In late 2008 we witnessed the release of Compiz++, a rewrite of the Compiz core in C++ plus other invasive work in order to improve this compositing window manager. With Compiz++ being a branch of Compiz and various other developers working on their own branches, the future of Compiz was unclear, however, today it has been cleared up some.

Compiz has a lot of nice effects that are mostly useless. In my quest to find a work place without distraction compiz effects doesn’t really fit it. Here are five effects that I actually found useful...

Compiz-Check is a script to test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup and if not, it will tell you the reason why.
The script is suitable for GNOME, KDE and Xfce users and is not limited to a specific Linux distribution – in fact, the script lists those infos for you.

Yesterday we shared that Compiz++ and Nomad would be merged back into Compiz and today there are even more announcements coming out of the Compiz camp. With Compiz not having a clear road-map, a Compiz council has been established to begin charting the future of this compositing window manager.

There have been several changes with the Compiz setup in openSUSE 11.0, including both exciting and new features in Compiz Fusion, and extra developments behind-the-scenes which make running and managing Compiz easier. Today we will be taking a look at these, and we’ll be catching up with Dennis ‘onestone’ Kasprzyk, a Compiz Fusion core developer and openSUSE user, to find out more.

I cannot count how many times I receive e-mails where I hear about the poor soul who opted to take whichever distro for a test drive, only to discover that Compiz, Beryl, and these days; Compiz-Fusion has left the user scratching their head. To be clear, I believe you should be using Linux for intelligent reasons: secure, free and customized to suit your needs.

I wrote a script called Compiz-Check over the past weeks that will test if Compiz is able to run on your system/setup.
If not, it will (hopefully) tell you the reason why.

"A new merged community around Compiz project would be known as Compiz-Fusion, details of the announcement here on Compiz Mailing List."

Compiz 0.9 is a complete re-thinking of Compiz 0.8. It’s like KDE4 was to KDE3. Totally new frameworks. Totally new buildsystem. Totally new API. It’s supposed to clear the ground from major architectural flaws that were in older versions of compiz to make development far easier and faster even for future version of compiz.