Compiz 0.9.14.2 Released After Two Years

[user1]

Many consider Compiz irrelevant and gimmicky, but I think it's one of the most, if not the most performant and lightweight compositing window manager on Linux. A few years ago I installed Ubuntu with Unity on a very old PC with Pentium 4 and an ATI 9600 pro 128mb (using open source drivers) and even with Unity, compiz was butter smooth on such ancient hardware. I mean try running modern Gnome or KDE on such hardware... it will probably crawl. One thing I noticed on both Gnome and KDE is that if you have a lot of windows open, animations will start lagging. This is not the case with Compiz. It's also the only X window manager that has a consistently and properly working fullscreen unredirection.
I heard a long time ago some people disliked it because the 0.8.x series was buggy, but the 0.9.x series since the early 2010's is very stable.
Btw, if you're using Linux Mint, Compiz is preinstalled in Mate and Xfce editions.

But regarding this new version, it's a bummer they didn't add support for _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS because without it all CSD windows have sharp corners, regardless of the used GTK theme.

[CochainComplex]

Speaking of Compiz, I'm still surprised I haven't seen anyone port the water ripple effect from Beryl to anything newer after the Compiz-Fusion merge.
It's old and low-res, but here's a video of what I'm talking about: (skip to the 2:04 mark)

Or this notification effect that utilized it:

reminds me of the good old day when I was a scriptkiddy - besides the underlying song "here comes the hotstepper from ini kamoze" is also very cool

[hamishmb]

Pretty sure Ubuntu was always owned by Canonical.

It was at least as far back as Ubuntu 10.04, which was the first Linux distro I ever used. Canonical definitely used to be more focused on usability rather than enterprise in those days. I loved Ubuntu 10.04 so much.

[asriel]

Got my folks and siblings on it too - they particularly enjoy being able to show off their desktops to friends and family.

Wayfire looks promising but it is really missing good window decrations - like emerald or at least gtk decorator from compiz.

[BlueJayofEvil]

Speaking of Compiz, I'm still surprised I haven't seen anyone port the water ripple effect from Beryl to anything newer after the Compiz-Fusion merge.
It's old and low-res, but here's a video of what I'm talking about: (skip to the 2:04 mark)

Or this notification effect that utilized it:

[patrakov]

Compiz is still useful with external plugins for full-screen color correction.

[waxhead]

While most of compiz is completely useless there's is a few things that can really be useful. For me that is the task switchers, expo modes, the ability to desaturate non active windows, zoom functionality and actually the infamous cube which all makes it easier to get a "physical feel" for the desktop.

[dragon321]

Ubuntu... back when it really was Linux for human beings...
No Canonical, no lies, no Snap, no trash

Pretty sure Ubuntu was always owned by Canonical.

[partcyborg]

For Gnome users, try the "Desktop Cube" and "Burn My Windows" extensions for a modern take on classic Compiz goodness.

Kde also has a "wobbly windows" effect plugin that definitely is reminiscent of compiz. I always enable it (although I turn down the "wobble" factor considerably)

[kokoko3k]

Back in the days, it was also very fast compared to kwin.
Since then, I've the impression that the latter has become even heavier.