needed for external people to come in are completely left behind unmaintained.
For example https://github.com/ubports/ubports-pdk
Issues open for 3 years while internal devs are climbing up the mountain alone.
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@shano said in Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?:
I also maybe overestimated the resource of UBports but I always thought that as a company behind it
There is no company behind UBports, it's a non profit association.
And there is no company behind Ubuntu Touch since canonical dropped it back in 2017.
If there where not UBports and volunteers behind it, Ubuntu Touch would've died 8 years ago. -
@Keneda Thanks, now I fully understand. My bad I didn't do my homework. Best of luck to the UBports team. If only they made contributing as an open-source developer a little more easier, a little more straight-forward I will jump wagons as I have a few tasks in mind to work on. As an ex-Scrum Master I am used to this type of thinking where if you make it easy enough for others to contribute and focus on removing impediments then volunteer power will multiply and give you even more time to make the process easier and more welcoming.
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@shano said in Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?:
rather excluding large parts of it.
well, that's a reproach that has been aimed at Microsoft (Windows
and Apple (Liquid interface).
When you go from a keyboard/mouse interface to something that can only be driven by fingers, you are most likely having to lose some functionality. The hand is a marvelous tool, but to manage a computer it's not always the most efficient. It's not for nothing that voice control has been added more often to phones than traditional computers. Yet clearly for the newer generations the classic computers are almost a curiosity from older times, the phone has won, warts and all.
