My understanding (and I could be entirely wrong) was that compiz was never actually meant to be as big as it was. Compositing was desirable for perfectly mundane reasons, and compiz was a rather cheesy tech demo.

I always found it amusing that while I considered compiz a novel way to test that compositing was functioning, others considered it the entire reason to switch DEs, or even OSes.

Yeah, it struck me as switching to Linux so you could run glxgears.

I do remember that Novell used glxgears in their compiz demos!

Hasn't Ubuntu switched back to Gnome recently? Since ~2009 most of the effort was Canonical-sponsored. The C++ rewrite was quite a dealbreaker in the flow of the project (which was originally written in C). The time it took to get the rewrite up and running and the language switch had a great toll on the motivation of the contributors.

Development is happening here: https://gitlab.com/compiz

Huge amounts of fragmentation in the dev community for one.. there were several major forks.

What else could possibly have happened? Fragmentation is the favorite sport of Linux devs.

that was a long time back (2007) though, when the original dev was not willing to integrate contributions

I guess that rules out any chance of a port to Wayland.

You cannot port a Window Manager to Wayland. You rewrite a WM for Wayland.

(disclaimer: Co maintainer of AwesomeWM here, we are doing it by merging with the Way-Cooler project)

AwesomeWM user here - thank you for your efforts! :)

This is great news!