Probably a cryptic title to many of you. Compiz is a modification/replacement of the linux X desktop environment (I believe it’s Gnome-only, but not positive). It was originally developed by Novell. It progressed, by third party devs, to a combination with XGL to make very fancy desktop features. Notably, desktop cube, wobbly windows, transparency, windows on a plane, etc. It really was quite impressive, even in its first releases. It’s easy to see the influence OSX had on it, as it emulates a lot of OSX features, but it also adds things I haven’t seen before. The current iterations are also very snappy performance-wise.

I thought I had already written my experiences with it, as I installed the compiz/XGL stuff on by Ubuntu partition a couple months back. But apparently I didn’t get to that in my big linux project post. I will. And I think I’ll make a little desktop movie of my compiz, even though a ton of people already have them on youtube.

Anyways. The project has been forked to Beryl. I mean, I think Compiz will still be around, just that the main third-party devs for it at compiz.net have decided to make their version more of a total project rather than a mod.

They don’t have a working version of Beryl yet, so don’t fret about how to changeover quite yet.