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.

Compiz has a lot of nice effects that are mostly useless. In my quest to find a work place without distraction compiz effects doesn’t really fit it. Here are five effects that I actually found useful...

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.

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.

Remember when it was a big deal that Ubuntu was going to include Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion out of the box? It wasn't long ago, actually, yet Linux desktop effects have come a long way since then. We've gone from desktop effects on Linux being a cool add on you could install if you wanted to do it yourself, to having it be part just another part of the Linux desktop.

So you’ve followed the latest series on KDE 4.5 and you are now using the spectacular latest release from the KDE team. You want to use Compiz, but quickly realize that it is not necessary as KDE has it’s own built-in compositing effects. In this article I am going to introduce you to the KDE Desktop Effects manager and how to use it to make your KDE desktop experience as sleek as it can be.

For a long time it has bothered me that Compiz does not seem to run as smoothly as Metacity on my desktop system. With desktop effects switched off, moving windows around the screen would seem smoother. With desktop effects switched on, I'd also notice tearing in areas of the screen with fast motion including in videos.

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.

Ubuntu 8.04(Hardy Heron) comes with a full featured version of Compiz Fusion, but the main problem is that there is no way to configure these effects. To configure the different options we will use a tool called Compiz Config.