The Ubuntu technical board has decided to forgo the inclusion of a compositing window manager and proprietary video drivers in the default installation of the upcoming Ubuntu release. Instead, the technical board plans to incorporate new system configuration components that will allow users to trivially install, enable, and configure compositing support and the requisite video drivers. The board's decision was largely made based on the compositing software's lack of maturity, not criticism of proprietary driver inclusion. Compositing window managers like Beryl and Compiz, which leverage the 3D hardware acceleration features provided by proprietary graphics drivers, bring rich visual interfaces to the Linux desktop and provide users with sumptuous eye-candy.
Prior to this decision it was generally assumed that proprietary video drivers and the open-source Beryl window manager would be included by default in Ubuntu Feisty installations. Although a majority of Linux users leverage proprietary software components for hardware support or multimedia, the planned inclusion of proprietary video drivers in the default Ubuntu installation received much criticism from Free Software purists who argue that proprietary drivers "taint" the Linux kernel and potentially violate the kernel's open-source license.
Despite the contentious nature of the proprietary driver issue, the Ubuntu technical board's decision to hold off on the inclusion of compositing functionality has more to do with the software's lack of maturity rather than concerns about tainting the kernel. In the official decision, the board states that "the exception granted to the Ubuntu Licence Policy at the project's inception, which allows the use of closed-source components where necessary to provide sufficient hardware support, remains valid and pragmatic," but "some of the relevant software necessary to implement [the compositing desktop proposal] is not yet considered mature enough to deploy in the default Ubuntu configuration."
As a user of the Beryl compositing window manager, I fully concur with the board's reasoning. Although Beryl has a tremendous amount of potential and a lot of unique and innovative features, it isn't stable or reliable enough at this point to justify inclusion in the default installation. The upcoming 0.2.0 release of Beryl will resolve many of the software's most critical problems, but there are still many issues that must be resolved before it is sufficiently reliable for default inclusion. There are also some unanswered questions about the performance implications of bringing 3D window management to legacy Linux computers. Of the people I know who have installed Beryl, approximately half of them have given it up because of stability or performance issues. I personally had to give up Beryl and switch back to Sawfish because Beryl doesn't presently support my triple-head Xinerama configuration, a problem that is actively being resolved.
Ultimately, I doubt that very many users will be disappointed by this announcement. The availability of a configuration mechanism that automates installation of a compositing window manager and proprietary graphics drivers will ensure that anyone who wants 3D desktop support will be able to get it very easily, with less effort than is presently required.
PowerPC architecture support to be reclassified as "unofficial"
The Ubuntu technical board also announced that the PowerPC architecture, formerly used in Apple computers, will no longer be officially supported due to lack of resources. This isn't particularly surprising, given that modern Intel-based Apple computers can run the regular x86 version of Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu is giving up on official PowerPC support, there are still several distributions that do support the architecture, particularly Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux.
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