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.

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.

Compiz 0.9 is a complete re-thinking of Compiz 0.8. It’s like KDE4 was to KDE3. Totally new frameworks. Totally new buildsystem. Totally new API. It’s supposed to clear the ground from major architectural flaws that were in older versions of compiz to make development far easier and faster even for future version of compiz.

There have been several changes with the Compiz setup in openSUSE 11.0, including both exciting and new features in Compiz Fusion, and extra developments behind-the-scenes which make running and managing Compiz easier. Today we will be taking a look at these, and we’ll be catching up with Dennis ‘onestone’ Kasprzyk, a Compiz Fusion core developer and openSUSE user, to find out more.

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.

"A new merged community around Compiz project would be known as Compiz-Fusion, details of the announcement here on Compiz Mailing List."

Our friends Dennis Kasprzyk and Guillaume Seguin announced the release of Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.7.6 respectively. As is the tradition we always make a release with a lot of new features and of course eye-candy to go with it.

Back in May we had the release of Compiz 0.7.6 with rewritten plug-ins and other changes to boost the vitality of this popular compositing manager. Since then all activity on the Compiz front has been relatively quiet, until this morning. Danny Baumann has announced the release of Compiz 0.7.8.

" We talked a few days ago about the Compiz and Beryl mergence and the name of the newly born project resulted from this fusion, Compiz Fusion. The Compiz Fusion project tries to bring us all the latest 3D technologies, such as Cube reflection, paint fire on your desktop and a lot of new eye candy animations."