Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE. Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins and a configuration system for the Compiz compositing window manager. It was created from the remerging of Beryl into Compiz.

Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE.

In late 2008 we witnessed the release of Compiz++, a rewrite of the Compiz core in C++ plus other invasive work in order to improve this compositing window manager. With Compiz++ being a branch of Compiz and various other developers working on their own branches, the future of Compiz was unclear, however, today it has been cleared up some.

Don't have a graphics card capable of running desktop effects with Compiz on Ubuntu? By enabling compositing in GNOME's default Metacity window manager, you get some eye candy and can run applications that require or benefit from a compositing window manager.

Yesterday we shared that Compiz++ and Nomad would be merged back into Compiz and today there are even more announcements coming out of the Compiz camp. With Compiz not having a clear road-map, a Compiz council has been established to begin charting the future of this compositing window manager.

Why you would want to do that? Because it uses less resources and it may run better for old or incompatible video cards (including Intel). You don’t even need accelerated graphics to run Metacity with compositing and it even works well inside VirtualBox.

Users of Compiz, a window manager that provides pretty visual effects, know that a lot of those effects are just for fun...Personally, I am most concerned with the Compiz plugins that add functionality to my desktop. There are plenty of those too. I am going to outline some of my favorites and most useful.

Thanks to Compiz you have better, slicker, and more efficient ways to switch from one application to another. Take a look at Compiz Switchers, and you'll never want to go back to the boring old panel buttons!

Last week we published Arch Linux vs. Ubuntu benchmarks to finally lay to rest that for the overall system performance the speed of the rolling Arch Linux distribution is not too different from that of Ubuntu when running with similar package versions.