Matt Van Stone

Just a quick note to say I just installed Compiz Fusion as per the instructions I posted about earlier. The instructions dont tell you that you have to install the main plugins and extra plugins packages if you want all the cool effects that they showcase in that video. I was pretty disappointed until I figured that out.

I really like the expo plugin. That is the one that shows you all 4 sides of the cube and you can move windows between all of them. To be honest I have never really been able to utilize more than one desktop, so thats something I want to work on.

I must say though, I am dissapointed with the performance. The video makes it look soo smooth. It’s not quite as nice on mine. A lot of the animations are jerky and creating windows is a little slow. I do run a 7800 GT 256MB video card, so I dont see why this is so bad. I tried a few tweaks on the Compiz forums but I didnt see too much improvement. Although, I didnt spend much time on it.

One thing I was impressed with was how easy it was to get up and running. The first time I installed Compiz over a year ago it took me several hours to get working and I believe it was probably more than one session worth of research before I finally got it working. This time it was less than 20 minutes and I had it installed and working. That just goes to show the type of advancements that are being made in Linux.

Compiz has been around for a long time. There was a forked version called Beryl that I used for a long time that was very popular. The two projects have merged again and this is what they have produced:

For those of you who don’t know, Compiz Fusion is a composition window manager for Linux. It will run on basically any GUI (Gnome, KDE, etc). The purpose of Compiz Fusion is to make the graphical user interface more fun to use at the same time as making it more productive.

This project is still in an alpha stage, which means it is not stable or ready for the general public. You can still download and install it on your Linux though, just don’t complain if you have stability issues. Hopefully they can work on getting this to a stable state now. I’d really like to see that.

• OpenCompositing
• Installing Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu/Kubuntu