4 ms·

Also, I have not played with compiz, and I'm wondering if people have found it to be straightforward and easy to live with? It looks fun, but if it makes my li

by ericb 18y ago

Also, I have not played with compiz, and I'm wondering if people have found it to be straightforward and easy to live with? It looks fun, but if it makes my life harder. Thoughts?

PieSquared 18y ago
Eh. It's shiny and nice, but in the end, it's pretty useless. I lived with it for a month, then figured that it didn't do much good, and disabled it. (I still enable it to show off to friends about how cool Linux is though, sometimes :D)
- jackowayed 18y ago
  Yeah, it is good for that. Especially when you tell them that it predates Vista by several years.
- wheels 18y ago
  Same here. Thought it was pretty neat at first, but it doesn't do a good job of balancing functionality and bling.
olefoo 18y ago
I turn it off most of the time. The medium setting is OK, but I generally prefer fast, and plain to fancy.
- sherl0ck 18y ago
  Well, so do I so I am using xubuntu + WMII, plain and fast.
drinian 18y ago
Someone else has already mentioned installing compiz-config-manager. This is crucial if you want to do any kind of customization with Compiz; a lot of little annoyances I've found with it can be fixed.
old-gregg 18y ago
I can't exist without Compiz and I'm amazed that HN audience is unaware of the benefits. Here are just a few: 1. Expose-like effect for quickly tiling all windows and picking the right one with the mouse/touchpad. Works MUCH faster for s witching between apps when you have many of them. 2. Very useful and informative animations for tossing windows between virtual desktops and switching between them: without Compiz there's no animation and you're left wondering which desktop you're on. 3. Window groups - a fairly advanced feature which also helps navigating among too many windows. 4. On some video drivers Compiz speeds up 2D graphics (especially scrolling) in regular everyday apps like Firefox. 5. Ability to quickly glance at your desktop (whenever all windows fly offscreen until you release a hot key). 6. Ability to "pin" certain windows into predefined positions automatically or by a configured hotkey. Helps enormously with buggy apps that can't remember their last position. Basically it all comes down to window management. Without Compiz all you have a basic and primitive Alt+Tabbing plus basic virtual desktop functionality. I switch between Ubuntu and OSX and I use these tools on both very heavily. When I get a hardware which doesn't run Compiz I tend to stick to OSX until the issue is resolved. When I do have Compiz-enabled machine my Mac becomes a backup - OSX isn't as powerful/flexible at managing windows as Metacity/Compiz. Besides, I find that windows without shadows look very flat and somewhat antiquated in 2008 :-)
- incomethax 18y ago
  Compiz-fusion also has a nice widgets layer (similar to dashboard) that makes making python widgets a breeze. Also the desktop cube helps when you're using 4 virtual desktops and can't remember which desktop had what running

by ericb 18y ago

Also, I have not played with compiz, and I'm wondering if people have found it to be straightforward and easy to live with? It looks fun, but if it makes my life harder. Thoughts?

PieSquared 18y ago

Eh. It's shiny and nice, but in the end, it's pretty useless. I lived with it for a month, then figured that it didn't do much good, and disabled it. (I still enable it to show off to friends about how cool Linux is though, sometimes :D)

jackowayed 18y ago
Yeah, it is good for that. Especially when you tell them that it predates Vista by several years.
wheels 18y ago
Same here. Thought it was pretty neat at first, but it doesn't do a good job of balancing functionality and bling.

olefoo 18y ago

I turn it off most of the time. The medium setting is OK, but I generally prefer fast, and plain to fancy.

sherl0ck 18y ago
Well, so do I so I am using xubuntu + WMII, plain and fast.

drinian 18y ago

Someone else has already mentioned installing compiz-config-manager. This is crucial if you want to do any kind of customization with Compiz; a lot of little annoyances I've found with it can be fixed.

old-gregg 18y ago

I can't exist without Compiz and I'm amazed that HN audience is unaware of the benefits. Here are just a few: 1. Expose-like effect for quickly tiling all windows and picking the right one with the mouse/touchpad. Works MUCH faster for s witching between apps when you have many of them. 2. Very useful and informative animations for tossing windows between virtual desktops and switching between them: without Compiz there's no animation and you're left wondering which desktop you're on. 3. Window groups - a fairly advanced feature which also helps navigating among too many windows. 4. On some video drivers Compiz speeds up 2D graphics (especially scrolling) in regular everyday apps like Firefox. 5. Ability to quickly glance at your desktop (whenever all windows fly offscreen until you release a hot key). 6. Ability to "pin" certain windows into predefined positions automatically or by a configured hotkey. Helps enormously with buggy apps that can't remember their last position. Basically it all comes down to window management. Without Compiz all you have a basic and primitive Alt+Tabbing plus basic virtual desktop functionality. I switch between Ubuntu and OSX and I use these tools on both very heavily. When I get a hardware which doesn't run Compiz I tend to stick to OSX until the issue is resolved. When I do have Compiz-enabled machine my Mac becomes a backup - OSX isn't as powerful/flexible at managing windows as Metacity/Compiz. Besides, I find that windows without shadows look very flat and somewhat antiquated in 2008 :-)

incomethax 18y ago
Compiz-fusion also has a nice widgets layer (similar to dashboard) that makes making python widgets a breeze. Also the desktop cube helps when you're using 4 virtual desktops and can't remember which desktop had what running