[mike-cardwell]

I'm confident that Canonical is on top of this.

[buster]

Nahh, Evolution is not the default client anymore (sadly, i prefer it to thunderbird) and Unity is built on top of compiz, where gnome-shell uses mutter. :(

[mseepgood]

Compiz is not without problems either: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/

And Mozilla has left Thunderbird more or less. Lack of developer power seems to be a pattern within open source desktop projects.

[buster]

Yes, knew about compiz, that's why it's a shame that Canonical chose this direction instead of putting more developer efforts into the gnome stuff.

[acabal]

I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them.

(Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introduced into plugins since Natty--window previews and wobbly windows, I'm looking at you.)

[mseepgood]

No. Mutter is not "yet-another-window-manager". It's an evolution of the Metacity code base (Mutter = Metacity + Clutter). So the Gnome developers basically continued using their window manager instead of hopping to yet-another-window-manager.

[buster]

Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402

Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).

[slurgfest]

Although Compiz is very, very customizable and hasn't changed all that much in years, so one would think it would appeal to all the people who are screaming about losing customizability and having everything change underneath them.