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New Ubuntu Project Code Named 'Gutsy Gibbon'
Go2Linux writes "The code name for the new Ubuntu project that is going to be release this October is Gutsy Gibbon, It was introduced by Mark Shuttleworth, early today, this release will come full composite as default, according to Mark."
Here's the actual mailing list posting: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-ann ounce/2007-April/000276.html
Try Compiz(http://compiz.org/), Beryl(http://beryl-project.org/), compositing manager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_manager) or compositing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing)!
I vote for Horny Hedgehog. Or Horny Hyrax. Anything Horny, really.
I recently installed 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my laptop, and I'm fairly surprised. The only things that didn't work right from the start were the digitizer (it's a tablet PC), and my USB wireless dongle. The digitizer isn't plug-and-play or anything like that, but the USB dongle is more of a mystery - it's claims Linux support, and it's even detected, but the included driver appears to be broken. The driver the manufacturer provides doesn't support anything in the standard manner (as far as WPA and various encryption stuff goes), so I'm using ndiswrapper for it right now. It works, but still won't work in encrypted modes. It uses a Ralink RT73 chipset, btw.
But hey, it got the old internal wireless card perfectly. It only supports WEP though. It also got the video card (and I can change resolutions in an applet!), sound card, USB hubs, my external USB DVD-RW (and it hotplugs!), and so on. It'll even hotplug the USB wireless dongle, with ndiswrapper - I full expected that to not work. So we're not getting 100% success, but it's entirely possible that you could install Linux and never touch a config file. That's how you do desktop.
Honestly, my biggest complaint now is that WPA and connecting to weird RADIUS servers run by universities and the like is still a royal pain. I tried Network-Manager (a Gnome applet) and it did all kinds of bad stuff to my system (loopback never came up), and didn't help me connect to encrypted networks at all. But, they're working on it. If this is the worst complaint I can muster, we've come a long way.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
In a traditional (non-compositing) windowing-environment, each application essentially handles its own part of the screen, when, for example, a part of firefox previously hidden behind an xterm get unobscured, firefox is informed of this fact, and is responsible for redrawing that part of its own window.
In a compositing system, instead each program draw on their own private separate area. All these areas are then sent to the compositing manager which makes the overall screen by combining these in various ways.
There's advantages. First, it simplifies things for the programs, since they can pretend they're always alone on the screen. Secondly, it makes it possible to unify visual tricks. Without composition, for example, each and every program that wants to support stuff like being transparent, or animating their appearance, or being transparent only while being dragged or any other of a million visible tricks need to implement this independent of eachother.
With composition, the compositing window-manager can handle all of that, and the programs won't even notice. So it improves consistency by making the same visual options work identically in *all* programs.