2 Minutes for Ubuntu Eye Candy!

This guy is advocating that you turn your box into a "desktop jukebox" by enabling all sorts of strange compiz effects. He adds that it doesn't come with a computational overhead.

It does come with another overhead however: A giant headache and distraction.

I think compiz is very nice to play with but if I want a sane and functional desktop I switch it off. I personally have yet to find a productivity enhancement with it.

That is not to say that this isn't possible but I think the compiz developers should focus a lot more on endusers and their needs and less on graphics tricks. They might get more bang for their buck if they thought more carefully about exactly what a regular user wants from their desktop. Innovations like a mouse had an obvious advantage over a keyboard in certain situations. What is the equivalent for compiz? Don't see it myself....

Actually, I find some aspects of Compriz very useful. The Cube, or in my case the hexagon makes switchint to the correct desktop easy, and efficient, the Wall makes it easy to see what applications are running where, and move Windows between them, and the flip search makes locating a specifi window easy, all these I can do with the mouse, so it's true point and click.

But that's only because that's how I set it up.

I have a disagreement with the comment that you wont take a performance hit. Computers that are compiz capable marginal will see a performance hit. Simply watching top/htop while enabling compiz will show the resource use clearly goes up with it active. This can effect computers that are otherwise much more than marginal under high load conditions. Any time your using resources to keep your desktop running versus other processes, thats a performance hit. Its one reason to either keep a lightweight WM handy or learning how to do things without a WM at all, thereby freeing as much as possible towards some other goal.

I'm with TA on this. I like some features of compiz, but find most kinda pointless. It's also nice to be able hit a key and show Windows users my transparent octagon of desktops with their floating windows and watch them oooh. :)

I personally like XFCE + Compiz on my laptop.

Quoting:t's also nice to be able hit a key and show Windows users my transparent octagon of desktops with their floating windows and watch them oooh. :)

That too, only I do it with the mouse, by grabbing the top centre of the screen and dragging, makes it seem even more magical, it's also more efficient. I have the mars lander 360 degree photo as my background,the hexagon floats about where the camera was.

I'm all confused on Compiz. Is it a standalone app, or does it depend on Gnome? I'd like to try it on my Debian box running KDE 3.5. I have an ATI graphics card with genuine 100% Free 3D drivers, and it seems to work fine.

Compiz doesn't need to depend on Gnome, but some backends and plugins do.

Quoting:or does it depend on Gnome?

That's a flawed notion, in my opinion. There's no such thing as 'dependent on Gnome'; as Gnome is just a 'set' of packages (on most distro's); and so is Compiz. Subsets of Compiz can be dependent on other subsets of the (meta-)set that's known as 'Gnome'.

To make it worse, under Gentoo* you can compile Compiz with or without Gnome support, and with or without GTK support. Same for kde, startkde4, SVG and cairo: You can make Compiz support (USE) them or not.

Gnome is not installed here (though tiny parts of it are, because GIMP / gtk-gnutella are on this system), and it seems 'portage' is willing to install Compiz and its main plugins without too much Gnome-overhead.

*Can do this too on other systems of course by manually tweaking the build process, but Gentoo makes it easy.

Quoting:I like some features of compiz, but find most kinda pointless.

Different users may like different features. Maybe some kind of 'popularity' vote would be nice, and if it would turn out some features that have been around for a while are used by almost nobody, they could be deleted. But the last time I looked at the Compiz page (2007 or so?) it clearly screamed 'the more the better' at me.

I was very interested to learn how Compiz helps the visually impaired.

For me, however, the desktop effects actually make me a bit nauseous, so I turn them off.

I think expo and task switcher for all windows are very useful and use them all the time.

I also use transparencies when I have bunch of terminals open and want to see something behind one.

no performance on any of my machines since the 3d card is doing all the work.

> I'm all confused on Compiz. Is it a standalone app, or does it depend on Gnome?

Slackware (which doesn't include Gnome, but does include GTK and some other Gnome libraries) has compiz, so it's not necessarily dependent on Gnome.

One thing I noticed when I turned on desktop effects in KDE4 (it's not Compiz, of course) is that it enables double-buffering. It's nice because with it some windows don't take very visible amount of time to repaint themselves on desktop/window switch, like they're fond of doing. It's enough for me to consider switching effects on. Unfortunately my home computer has an integrated Radeon, which is too slow on Free drivers (at least in the current state - two months ago they didn't work at all!), an my work laptop has an Nvidia chip - and that's 'nuff said ;)