I gave Compiz another try today after a good many months. It's in Portage and it installed easily, as did Compiz Fusion. Which itself is a change from the last time I tried it.

Compiz still never works quite right with KDE. The desktop pager and taskbar are always wonky. However there are some patched versions of kicker applets floating around which make kicker's pager and taskbar work correctly. Though I'm using KDE 3.5.9 and those apps are meant for older versions of KDE, they work fine for me.

I've been in love with kwin for a while now; it does exactly what I want. So I'm questioning whether I want or need to switch to Compiz at all. Aside from gratuitous graphical effects, does Compiz do anything kwin doesn't?

One "yes" to this question is the way Compiz lets you view and manage virtual desktops. Of course there's the infamous Enormous Rotating Cube which at this point in my life I can accept as totally worthless other than to impress people. But Compiz also has a flat desktop "wall" view which is more minimalistic and very nice.

Something I do often is throw windows back and forth between desktops. Kicker gives you a tiny little pager which you can use to drag windows around between desktops, but my 2x4 grid of desktops is far too tiny for this to be easy. I could make the pager bigger but then kicker itself would grow to monstrous proportions and hog far too much screen real estate.

Or you can right-click a window and move it to a desktop that way, but then you're almost working the dark, not quite sure what the target desktop is going to look like once this new window plonks down onto it. (And right-clicking and navigating popup menus is too slow for my impatient self.)

Compiz on the other hand gives you a huge view of your desktops, and this desktop view stays out of the way until you activate it (by putting the mouse in the corner or by hitting a key combo), which is exactly what I want.

You can drag and drop windows between desktops on that thing. You can also easily see which apps are open on which desktops, something that a tiny little kicker pager never quite conveys. And it looks as good as any fruit-based desktop OS, which it likely is copied from to begin with.

Compiz actually does have quite a few nice features like this that can improve your window managing enjoyment a bit. Compiz also has a lot of incredibly annoying and distracting features. The good thing is that you CAN disable the wobbly windows and rotating cubes and other distractions. You can set windows to gently fade in and out of existence rather than explode into giant fireballs. You can disable the silly window opacity and motion blurring plugins. Yeah you can make it snow on your desktop and have your tooltips beam onto your monitor like Star Trek, but you don't have to.

Compiz also has a nice rule-matching engine to let you manage window placement, size, stickiness, etc. based on window names or classes or other attributes. It's not quite as easy to configure as kwin but it's usable. Compiz lets you configure shortcut keys for everything too, which is essential for me.

As 73 other blogs already mentioned, you don't need XGL to run Beryl any longer if you use the beta nvidia-drivers in Portage (which are currently quite masked). This is pretty nice because the last version of XGL that worked for me was from July. I've had to mask every one since then. I got some kind of GlxBadDrawableSomethingOrOther error every time I tried to run the new ones. I tried everything I know of (which is arguably not much) to get the newer versions to work, but nothing ever worked right. Tried every version of nvidia-drivers under the moon, recompiled my whole system once (for other reasons, but still). Nope. So this is good news. It runs at full speed too, which is also nice. A few short weeks ago, nvidia drivers + Xorg would crawl any time any special effects happened. Once again I'm amazed at how quickly the development of this project is going.

I noticed a lot of themes missing from Emerald that used to exist in Compiz/CGWD. Apparently they removed all the non-GPL themes, which is good I think. We don't want Beryl being sued out of existence by MS and/or Apple. However I don't think most of the themes there now really take advantage of the flashy transparent eye-candy that Emerald is capable of. If only I wasn't working on 12 other things and dead tired from work, I might give a theme a shot.

I got beryl (i.e. compiz-quinnstorm) working. I had to do this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib
export DISPLAY=:1
beryl-manager

This thread was a life-saver. Now rather than the whole screen being white, I get nice unnecessarily bouncy window effects. Can't be beat. A lot of new stuff has been added since last I looked. The development speed on this project is rather shocking. Every time I look there's a new plugin or new feature that's been ganked from OS X or Vista. It's an exciting time to be a Linux user.

My emerge -e world finished after almost exactly 24 hours. Not bad for 600 packages I guess. It failed on samba, some gst-plugins, qt, vnc, and probably a few other things. That was annoying. I actually managed to finish without using (much) of --skipfirst though. It's nice that when emerge -e world fails on the 300th package, you can emerge or emerge -C another app, and then emerge --resume and it will still be smart enough to resume with the 300th package from before. Doesn't work as well as it could, though.

In other news, compiz no longer works. I get a blank white screen. I don't know what happened. I haven't been updating compiz or XGL, but I must've updated one of its dependencies. Possibly the nvidia drivers. Who knows. It's not worth tracking down to fix, really. The surprising thing isn't that compiz doesn't work now, it's that compiz somehow managed to work on my computer for as long as it did.

There are plenty of nice Compiz themes at compiz.net. Here's Milk, which I've always liked. KDE + Compiz is just too nice:

Since taking these screenshots, I've started using dual monitors. There's a good FAQ on the Gentoo Wiki about setting up TwinView. It honestly couldn't be easier. I don't know how I got along with only one monitor before now. It's so much nicer with two.

The only bad thing about TwinView is that you can't specify which screen is your "main" screen. As seen in this thread, this is a limitation of the nvidia drivers. Kind of sucks, but KDE's support for dual screens makes up for nvidia's lack. You can force Kicker to be on one or the other screen or both; you can set wallpaper for each independently; etc. Full-screening most apps works fine. It all works perfectly fine with XGL/Compiz too.

Linux has come so far in the past 5 or 6 years. It's really quite amazing.

I've installed XGL and compiz-quinnstorm again. I'm somewhat disappointed. I was looking forward to a night of hacking and tweaking and getting things to work. But the darn thing installed with no problems at all. :( Even on my AMD 64-bit dual core. I thought I'd have trouble getting it to compile for amd64, but nope.

emerge layman
layman -f
layman -a portage-xgl
emerge xgl compiz-quinnstorm gcompizthemer

That's about it. Though I had to unmask some packages and write a few shell scripts to make sure everything starts that needs to start. And now I have a bouncy, wobbly, semi-translucent desktop. mplayer works, zsnes works, and that's about all I care about. I'm using compiz in conjunction with KDE, and it works perfectly fine.

One great new thing about compiz is that you can use themes. There are already a huge amount of amazing themes made for it. Including the obligatory Mac and Vista ripoffs. I find it hilarious that I can use a Vista-themed 3d-accelerated Linux before Vista is actually released.