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 wind

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 :-)