Where is Compiz?

[erroneus0]

I'm glad I am able to switch to MATE out of the box. Long ago, I learned that I hated GNOME3. Especially on a laptop, it requires FAR too much mouse movement when using a touchpad. It renders all of the fancy look and feel into a clumbsy to operate mess. I learned that long ago, and after revisiting it again under CentOS7, I find the same holds true. Microsoft made the mistake of trying to make everything "tablet ready" but it shocked and disappointed me that GNOME wanted to mirror the mistake. There's no quesiton that some UI styles are more appropriate for touch-screen devices than others. But ONE UI to rule them all? Ridiculous. If Microsoft made cars, you would drive with a mouse and/or a touch screen. Would that be appropriate? Hardly. Different use cases require different environmental interfaces. Enough of that rant though.

I want my Compiz back. I was looking forward to getting off of CentOS 6.x and still am even if it means the best I get is MATE. But If I could have Compiz and all of that back, I would be a much happier guy.

[Lanza]

I'm in the same boat as you as far as migrating away from Gnome and loving compiz features, but I wanted to bump this post to see if any other users have attempted to compile compiz 0.9.12 on centos7. I had some success compiling the older Compiz 0.8.8, but when I grab the most resent build I'm getting compile errors. Has anyone had success compiling compiz .0.9.8 or above, or has anyone found a good guide for doing this on Centos?


Thanks!!

[owl102]

From https://answers.launchpad.net/compiz/+question/235670 :

The project is dead. Long story short, Canonical was the last company keeping this project alive, but they also lost any interest months ago. Google for the details if you are interested.

and

I'm no longer putting any work into compiz as a private individual. I stopped in about August and don't have any plans to continue.

I've written at length as to why I think compiz is a dead end and why development effort should be invested elsewhere. Most agree with me on this point.

[Lanza]

Looking at the log of changes in Bazaar, it appears this last revision by canonical was July 7th 2014. That's a while ago, but not months. Hopefully, they continue to support it in some small way. It gives linux as a desktop some coolness that it needed.

[Lanza]

I downloaded the 0.8.9 source from git. That was apparently the last old stable build, but was never placed in the releases on the site. All componants compiled and installed successfully, and I now have all my fancy animations working in xfce4/emerald on centos7. Here are some quick notes since I wasn't able to find info all in one place. I may make something more step by step later.

I added the general EL7 repo to yum, and had to use a pyrex rpm that was really for FC20. Between those two things I was able to install all the required dependencies listed here: http://wiki.compiz.org/Installation/Stable
I followed the compile instructions exactly on that page except I just installed in /usr rather than /usr/local.
After I compiled core I had to export a pkg_config_path variable with the location where I installed compiz for libcompiz to compile successfully:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig
(centos7 didn't seem to use this variable by default. I only set it once for compile time, and did not bother to add this perminantely)
Once everything was installed you also need to add the library directory where you installed compiz to the ld library config in:
/etc/ld.so.conf/
Make a file "usr.lib.conf" and add a line to it with a text editor "/usr/lib", then run "ldconfig -v".
After that just open the emerald theme manager, and set your theme. Then open ccsm, turn on window decorator/move/resize, and edit the window decorator command box to say "emerald --replace". After that I just ran: "compiz --replace ccp &" Once I had everything working I added that command to my xfce startup, and it was golden.