Don't have a graphics card capable of running desktop effects with Compiz on Ubuntu? By enabling compositing in GNOME's default Metacity window manager, you get some eye candy and can run applications that require or benefit from a compositing window manager.

In GNOME 2.22, included in Ubuntu 8.04, the default Metacity window manager has compositing built in. This means that you can get your eye candy effects without switching window managers!

Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE. Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins and a configuration system for the Compiz compositing window manager. It was created from the remerging of Beryl into Compiz.

Why you would want to do that? Because it uses less resources and it may run better for old or incompatible video cards (including Intel). You don’t even need accelerated graphics to run Metacity with compositing and it even works well inside VirtualBox.

Cairo dock is a Mac OSX dock-like application that you can install in your Linux machine. One of the advantage that it has over other docks is that it does not require any compositing window manager to work. Even on a low-end PC, it will still work fine. This is not possible for docks like Avant Window Navigator which depends on compositing manager (such as Compiz) to function.

Compiz is one of the first compositing window managers for the X Window System that is able to take advantage of OpenGL-acceleration. The integration allows it to perform compositing effects in window management, such as a minimization effect and a cube workspace. Compiz conforms to the ICCCM standard and as such can substitute for the default Metacity in GNOME or KWin in KDE.

The Linux community has come up with a bunch of new technologies to bring the UI eye candy on Linux to the next level…following the path of a well established player : Apple with its 8 years old compositing window manager Quartz.

Window Maker is a window manager that, while having elements of a desktop environment, does keep very strongly to the principles of a basic, light weight window manager. It has an extremely simple, mouse driven interface and in some ways operates in the old NextStep blueprint of functionality.

"Recently I switched from GNOME to Stumpwm (wiki), which means that I jumped out of a desktop environment to a simple window manager. So far, I'm very satisfied with such a change and never looked back. Stumpwm, as its website says, 'is a tiling, keyboard driven X11 Window Manager written entirely in Common Lisp'. This definition summarizes the reasons why Stumpwm is so suitable for me..." --