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Ever tried compiz' Enhanced Zoom Desktop plugin? You can zoom in and out on your desktop with your mouse wheel and the Win key, and maneuver around and type in the zoomed desktop. Very handy for using my 32" CRT TV attached to my stereo rack computer by S-video from the couch 5 meters away. Or at least it was until changes to xorg made it impossible for me to install the crummy fglrx proprietary ATI driver on my onboard video adapter (which doesn't have 3D radeonhd support). Now I have to sit close or use VNC from my laptop. Hmmm, KDE4 seems to have a magnifier plugin for Desktop Effects that is similar.

I suspect Windows 7 and OSX must have something similar?

This is just the same problem Noted in XKCD.

Good battery life is not cool. Open source software, especially a mutt like linux, is all about cool.

Good battery life requires annoyingly huge amounts of microoptimizations and chipset-dependent tricks. Which is most definatly NOT cool.

Incorrect, at least in this case.

This problem has nothing to do with whether it is cool or not to squeeze and extra hour or two out of your notebook... This problem has to do with hardware support.

Linux developers continue to have trouble getting access to the hardware they need. Hardware developers are frequently unwilling to divulge the necessary secrets for F/OSS developers to write good drivers... And those same hardware developers are frequently unwilling to devote the time/money/effort necessary to write good drivers themselves...

So you wind up with half-crippled hardware under Linux. You get video cards, motherboards, hard drives, motherboards, etc. that won't properly spin down or hibernate or sleep or whatever.

Other folks in this thread have mentioned that this particular notebook ships with an ATI video card. ATI has notoriously crappy Linux support. This is a video card we're talking about... Geeks love video cards. It doesn't get much cooler than 3D graphics - look at all the time and effort going into projects like Compiz.

I can almost guarantee that if ATI would open up their documentation you'd see better battery life just as quickly as folks could code it.

And have you seen the compiz configuration setting manager? Worst UI ever.

I sentence you to death by options!

Don't mind him. He's clearly never heard of Compiz (more info). Notice how smooth all the transitions are? Whenever I see an Aero desktop it feels so much clunkier... kinda like the cheap animation of Saturday-morning cartoons versus, say, a Pixar movie.

Notice also the plethora of plugins for Compiz. It'd be a cold day in hell before Microsoft let you do something like the Wiimote plugin for Aero.

Yes, Linux is a great OS, but it simply doesn't have photoshop or anything that compares to it. GIMP is a clumsy hack and is frankly like Paint in comparison.

Compared to Photoshop, Gimp might be like Paint, but compared to Paint, Gimp really is like Photoshop :-)

Gnome, KDE and Explorer have nothing on the frankly revolutionary changes Mac has seamlessly implemented in the last few years. There are a lot of poorly implemented whizbang features like Time Machine's GUI or Safari 4's Top Pages, but there are also features like Spotlight, Expose, the new stacks in the Dock, and Quick Look.

Maybe you can check out

• Beagle
• Compiz
• Cairo-Dock
• gloobus

Call me back when Linux works with my hardware out of the box

Call me back when you buy hardware that works with Linux. :-)

Well I started something at the compiz forums. You might have something at the end of thanksgiving break if you're very lucky.

The people who think this should read some books on user interfaces. This kind of 3D UI has been analyzed for decades...

Back up a bit. Super Mario Bros 64 (the first 3D platform game) came out in first about a decade ago. If it took the game industry that prides itself on being "ahead" so long to get around to 3D in any meaningful way, I seriously doubt anyone could have made anything worth analyzing "decades" ago for anything. Especially not a web interface.

- while the world s 3D, the display technology itself is 2D. Introducing 3D content in 2D automatically means some information will be occluded and needs to be found through navigation.

I would really like to see something like browser viewer for a molecule (that is inherently 3D) and its chemical interactions, pictures of animals from the web, movie scenes, basically anything other than text, done better on the whole in 2D than 3D.

Plus, what is to stop text from being rendered in a way that the immediately relevant stuff is in front of you from the start? With 3D you can also use the back (or sides as well) of text boxes to display additional information (for example a log of events)

- humans suck at 3D navigation. While we live in a 3D world, we have evolved to move on a 2D surface. Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.

Tell that to the Compiz Fusion community, etc.

Could be that applications have not yet been developed and people are always willing to make a sweeping analysis of something that has not had enough time to really show its virtues.

Damn it, I want my holodeck in the future. No one is going to remember how we got there (through many failed attempts, each attempt bringing something new though), if it does come around.

- 3D is a really poor use of your "screen realestate" (i.e. the number of pixels you have on your screen). In 2D, almost all of your pixels can be used to show important content, in 3D you are bound to have lots of your pixels (often way over 50%) show 3D context that does not contribute to communicating the content itself.

Again, a lot of 3D content (non-text) is probably "missing" from what you do at the moment with computers. This content is richer than 2D equivalents because it describes a lot of detail at once, where several 2D images would otherwise be necessary.

Also, 3D does include surfaces of 2D (for example a cube). What you are using in 2D can be thought of as just a 2D projection of an environment already "3D."

You can imagine reading the text from a book using different levels of zoom as well. Zoom out too much and you see the outline, zoom in to see the content. This is a "2D" thing, but should make it much easier to navigate (even when pixels become not as important as the geometry).

Sorry for picking apart your post like this. However, citing reference sources would be nice next time.

How to get ARGB visuals on the background in GNOME 2.20 - in theory someone smart should be able to make it work on 2.22. Dunno if it works any way but with compiz desktop plugin, haven't tried.

This is cool, if only I had a pair of green and red (anaglyphic) glasses I could have my 3d desktop cube and wobbly windows and AWN pop out of the screen at me! Now that is cool!

I'm using whatever the default window manager comes with Ubuntu when using desktop effects (compiz).

There has been a shift (at least a decade old) of applications using a single window rather than multiple windows.

I have to agree that, for me, the best writing environment is a terminal with vim (often using Compiz' ADD Helper to dim the desktop and all other windows)

Also, a lightweight markup language, like Markdown, lets you write normally - but be able to convert your document to XHTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc etc.

The biggest downside to using vim is that, unlike Scrivener, it doesn't give you explicit places to put your notes / outline / etc. So, using vim, you're free to put your notes / etc wherever you want ... both an upside (freedom) and a downside (something you have to figure out and that might distract you).

For drafting, I often using an SCM like git or subversion, but for little snippets and free-writes, etc? They might be written down on paper, they might be in a random note file ... who knows?

It might be worth it to use screen or vim split screens to reproduce something like Scrivener provides, with designated places on the sides to have notes, etc etc. I think I might try that out ...

But, come-on, really ... don't we use vim because it's what we use all day, anyway? As sysadmins / programmers / etc, it makes sense for us to use the editor that we always use (which is available on all OSes, as well).

I use vim for my writing, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use git for keeping track of my files / drafts / revisions, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use markdown for my markup, because it's what I use all day anyway.

How about this? It looks pretty cool with the glasses.

Compiz doesn't work on every graphics card (or with every driver). The Compiz-Fusion wiki needs reports of which HW/drivers work or don't. That list, in turn, will help recruit many more people to test and develop the feature.