Hi all,

thanks to the restless efforts of the User Platforms team and friends, we have concluded our clutter/mutter/clutk/unity work for the previous cycle. Although we didn't get to the point of providing an ultra smooth user experience, this is still a great success and more than we hoped for at the beginning of the cycle.

You can find all the related packages at ppa:asac/armel1.

For those who are wondering, the fact that Unity will now move to compiz does not invalidate our efforts at all. Unity was just a means to an end, a way to recognize some of the ingredients that are needed to provide a smooth user experience on ARM (and GLES2.0 platforms in general).

Some highlights from our efforts:

* We clearly communicated our technical and distribution related needs to upstream clutter and contributed patches to support our goals. As a result, clutter is progressively becoming more friendly to distributions that need to ship multiple backends and perform runtime selection.

* We standardized on and provided a proof-of-concept implementation for accelerated WM compositing using the EGL_KHR_image_pixmap and GL_OES_EGL_image extensions for EGL/GLES2.0. This is a critical feature for providing a smooth user experience on GLES2.0 based platforms.

* We provided vendors with a real-world test case that can be used to exercise their drivers on.

For the next cycle we are moving away from active development on clutter and mutter, but we will still keep an eye on them (esp. clutter). We may even be able do some more work on them if we have the resources and there is a high demand for it.

Thanks, User Platforms team