Lubuntu switches entirely from Compton to Picom in Lubuntu 23.04

Development
#1

Lubuntu has featured the Compton X compositor for a while. Recently, in Lubuntu 23.04, the Lubuntu Development team has removed Compton entirely from Lubuntu, and switched entirely to the newer Picom compositor. The Picom compositor has been installed for a while, along with Compton, but both were disabled by default. Compton has now been removed from the Lubuntu seed, meaning it won’t be present in new daily ISOs of Lubuntu 23.04, and will probably not be present in the final release of Lubuntu 23.04. Picom has also been enabled by default.

Those who use Lubuntu 23.04 Lunar should probably purge the compton-conf package from their systems, and then run an autopurge (assuming you’ve not made any changes to your system that would make an autopurge cause damage to the rest of the system).

Note that this does not affect any users of Lubuntu 22.10 or earlier - you only need to do anything if you are running the Lubuntu 23.04 development release.

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#2

Note to self or others, but we’ll have to check release-upgrades have the compton-conf package removed as expected.

I don’t see any hurry on this though; it can always be covered with a note in the release notes of 23.04.

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#3

Ran 2 upgrade tests Lubuntu Kinetic to Lubuntu Lunar and can confirm the compton-conf package was removed as expected in both cases.

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#4

Does this mean LXQt Configuration Center > Window Effects
will be gone for good ?

#5

It will probably be gone in Lunar, I believe. It might not be gone forever, though. While we haven’t committed to the idea, we were thinking about the possibility of rewriting compton-conf to work with Picom and then shipping that sometime in the future. We have a lot on our plate, so this probably won’t happen this release, and we can’t guarantee it will happen any time soon, if at all, but it is an idea.

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#6

Glad to see this move because Compton is no longer being developed. I have used both over the years off and on. I switched to Picom long ago due to smoother desktop feel on older hardware. I would not expect the change to be noticed by many users with modern hardware.

I recall running the autoremove for the compton-conf package with my Lunar Lobster development machine.

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