If you thought Compiz was left in the dark once Gnome Shell comes out, think again. A post on the blog of one of the Compiz developers states that Unity will use Compiz instead of Mutter as the default window manager:

Most notably this was done for performance reasons, but also because a number of the new interfaces provided in compiz 0.9x allow for some great new stuff to happen with Unity.

And that means a whole lot for the Ubuntu users now when Unity has been announced as being default for Ubuntu 11.04 desktop (and not just for the netbook edition) - they will get to keep the Compiz effects and all the bling (but also usefulness) which attracts so many users to Linux.

This also means that the Compiz development will now be much faster and it will get a lot more attention then before (or at least more then in the last few months).


If you're worried your graphics card doesn't support Compiz, you should know that Compiz 0.9.x no longer requires Opengl or compositing to run. So basically it's not Compiz that will need to support your hardware, but Unity.

Thanks to vs8 for the tip!

The UDS-N (Ubuntu Developer Summit - Natty Narwhal) started today and Mark Shuttleworth already announced that Unity will be default for Ubuntu 11.04 desktop:

I'm not exactly sure what "new users" refers to, but it might mean that those who will upgrade will use the old Gnome interface instead of Unity. Also (important!), Unity will only be default if your graphics card supports it:

It is going to be a primary focus this cycle to enable Unity on as many chipsets as possible.

(Neil Patel, Technical lead for Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Unity, Desktop Experience Team)

A slide from Mark Shuttleworth's keynote at UDS-N

Unity is the current Ubuntu Netbook Edition interface and has received a lot of criticism since UNE 10.10 came out such as not being finished, poor performance and the lack of customization.

Also, a new icon theme will be designed especially for Ubuntu. It will not be ready for 11.04 but the work will probably start now and the new icon theme should be ready by Ubuntu 12.04.

Update: and a surprise (I for one definitely didn't see that coming): Unity will use Compiz instead of Mutter!

For more info, stay tuned!