Today we soldier on to Desktop Effects with Compiz Fusion. It can be safely said that few features are as keenly desired as Desktop Effects. Ever since Compiz was announced XXX years ago, users and developers have been playing with the bling-tastic effects and wondering when it will hit a desktop near them. Well, the wait is no longer.

So, that proprietary 3D graphics driver you installed is now causing you some problems, so you got rid of it. But there's a problem. Your KDE 4 installation had those fancy desktop effects enabled, which now aren't working. Instead of a KDE desktop, you have a nice white screen.

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.

Compiz Fusion is the best thing that happened to Linux desktop user experience yet. In the world of Linux bashers who argue that Linux is not quite ready for home users; compiz is one of the few things that really set Linux apart from other OS with major market share.

One of the coolest things about Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) are its new “Desktop Effects”. Desktop Effects are really a combination of two opensource components written by Novell’s David Reveman, Compiz and Xgl.

KDE’s visual effects for windows and menus technically dates back to KDE 3. With the coming of KDE 4, the number of effects has multiplied, and KWin (KDE’s window manager) is now on par with Compiz.

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.

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.

Since the release of Ubuntu 8.04, Compiz Fusion has been updated to version 0.7.6. Been eying the new cylinder and sphere deformations effects or other new plugins? It's not hard to upgrade Ubuntu 8.04's version of Compiz to get the latest and greatest desktop effects.