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Compiz Gets Thumbs-Up for Gutsy Gibbon
Da Chronic writes "After a vigorous debate at the last Ubuntu Technical Board meeting, the board decided to ship Ubuntu 7.10 with Compiz enabled by default. The decision was made despite the fact that Compiz still has some significant issues relating to drivers and Xorg. 'For instance, there are some problems — like accelerated video playback issues with Intel drivers — that can only be resolved by using the EXA accelerated rendering framework which is still not ready yet. When asked why Intel isn't addressing the driver issue, technical board member Mathew Garrett explained that "Intel are working on the basis that composited desktops won't be ready for rolling out until EXA is stable enough anyway, so it's not a concern [for them].' In the end, all but one member voted to include Compiz in Gutsy."
I've been running Compiz in its various forms (compiz-quinnstorm, beryl, now compiz-fusion) on Gentoo since around March of 2006, and while I can see where you're coming from I have found some of its features actually useful. The ones I particularly like are: the expose clone (google 'expose mac to see what I'm referring to), the live alt-tabs (you see what's running in the alt-tab windows), it allows for extensive key bindings (I know you can use other programs like xbindkeys, but it at least beats Metacity's binding capability), and transparency (compiz isn't required to do this, but it makes it a lot easier than other WM's -- basically it's designed with that in mind).
Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I originally thought the same thing with Beryl (the breakoff from Compiz, which is now remerging into compiz-fusion), and thought, "hey it looks nice, but that's about it". I left it installed on my machine as it was pretty stable and didn't see a need to remove it. After a while I started rearranging and managing my desktop-- all development work in one window, terminal windows in another, email/web browser in another, and the last for visualization apps (imageJ, matlab, etc.). It wasn't until I had all four desktops being active used that I realized how much easier it was to multitask with a more sophisticated windows manager. I could actively switch between desktops fast, drag and drop items from one desktop to the other, separate global and local task switchers-- all much faster and with less downtime than before. Now I find it rather limiting to use a linux box that doesn't have it installed.
The only thing really holding it back is the stability issues (my desktop has no problems, but my laptop crashes at least once a day with it enabled). It doesn't hurt to install it and give it a try-- if you don't find it useful at first but it runs stable, then leave it installed-- you might come back and find it useful someday.