“For the next round of Linux Releases (Ubuntu Gutsy, Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3, Mandriva 2008, etc.) Compiz Fusion should be installed by default in those releases and with the release date looming not far ahead the time is ripe to give you a preview of what to expect from the latest Compiz Fusion.”
The new widgets ala OSX is way to cool.
I didn’t now you could make this:
http://hendrik.kaju.pri.ee/screenlets/
coolness factor +1.
Edited 2007-09-11 14:52
that’s just another superkaramba/gdesklets/etc clone, right? Nothing special?
If so, I expect much more from Plasma[1]… The seperation of engines and the actual plasmoids, and the integration of desktop & taskbar, and the ideas for zoom are at least new, and promising…
[1] http://plasma.kde.org
I’m using whatever version is bundled with Gutsy and I have to say, I am in love with its features. My only complaint is the key combinations aren’t easily discoverable or documented anywhere – more an Ubuntu fault I think.
The ring switcher, expo and virtual desktop switching effects all get “oohs” and “aaahhs” from casual onlookers. I think Compiz-Fusion will be responsible for a lot of new distribution users, purely because they will want the eye candy… the concerns of apps, data etc will come second to having the cool factor.
Considering it is only a 0.5.x release so far, I’m expecting great things from the project. I hope the Firefox title-bar redraw issues get fixed (well, I actually hope someone makes it easy for amateurs like me to install Epiphany-webkit once it’s usable) …. the future is very bright for my beloved laptop
Right, but apart from that: what does it actually do that is useful?
“Right, but apart from that: what does it actually do that is useful?”
Provides more screen estate; better navigation between applications; provides accessibility features like creating a more high contrast desktop; Zoom into an object those applications. The power of tabs added to every applications. Better desktop management in a multi-user environment. Attractive working environment. Small applications that report anything from system information to the weather. Better windows management that have only been available within an application ; tile etc. Preview of large application useful for checking whether batch job has finished. Real positive visual feedback to basic windows tasks, for minimize; active application; alerts.
…and this is of the top of my head.
This is ignoring all the potential applications like a *real* desktop analogy; none standard windows. Already applications are coming out that show how photos can be views sorted.
…but the bottom line is why the hell would you not want you windows to fold into a paper airplane and float away; simply because its attractive; fun; and a little exciting which is what computing should be about. If nothing else its looks modern.
“why the hell would you not want you windows to fold into a paper airplane and float away”
Because it’s slower than if they just disappeared instantly ?
And, you know, some of us use the computer to get the job done, not just to impress friends
It looks neat, but so far I’ve found it objectively doesn’t really offer any increased productivity.
“It looks neat, but so far I’ve found it objectively doesn’t really offer any increased productivity.”
I’m not disagreeing with you, although objectively you have little to know way of knowing. Even proper testing I suspect would only produce dubious results.
I suspect a faster CPU, more memory, or even better a larger monitor…or two will have a greater effect on productivity, esp as in this instance we are talking small amounts of time that add up.
What is clear is that it does make desktop *events* clearer; improve your screen real estate; provide smooth transitions between events; add accessibility features.
Pretty desktop background don’t offer increased productivity either, but most people seem quite fond of them despite this. People will also argue about if a certain icon set is pretty or ugly for hours at an end, yet no one has shown objectively that a pretty icon set increases productivity.
And to round it off, while I have no idea if expose on OSX has actually increased my productivity or not, I find it a great feature which makes the computer more enjoyable and easy to use.
Well, I think the effect makes sense in OSX because there is no taskbar like in kde, gnome, or windows. It actually serves a functional purpose in OSX. In gnome it’s a little redundant but it can be cool anyway. What it does is change the way users minimize their windows. With scale there is less minimizing since flipping through windows is easy and both expose and scale work better with unminimized windows.
Alt-tabbing between windows is suddenly more useful when you can see what you’re alt-tabbing to (Ring Switcher). Expo lets you easily juggle windows around your virtual desktops. And the window tabbing plugin makes it easy to group 20 windows you only use every now and then to 5 windows.
http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDS2007/Notes has some notes on Red Hat’x xorg work and what needs to be done before Compositing works properly by default.
Interesting, but I’d really like to see a roadmap of this immplementation, we have the “what” but we also need the “when”.
When is depending on merge code across a number of upstream projects. Seems it is atleast 6 months of work. Take a look at http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2007/08/compiz-and-fedora.html for some more details.
tnx for the links, they are interesting…
I’m really looking forward to really good hardware acceleration on the linux desktop. Compiz works pretty bad here (and I have a dualcore proc, 3gb ram and a geforce 6600 256mb) and besides, it’s still actually slower than noncomposited. That should really change…
Just curious, what driver you use for geforce 6600 256 mb? I have a similar machine (Athlonx 64 X2 3800, 2bg ram and geforce 7800GS 256mb) who runs compiz smoothly. I presume the issues is related to the hardware configuration.
nvidia. But it’s mostly drawing artifacts and bad integration with window management, instability etc which annoy me. Kwin just feels smarter…
Compiz Fusion is definitively a great project. However, I hope that Ubuntu Gutsy will provide a strong support of nvidia drivers (and other video cards). At the moment, it is still the nightmare trying to use compiz-fusion on a nvidia board (white screen, xserver crashes, bad integration of nvidia drivers with into the restricted drivers, etc.). So keep in mind that having a nice graphical framework is great, but the underlying video management using OpenGL must be effective as well.
Im using Ubuntu+Nvidia, no problems at all here.
I’m using Ubuntu+Nvidia as well. Never got it working despite following every guide I could found.
My other box has Ubuntu+Nvidia as well, but a different video card. And that one worked out of the box, though very slow.
I guess there are still issues in the Nvidia drivers.
try using the loose binding option, should make it run faster on your nvidia card.
Which version of Ubuntu are you using?
From the Tribe 5, a lot of people seem to have problems to use nvidia with the new OpenGL framework (nvidia-glx-new). Personally, I get a white screen.
I know that Tribe 5 is not a stable one, but this problem of white screen already appear for quite a long time.
Do you have a clear installation procedure – or a reliable URL – to have compiz-fusion working on last beta releases of Ubuntu?
TIA
This has nothing to do with Ubuntu. They already using proprietary Nvidia and ATI device drivers by default, and this doesn’t seems to be all correct too IMO.But the point is, the problem with nvidia adapters is about they call ‘legacy drivers’ which doesn’t support composite features. Nvidia and many other manufacturers force the customer to buy brand new cards shutting down the support on ‘old’ devices. I as a GNU user and a free software enthusiast don’t agree with this, for me Intel video adapters look very interesting since they are cheap and have GPL licensed device drivers. I believe this is reasonable for everyone who share from this ideas.
>>…you get a rather interesting Pentagon shaped Cube…
Interesting description. A pentagonal cube… All the old mathematicians are turning in their graves! Pentagonal pyramid maybe? But whatever, we get the point. 🙂
“Interesting description. A pentagonal cube… All the old mathematicians are turning in their graves! Pentagonal pyramid maybe? But whatever, we get the point. :-)”
It’s actually a pentagonal prism. A pyramid wouldn’t be too useful unless you have a triangular screen.
So? Are you implying he doesn’t have a triangular screen?
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but widgets seem more like a desktop feature than something that should be in a window manager like Compiz. Is the GNOME community behind this and if so, have they unofficially adopted Compiz or are they continuing work on their own compositing WM?
Compiz is Desktop Agnostic, I could use the same features in XFCE too or even KDE. I find better having a dedicated community working on this that have only some desktop developers working in an isolated way.
>Compiz is Desktop Agnostic,
Which is sometimes a problem: in Mandriva, Compiz activated the cube effect when your mouse was in the higher right corner, which is fine in Gnome which has a toolbar in the upper layer, but which sucks *a lot* with KDE: when you want to close a window, half the time the cube effect would activate..
Lack of integration/coordination between layers as usual in Linux.
A minor problem that can be easily fixed instead of reinveting the boiled water.
A minor problem?
For you probably, but for the non-technical user who doesn’t know how to display properly the wallpaper, it’s a big problem..
And the point is that it wasn’t fixed in the distribution.
when I say a minor, I mean easy to fix instead to make another composing system.
From what the KDE developers say, it’s actually the opposite with compositing taking up only a couple percent of the code base and little corner cases and fixes making up > 90%. They’re also providing several new features, like a stable API and falling back gracefully when the video card doesn’t support compositing. What’s going to take resources are creating the effects themselves, which Compiz has tons of and a great community surrounding it.
Edited 2007-09-11 20:49
This whole falling back gracefully thing is cool. However, I really don’t see an issue. Beryl used to have this feature where if it crashed it would automatically launch the native window manager, and in some cases this can be pretty seemless. There are certain things that could be tightened up in this respect but those are gnome and metacity issues.
As I understood the ‘failing back’ in KDE is more to provide a way to have an equivalent feature without 3D than to avoid crash.
For example, I think that the Expose effect is possible to do without composition if the windows are static.
This is configurable so I don’t see the problem. Maybe the default suck but that has very little todo with compiz being desktop agnostic.
Why bother when compiz was written with GNOME in mind from the start. I think it’s a complete waste of time and resources working on one for a specific DE, KDE has it’s own which has been the story with anything KDE anyway.
to tell the truth, the widgets don’t have anything to do with compiz. It has a ‘widget layer’ plugin which just provides the dashboard-esque effect of making widgets appears on screen, but you can use it for whatever you want (I’m using it with superkaramba). The fact that he compares compiz fusion to kde is really pretty annoying, especially considering that the widget layer plugin was from before the remerge. Also, what he said about how the teams reformed is incorrect – devs from both teams are working on plugins, the beryl core was scrapped, and some beryl coders are trying to figure out the ‘right’ way to do some of the core changes this time around. This means a more stable, less hackish 3d environment, but there are some features beryl had that compiz yet lacks, like temp unminimization/ having textures of unmapped windows.
So smitty, it’s works out that you’re correct. It’s not that I’m not appreciative of lunapark’s article, it’s just that after all the drama that went into this, that he’d at least get some of the facts right.
“having textures of unmapped windows. ”
yuo mean the impossibility to have, for instance, the live preview of a window in the taskbar if the window is minimized and not just covered by other windows, don’t you?
IIRC last time I checked, Aero as well suffers this problem (but maybe I’m wrong, tomorrow I’ll check)
yup.
Yes it has the same issue. Beryl actually had a hack for this that basically opened and closed the window quickly to take a snapshot to use a texture. Compiz removed the hack because, well it was a hack. There are still things that don’t work as smoothly as they did, The default application switcher is pretty buggy at the moment and considering how old it is this shouldn’t be the case. I use the vista switcher anyway so no biggie.
Thanks to compiz, the foss world is, for one time, *ahead* of MS an apple in the desktop land.
Ahead?? You mean just eyecandy or technology inside? I might agree for Windows, but not for MacOSX
both – compiz surpasses everything else in its area, including mac os x
Does someone uses compiz with ATI cards?
I have a Radeon 9XXX and have tried it from time to time with live-CDs. Mostly it works quite good but resizing windows is extremely slow and totem has problems displaying videos (especially if i move the window).
Does someone has the same problems? Is it a ATI-driver problem or a compiz problem? Can i expect that the problems are solved with the new x.org and compiz versions?
I’m using Ubuntu Gutsy on my laptop with an ATI 9000 IGP (with the open source drivers) and it really rocks!
Gutsy is the first version of Ubuntu that runs compiz/beryl/compiz-fusion nicely on my machine.
I just have found problems with Celestia, but everything else works nicely.
“Does someone uses compiz with ATI cards?
I have a Radeon 9XXX and have tried it from time to time with live-CDs. Mostly it works quite good but resizing windows is extremely slow and totem has problems displaying videos (especially if i move the window).
Does someone has the same problems? Is it a ATI-driver problem or a compiz problem? Can i expect that the problems are solved with the new x.org and compiz versions?”
This should be question made on irc/distro forum not on OS news.
If you are referring to the FOSS drivers then you will be disappointed. The 7.3 release does not contain new drivers to replace the 6.6.3 drivers released 11 months ago. The unstable 6.7.192 which contains features than are simply not available in the the earlier diver allowing smooth play of all my games without dropping in FPS, and solving the occasional niggle with those drivers had like missing textures in spring etc, but these are simply not stable. I personally suffer random hard-locks which I have never experienced with anything else on GNU. So have reverted to the earlier drivers much to my disappointment.
I suspect with AMD’s announcement with the R300 chipsets specifications being released *after* everything else, and the excitement surrounding. I suspect that waiting for a stable R300 more feature-rich driver is going to a while.
I have no problem with FOSS drivers, but it works properly only when I install Gutsy.
The live CD works well but is not so responsive like the installed version is, I don’t know why.
It is nice to comment here because I use Ubuntu but I don’t know if works better on Fedora, SuSE or Mandrake, for example.
I am currently using CompizFusion on Suse 10.2 and loving it, but its integration with KDE right now is fairly poor.
Traditional KDE key combinations do not work and the window decoration must be run manually. Additionally, KDE’s concept of different desktops and Compiz’s concept of viewports do not mesh well together.
Other than that, it represents an amazing accomplishment and it has been totally stable for me.
I imagine that if Suse 10.3 plans to include CompizFusion, they will work on the very prominent integration issues with KDE.
I know that the KDE folks are including some compositing features in Kwin for kde4, but for those of us that will be running KDE 3.5.7 for the foreseeable future, can anyone confirm whether any integration work with KDE is taking place?
I am sorry to say that but those Compiz guys are just trying to rip off as much thing as they can from Mac OS X, their product is a totally rip off of what Apple does with its OS.
I mean come on, dashboard, Expose, Cover Flow are all riped off. Not only that, all 3D effects that Apple use in its OS or application (namely Keynote) are ripped off. The accessibility zoom feature is also implemented exactly as in OS X.
It s not that i am against that they use some ideas found elsewhere but can’t they have their own ideas or create something which is not simply a reimplementation of something else found elsewhere.
Don’t they have any kind of creativity?
You’re talking about the same Apple that was inspired by Xerox PARC, instead of making their own GUI with no outside influence. Dashboard is sometimes accused of ripping off Konfabulator. Fast-user switching was copied from Windows XP.
You can’t monopolize ideas in software, no matter how much the patent pushers want to.
fast user switching was in linux well before it was in windows XP. It just wasn’t streamlined or highlighted as well. You could run 2 or more X sessions and login to either as a different (or the same) user and switch between them easily. Its not as elegant a solution as in XP, but essentially the idea originated with X.
Not that I care. I think we cant win either way.
If compiz didn’t copy OSX at all the OSX people would say, but it cant do THIS therefore OSX is better…and if they did copy OSX they’ll say “but you copied it all from OSX”…
There are unique features in compiz if you look closely.
And I’ve had a couple OSX users ask if compiz is available for OSX because they think it looks BETTER than what apple has.
Compiz has this smoothness to it that apples stuff lacks. The windows seem to uses acceleration so they alway bounce a little before settling into their positions. The same for the cube. This is all configurable but the default is great. Compiz has a more pleasing feel to it when it comes to the animations. The scale plugin (expose) has now surpassed Apple’s offering, imo. Being able to type the name of the window to select it, bringing windows forward, closing windows while in scale is really intuitive and I wish that apple would consider implementing some of these features. The linux community has always been good embracing and extending. They love to extend the hell out of stuff. The smartest thing that Dave did when he created compiz is to make it pluggable, if there is one thing the OSS community is good at is making plugins.
“Don’t they have any kind of creativity?”
Clearly you have not been keeping up. The plug-in ability from beryl has consistently produced a verity of effects both useful and fun.
Oh, you mean like how Apple stole the ideas for Dashboard?
Any new youtube vids to look at the new features? I have seen the previous ones posted in these forums and really liked them. Was wondering if there are new vids with this latest version.
Reminder to self: search them on youtube
Why paint teh walls of your office a pleasing color, why not leave them gray? Certainly doesn’t make you more productive. Why put a plant in the corner? Does it somehow make you type better? Why do we wash our cars? Put on nice clothes? Fix our hair? Because it helps our state of mind and that helps us work better. It creates an environment that allows us to feel good about the task at hand. I spend a LOT of time in front of a monitor and at times feel that I work *inside* the computer, as if that is actually my work space. If things like this make my workspace more enjoyable to inhabit – then it is worth it.
I, too, am usually a bit put off by all the complainers carping about “productivity”. I’ve been to their website, installed and configured the app; but nowhere did I ever see any Compiz/Beryl crew claiming this was some sort of application for business or production of any type. When you consider this you have to wonder why the complaints are even warranted (besides, OS X is reknowned for its stellar GUI, but you never hear anyone complaining about it, do you?).
It seems to me that Compiz, Beryl, Metisse, et al., are nothing more than “eye-candy” demonstration platforms created to illustrate the capabilities of Linux. Nothing more. No one ever claimed that these apps were going to cause a revolution, or change the world, so can we stop with the “sour grapes” attitude already?
Incidentally, I usually hear these dismissals coming mostly from Windows adherents. My theory: Mr. Vista just dropped a large sum of money on his shiny new OS (and another princely sum for a machine with enough horsepower to run it). He’s probably been thinking he’s the “cat’s meow” until he spys someone else running a completely free (as in beer AND speech) OS on hardware with (sometimes) much lower specs – and not only is this lesser machine and “lesser” OS capable of the very same GUI effects, but it can do things Vista can’t even touch right now. Our Vista user is probably feeling a little ripped off right now, so he starts bashing the competition and talking about “productivity” and “but I can run more apps!”.
Maybe I’m off-base here, but at first blush this impression I’ve been getting.
Edited 2007-09-13 02:54 UTC