Comment 74 for bug 876198

It seems that the developer I was communicating with was mistaken as to the cause of this issue - and he's "not really supposed to use work time to support things like the cube."

The root of the problem here seems to be that Canonical/Ubuntu developers have decided that, even though their new pet project Unit depends on Compiz, they don't actually support Compiz; as seen in the mailing list discussion mentioned here several comments back, some of them are even pushing to remove the CompizConfig Settings Manager from official Ubuntu repos completely, because people use it to break things and then file bugs. The actual problem here is surely that they've broken Compiz (or "upgraded" to a broken version because they haven't tested properly before upgrading - I'm not sure which, but I'm also not sure which is worse) and are ignoring that fact because it's part of Compiz that the all-holy Unity doesn't use by default.

Ubuntu seems to be moving rapidly away from a good base that anybody can easily tweak to suit them, and towards a pre-packaged box that breaks if you so much as think about tweaking it to suit you. I've been using Ubuntu since the relatively early days, but it seems to be becoming exactly that which I sought to avoid by moving to Ubuntu as my primary OS - a precarious arrangement which is liable to topple if looked at the wrong way. (Yes, it's always been possible to break Ubuntu - but you used to have to actively try doing something out of the ordinary to do so!)

If anybody can suggest an alternative distro that includes kernel >= 3.0, Gnome (preferably 2, but I'll take 3 if it's a stable build which plays nice with Compiz) and Compiz (a working version - not this unsupported, broken mess), I might just have to switch. I can't downgrade to an earlier Ubuntu, as the main reason for moving to 11.10 was to get kernel 3.0; 2.6 doesn't support half the hardware in this laptop.