9 ms·

"Little known?" Compiz was the hotness of the century about a decade ago. Fire effects on minimizing windows and the famous "cube" to switch desktops. Compiz de

by lxe 8y ago

"Little known?" Compiz was the hotness of the century about a decade ago. Fire effects on minimizing windows and the famous "cube" to switch desktops. Compiz definitely propelled Ubuntu and desktop Linux in general to where it is now. Check out this Google Trends chart to get the picture of where it was in 2007: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...

Insanity 8y ago
That brings me back :) I remember playing around with the fire and the raindrop effects. Totally useless stuff, but pretty cool!
- senectus1 8y ago
  oh wow.. I knew I had seen that word before... yeah I remember Compiz now. loved playing with snap to jelly windows... the little things that make linux fun.
- roenxi 8y ago
  It was interesting how the efforts at window decoration after Compiz never really seemed to get the useless-but-cool. I recall KDE adding some disappointing compositing effects that combined being useless with not looking very good. It was the difference between an exploration of a cool concept and someone checking a box. Compiz's best feature was it made changing virtual desktops an exciting and rewarding process. Their specific implementation of the Cube was genius.
  - CarVac 8y ago
    The best part about the cube is that it allows me to use my spatial memory to better remember what windows are open on which workspaces.
    - ehnto 8y ago
      Which is a technique some memory athletes use to remember things! They often use spatial cues like mentally placing a piece of information somewhere in a room or town. Maybe the brain prioritizes things placed in the world over ephemeral things.
      - infogulch 8y ago
        I think it's more that the brain has special circuits for remembering things spatially (wether real or invented), and spatial-oriented memory "hacks" are just piggybacking on those dedicated circuits. It's like how GPUs were designed for games but it turns out they can work great for other tasks like machine learning too, if we massage the problem a bit.
    - mFixman 8y ago
      Cool people had a transparent desktop so you could see the windows open in the other side of the cube.
    - chriswarbo 8y ago
      Hijacking spatial memory like that is really useful. I used to use 6 desktops (in Enlightenment 0.16) in a 3x2 grid, which I could slide between by throwing the mouse to the window edge. The Compiz cube made the transition a bit fancier, but only made sense when the desktops were arranged in a line, and anything other than 4 didn't work as nicely.
- yangzx 8y ago
  I remember its flaming effect was my motivation for trying to install an Ubuntu on my PC when I was 13 or so. :)
  - Synaesthesia 8y ago
    The wobbly windows were the best for me, and the exposé clone.
CarVac 8y ago
Also the related Beryl which was more commonly used before the projects merged(?). https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz,Beryl https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...
- tolle 8y ago
  Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota seem to have really preferred Beryl for some reason.
- Izkata 8y ago
  Wouldn't surprise me. I'm reading other comments talking about how much they learned getting Compiz to work, meanwhile I used Beryl and remember it working immediately with no problems (on an HP laptop with Ubuntu). Then Compiz Fusion came along (which was supposed to be all of Beryl's updates being merged into Compiz), but they dropped like 2/3rds of the effects and it became a pain to make functional at all. That was when I stopped using it.
tinco 8y ago
Compiz famously preceded Windows Aero, really rubbing it in how hard Microsoft failed at the Vista launch. A small team made Windows great futuristic new OS look dated before it even came out.
- 21 8y ago
  That's not how I recall it. > The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006 > Build 5048 (built on April 1, 2005) was the official WinHEC 2005 preview build, ... The Aero visual style made its first appearance in this build Sure, technically Compiz was released before since the official Vista release date was Nov 2006, but work on Compiz started AFTER Aero was shown.
  - Elv13 8y ago
    Well, actually, most compiz features were first show in WinHEC 2003. Novell copied the demo 3 years later with the misguided XGL implementation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0idaN0MY1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0idaN0MY1U The funny thing about XGL is how ahead of its time it was. In some way, it still is. Building desktop OS on top of game engine is a trend starting to take hold. Newer Linux Mesa GLAMOR acceleration is just that. Qt6 will brings this to tons of embedded devices near you. Modern SOC are more efficient when pushing GUI into 3D space.
    - vlovich123 8y ago
      That’s not actually true. The majority job of a GUI is text rendering. I recommend reading some of Raph Levien’s posts on the matter. It’s really hard to get quality GPU-accelerated text rendering. Games don’t have this requirement because they draw very little text and it’s stylistic so all the high-quality text rendering requirements are bypassed. Moreover they also probably remove the need for arbitrary Unicode whereas GUIs can frequently not make such a simplification. It’ll be interesting to see what performance gains are realized keeping in mind from a battery perspective the GPU may be sufficiently more power hungry that the efficiency gains are insufficient to make it more power efficient.
  - 8y ago
twothumbsup 8y ago
this was part of what got me interested in linux. The cube and fire effects were so cool but also ran so slowly on the computer I had for experimenting with.
theonemind 8y ago
for scale, I threw KDE on. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C... Almost reached KDE level in Oct 2017.
- bscphil 8y ago
  A significant number of the KDE searches seem to be for the Kentucky Department of Education.
  - rerx 8y ago
    The Czech / Slovak word for "where" seems to be even more significant: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Compiz,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Compiz,k...
tjr225 8y ago
Trying to get compiz/beryl to work on my crappy dell inspiron was probably one of a few indirect factors that resulted in my cushy tech job.
- iXce 8y ago
  I can totally relate :) The hackery you had to do to have the whole stack work was significant and helped a lot grow sysadmin skills for me, and to build fresh versions and hack up new plugins was a great motivation to learn to code in a team-oriented setting.
- jordonwii 8y ago
  Wow, that's a throwback. It's amazing how little things like that can get you started tinkering. I remember the excitement when my old distro of choice (Mandriva) added compiz support, and then it turned out to be so difficult to get it working (also on an Inspiron, incidentally). Trying to get the kernel modules for Virtualbox working also took an ungodly amount of time for me when I was just starting to tinker with this stuff.
- SpaceGorilla 8y ago
  Oh man, the memories! I saw the title of this thread and thought "no ways its the same compiz". Somewhere on YouTube is a pretty cringworthly video of me demoing beryl by drawing fire anarchy symbols
- zphds 8y ago
  Same here! Trawling around forums and mailing lists to try and get Beryl working on my old desktop with a cheap-ass SiS integrated motherboard was quite a learning experience. Dead-ends all around. Also learned what hardware acceleration was all about and that my motherboard's VGA chip specifically didn't support it. The first thing I did after saving up for a new laptop was install gentoo+beryl+gnome on it and rotate my desktop cube in all its hardware accelerated glory. Fun times!
- acct1771 8y ago
  Anyone wanting to recreate one of these beautiful experiences in a VM should find a likely now defunct distro called Uberyl (Ubuntu+beryl).
lathiat 8y ago
I miss wobbly windows just as much as I miss the addon to throw windows off the side of the screen to close them. Ahhhh.
- 83457 8y ago
  Ha.Tossing virtual windows in VR to close is one of my favorite parts of the UI in Echo Arena. Didn't realize someone already implemented that on the desktop.
- acct1771 8y ago
  You sure they weren't stacked in your other workspaces?
- skocznymroczny 8y ago
  Why throw windows off if you can just shoot the process? https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
  - jhanschoo 8y ago
    I'm tickled that research money went into this.
- rikkus 8y ago
  I'm currently using KDE Neon and if you choose Wayland when you log in, you can also select wobbly windows in the settings.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    I am using Kubuntu (that I chose over KDE Neon) under X11 and wobbly windows are also available.
krisgenre 8y ago
Oh yeah, I was blown over by the 'cube' switch back then. When Chrome gained popularity, I remember using Compiz to hide the title bar on Firefox.
Hypergraphe 8y ago
True story !
duiker101 8y ago
Which reminds me of one of my favorite earlier videos on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ
kayamon 8y ago
Every Ubuntu user should be well aware of compiz by now, mostly because of having to switch to a new terminal screen and restart it at least once a day whenever it crashes.

by lxe 8y ago

Insanity 8y ago

That brings me back :) I remember playing around with the fire and the raindrop effects. Totally useless stuff, but pretty cool!

senectus1 8y ago
oh wow.. I knew I had seen that word before... yeah I remember Compiz now. loved playing with snap to jelly windows... the little things that make linux fun.
roenxi 8y ago
It was interesting how the efforts at window decoration after Compiz never really seemed to get the useless-but-cool. I recall KDE adding some disappointing compositing effects that combined being useless with not looking very good. It was the difference between an exploration of a cool concept and someone checking a box. Compiz's best feature was it made changing virtual desktops an exciting and rewarding process. Their specific implementation of the Cube was genius.
- CarVac 8y ago
  The best part about the cube is that it allows me to use my spatial memory to better remember what windows are open on which workspaces.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    Which is a technique some memory athletes use to remember things! They often use spatial cues like mentally placing a piece of information somewhere in a room or town. Maybe the brain prioritizes things placed in the world over ephemeral things.
    - infogulch 8y ago
      I think it's more that the brain has special circuits for remembering things spatially (wether real or invented), and spatial-oriented memory "hacks" are just piggybacking on those dedicated circuits. It's like how GPUs were designed for games but it turns out they can work great for other tasks like machine learning too, if we massage the problem a bit.
  - mFixman 8y ago
    Cool people had a transparent desktop so you could see the windows open in the other side of the cube.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    Hijacking spatial memory like that is really useful. I used to use 6 desktops (in Enlightenment 0.16) in a 3x2 grid, which I could slide between by throwing the mouse to the window edge. The Compiz cube made the transition a bit fancier, but only made sense when the desktops were arranged in a line, and anything other than 4 didn't work as nicely.
yangzx 8y ago
I remember its flaming effect was my motivation for trying to install an Ubuntu on my PC when I was 13 or so. :)
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  The wobbly windows were the best for me, and the exposé clone.

CarVac 8y ago

Also the related Beryl which was more commonly used before the projects merged(?). https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz,Beryl https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...

tolle 8y ago
Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota seem to have really preferred Beryl for some reason.
Izkata 8y ago
Wouldn't surprise me. I'm reading other comments talking about how much they learned getting Compiz to work, meanwhile I used Beryl and remember it working immediately with no problems (on an HP laptop with Ubuntu). Then Compiz Fusion came along (which was supposed to be all of Beryl's updates being merged into Compiz), but they dropped like 2/3rds of the effects and it became a pain to make functional at all. That was when I stopped using it.

tinco 8y ago

Compiz famously preceded Windows Aero, really rubbing it in how hard Microsoft failed at the Vista launch. A small team made Windows great futuristic new OS look dated before it even came out.

21 8y ago
That's not how I recall it. > The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006 > Build 5048 (built on April 1, 2005) was the official WinHEC 2005 preview build, ... The Aero visual style made its first appearance in this build Sure, technically Compiz was released before since the official Vista release date was Nov 2006, but work on Compiz started AFTER Aero was shown.
- Elv13 8y ago
  Well, actually, most compiz features were first show in WinHEC 2003. Novell copied the demo 3 years later with the misguided XGL implementation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0idaN0MY1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0idaN0MY1U The funny thing about XGL is how ahead of its time it was. In some way, it still is. Building desktop OS on top of game engine is a trend starting to take hold. Newer Linux Mesa GLAMOR acceleration is just that. Qt6 will brings this to tons of embedded devices near you. Modern SOC are more efficient when pushing GUI into 3D space.
  - vlovich123 8y ago
    That’s not actually true. The majority job of a GUI is text rendering. I recommend reading some of Raph Levien’s posts on the matter. It’s really hard to get quality GPU-accelerated text rendering. Games don’t have this requirement because they draw very little text and it’s stylistic so all the high-quality text rendering requirements are bypassed. Moreover they also probably remove the need for arbitrary Unicode whereas GUIs can frequently not make such a simplification. It’ll be interesting to see what performance gains are realized keeping in mind from a battery perspective the GPU may be sufficiently more power hungry that the efficiency gains are insufficient to make it more power efficient.
- 8y ago

twothumbsup 8y ago

this was part of what got me interested in linux. The cube and fire effects were so cool but also ran so slowly on the computer I had for experimenting with.

theonemind 8y ago

for scale, I threw KDE on. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C... Almost reached KDE level in Oct 2017.

bscphil 8y ago
A significant number of the KDE searches seem to be for the Kentucky Department of Education.
- rerx 8y ago
  The Czech / Slovak word for "where" seems to be even more significant: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Compiz,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Compiz,k...

tjr225 8y ago

Trying to get compiz/beryl to work on my crappy dell inspiron was probably one of a few indirect factors that resulted in my cushy tech job.

iXce 8y ago
I can totally relate :) The hackery you had to do to have the whole stack work was significant and helped a lot grow sysadmin skills for me, and to build fresh versions and hack up new plugins was a great motivation to learn to code in a team-oriented setting.
jordonwii 8y ago
Wow, that's a throwback. It's amazing how little things like that can get you started tinkering. I remember the excitement when my old distro of choice (Mandriva) added compiz support, and then it turned out to be so difficult to get it working (also on an Inspiron, incidentally). Trying to get the kernel modules for Virtualbox working also took an ungodly amount of time for me when I was just starting to tinker with this stuff.
SpaceGorilla 8y ago
Oh man, the memories! I saw the title of this thread and thought "no ways its the same compiz". Somewhere on YouTube is a pretty cringworthly video of me demoing beryl by drawing fire anarchy symbols
zphds 8y ago
Same here! Trawling around forums and mailing lists to try and get Beryl working on my old desktop with a cheap-ass SiS integrated motherboard was quite a learning experience. Dead-ends all around. Also learned what hardware acceleration was all about and that my motherboard's VGA chip specifically didn't support it. The first thing I did after saving up for a new laptop was install gentoo+beryl+gnome on it and rotate my desktop cube in all its hardware accelerated glory. Fun times!
acct1771 8y ago
Anyone wanting to recreate one of these beautiful experiences in a VM should find a likely now defunct distro called Uberyl (Ubuntu+beryl).

lathiat 8y ago

I miss wobbly windows just as much as I miss the addon to throw windows off the side of the screen to close them. Ahhhh.

83457 8y ago
Ha.Tossing virtual windows in VR to close is one of my favorite parts of the UI in Echo Arena. Didn't realize someone already implemented that on the desktop.
acct1771 8y ago
You sure they weren't stacked in your other workspaces?
skocznymroczny 8y ago
Why throw windows off if you can just shoot the process? https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  I'm tickled that research money went into this.
rikkus 8y ago
I'm currently using KDE Neon and if you choose Wayland when you log in, you can also select wobbly windows in the settings.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  I am using Kubuntu (that I chose over KDE Neon) under X11 and wobbly windows are also available.

krisgenre 8y ago

Oh yeah, I was blown over by the 'cube' switch back then. When Chrome gained popularity, I remember using Compiz to hide the title bar on Firefox.

Hypergraphe 8y ago

True story !

duiker101 8y ago

Which reminds me of one of my favorite earlier videos on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ

kayamon 8y ago

Every Ubuntu user should be well aware of compiz by now, mostly because of having to switch to a new terminal screen and restart it at least once a day whenever it crashes.