Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend | Hacker News Reader

Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend

code.mradford.com

199 pointsMattyRad119 comments

"Little known?" Compiz was the hotness of the century about a decade ago. Fire effects on minimizing windows and the famous "cube" to switch desktops. Compiz definitely propelled Ubuntu and desktop Linux in general to where it is now.

Check out this Google Trends chart to get the picture of where it was in 2007: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...

That brings me back :) I remember playing around with the fire and the raindrop effects.

Totally useless stuff, but pretty cool!

oh wow.. I knew I had seen that word before... yeah I remember Compiz now. loved playing with snap to jelly windows...

the little things that make linux fun.

It was interesting how the efforts at window decoration after Compiz never really seemed to get the useless-but-cool. I recall KDE adding some disappointing compositing effects that combined being useless with not looking very good. It was the difference between an exploration of a cool concept and someone checking a box.

Compiz's best feature was it made changing virtual desktops an exciting and rewarding process. Their specific implementation of the Cube was genius.

The best part about the cube is that it allows me to use my spatial memory to better remember what windows are open on which workspaces.

Which is a technique some memory athletes use to remember things! They often use spatial cues like mentally placing a piece of information somewhere in a room or town.

Maybe the brain prioritizes things placed in the world over ephemeral things.

I think it's more that the brain has special circuits for remembering things spatially (wether real or invented), and spatial-oriented memory "hacks" are just piggybacking on those dedicated circuits. It's like how GPUs were designed for games but it turns out they can work great for other tasks like machine learning too, if we massage the problem a bit.

Cool people had a transparent desktop so you could see the windows open in the other side of the cube.

Hijacking spatial memory like that is really useful.

I used to use 6 desktops (in Enlightenment 0.16) in a 3x2 grid, which I could slide between by throwing the mouse to the window edge.

The Compiz cube made the transition a bit fancier, but only made sense when the desktops were arranged in a line, and anything other than 4 didn't work as nicely.

I remember its flaming effect was my motivation for trying to install an Ubuntu on my PC when I was 13 or so. :)

The wobbly windows were the best for me, and the exposé clone.

Also the related Beryl which was more commonly used before the projects merged(?).

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...

Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota seem to have really preferred Beryl for some reason.

Wouldn't surprise me. I'm reading other comments talking about how much they learned getting Compiz to work, meanwhile I used Beryl and remember it working immediately with no problems (on an HP laptop with Ubuntu).

Then Compiz Fusion came along (which was supposed to be all of Beryl's updates being merged into Compiz), but they dropped like 2/3rds of the effects and it became a pain to make functional at all. That was when I stopped using it.

Compiz famously preceded Windows Aero, really rubbing it in how hard Microsoft failed at the Vista launch. A small team made Windows great futuristic new OS look dated before it even came out.

That's not how I recall it.

> The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006

> Build 5048 (built on April 1, 2005) was the official WinHEC 2005 preview build, ... The Aero visual style made its first appearance in this build

Sure, technically Compiz was released before since the official Vista release date was Nov 2006, but work on Compiz started AFTER Aero was shown.

Well, actually, most compiz features were first show in WinHEC 2003. Novell copied the demo 3 years later with the misguided XGL implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0idaN0MY1U

The funny thing about XGL is how ahead of its time it was. In some way, it still is. Building desktop OS on top of game engine is a trend starting to take hold. Newer Linux Mesa GLAMOR acceleration is just that. Qt6 will brings this to tons of embedded devices near you. Modern SOC are more efficient when pushing GUI into 3D space.

That’s not actually true. The majority job of a GUI is text rendering. I recommend reading some of Raph Levien’s posts on the matter. It’s really hard to get quality GPU-accelerated text rendering. Games don’t have this requirement because they draw very little text and it’s stylistic so all the high-quality text rendering requirements are bypassed. Moreover they also probably remove the need for arbitrary Unicode whereas GUIs can frequently not make such a simplification. It’ll be interesting to see what performance gains are realized keeping in mind from a battery perspective the GPU may be sufficiently more power hungry that the efficiency gains are insufficient to make it more power efficient.

> but work on Compiz started AFTER Aero was shown.

I'm not sure it's necessarily true they started development after Aero. They released it 8 months later. Did it only take 8 months for the first release?

The author also omits beryl, which was the real beginning of compiz.

Maybe my history is fuzzy, but I seem to recall beryl being a fork of compiz which eventually came back into the fold.

Actually. It was my history that was fuzzy, according to Wikipedia you’re right.

I also recall seeing Project Looking Glass[0] demo'd way back in the early 2000s. People were definitely having fun with/exploring the desktop metaphor in those years.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

Thanks for this, I saw a demo of this years ago and I found the ability to write a note on the back of windows very fascinating, and for years I couldn't remember what it is.

Steve Jobs even felt threatened enough by looking glass to call Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's CEO) and tried to intimidate him: https://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-arti...

this was part of what got me interested in linux. The cube and fire effects were so cool but also ran so slowly on the computer I had for experimenting with.

for scale, I threw KDE on.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...

Almost reached KDE level in Oct 2017.

A significant number of the KDE searches seem to be for the Kentucky Department of Education.

The Czech / Slovak word for "where" seems to be even more significant: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Compiz,k...

Trying to get compiz/beryl to work on my crappy dell inspiron was probably one of a few indirect factors that resulted in my cushy tech job.

I can totally relate :) The hackery you had to do to have the whole stack work was significant and helped a lot grow sysadmin skills for me, and to build fresh versions and hack up new plugins was a great motivation to learn to code in a team-oriented setting.

Wow, that's a throwback. It's amazing how little things like that can get you started tinkering.

I remember the excitement when my old distro of choice (Mandriva) added compiz support, and then it turned out to be so difficult to get it working (also on an Inspiron, incidentally).

Trying to get the kernel modules for Virtualbox working also took an ungodly amount of time for me when I was just starting to tinker with this stuff.

Oh man, the memories! I saw the title of this thread and thought "no ways its the same compiz".

Somewhere on YouTube is a pretty cringworthly video of me demoing beryl by drawing fire anarchy symbols

Same here! Trawling around forums and mailing lists to try and get Beryl working on my old desktop with a cheap-ass SiS integrated motherboard was quite a learning experience. Dead-ends all around.

Also learned what hardware acceleration was all about and that my motherboard's VGA chip specifically didn't support it. The first thing I did after saving up for a new laptop was install gentoo+beryl+gnome on it and rotate my desktop cube in all its hardware accelerated glory. Fun times!

Anyone wanting to recreate one of these beautiful experiences in a VM should find a likely now defunct distro called Uberyl (Ubuntu+beryl).

Same here!

Haha same thing here, I even found some old youtube videos I posted about my setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1I7xXRsoOM

Oh God yes, I remember doing this. Turning all the effects on was the best! Wobbly windows!

Don't forget Compiz Fusion, which was eventually merged into Compiz, but that's the one I remember being the hot one. I thought it funny at the time cause KDE could do all the same things too. But I agree with the parent comment, this isn't "little known" if you were using Linux in the mid to late 2000's you were possibly so mesmerized learning the damn thing you looked up ways to make it look and behave in cool ways.

This is hilariously true. My Gateway 7510GX sang on compiz/beryl compared to barely meeting Aero's spec

I miss wobbly windows just as much as I miss the addon to throw windows off the side of the screen to close them. Ahhhh.

Ha.Tossing virtual windows in VR to close is one of my favorite parts of the UI in Echo Arena. Didn't realize someone already implemented that on the desktop.

You sure they weren't stacked in your other workspaces?

Why throw windows off if you can just shoot the process? https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

I'm tickled that research money went into this.

I'm currently using KDE Neon and if you choose Wayland when you log in, you can also select wobbly windows in the settings.

I am using Kubuntu (that I chose over KDE Neon) under X11 and wobbly windows are also available.

Oh yeah, I was blown over by the 'cube' switch back then. When Chrome gained popularity, I remember using Compiz to hide the title bar on Firefox.

True story !

Which reminds me of one of my favorite earlier videos on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ

Every Ubuntu user should be well aware of compiz by now, mostly because of having to switch to a new terminal screen and restart it at least once a day whenever it crashes.

I still remember when Gnome 2 reached its peak with Ubuntu in the early 2000's. It was pretty much the complete, reliable, configurable, and robust desktop that Linux ever needed. Anything since that has been a downhill, with new features being presented at the expense of other features and no-frills-but-functional design. I sometimes feel for Windows users whose basic desktop proposition has remained largely unchanged for quite a many years, disregarding some cosmetic updates.

The endless need to change things eventually caused Gnome 2 to gradually become unavailable. It would've needed maintenance, updates to support new library versions, and nobody was interested. There's MATE but each time I've checked is a non-polished mess based on Gnome 2 codebase. The original Gnome 2 was lean and tidy on the surface with lots of power underneath, possibly thanks to curation by Ubuntu.

The Gnome Classic in Ubuntu is okay-ish but it has a lot of leaky abstractions as well, and you feel it's sort of out of place. It takes some tweaking to change the window manager as the newer window managers tend not to be configurable enough so that I can't set my keyboard bindings to what I've had for decades.

The only thing that does remain the same is the shell which I gladly accept. Having grow up using an Amiga, however, it still feels weird not to have a fully-integrated, native desktop GUI that very much defines the feel of the operating system itself. Gnome 2 had that chance. Other Linux environments before and after Gnome 2 are mostly just a shell to run terminals, the editor and the browser.

Um, Compiz is far from little known. When I was in high school (2005-2009) I remember installing linux for the first time on my main computer because of Compiz. The animations for switching between desktops looked very futuristic. It was cool to play with but because I built my computer for gaming Linux didn't really cut it for me. I even tried it again after watching a video about how WoW ran faster on wine on Linux than it did on XP. I distinctly remember the cube desktop switcher animation from Compiz in that video.

Compiz kick started the belief that Linux "Year of the Desktop" could be a realt thing. Wobbly windows, fire and the cube were great demos to get people interested in Linux

i never believed that hype, but i loved the wobbly gobbly effects. Given linux desktop's general unsatisfaction, they were making it quite fun. The fact that it didn't crash easily helped.

Unfortunately, Compiz seems not to be actively maintained since 2016. It looks like the development is suddenly stopped. It is quite surprising to me considering the fame in the past. I'm kinda wondering what happened to them.

[1]: https://launchpad.net/compiz

Hasn't Ubuntu switched back to Gnome recently? Since ~2009 most of the effort was Canonical-sponsored. The C++ rewrite was quite a dealbreaker in the flow of the project (which was originally written in C). The time it took to get the rewrite up and running and the language switch had a great toll on the motivation of the contributors.

Huge amounts of fragmentation in the dev community for one.. there were several major forks.

that was a long time back (2007) though, when the original dev was not willing to integrate contributions

What else could possibly have happened? Fragmentation is the favorite sport of Linux devs.

My understanding (and I could be entirely wrong) was that compiz was never actually meant to be as big as it was. Compositing was desirable for perfectly mundane reasons, and compiz was a rather cheesy tech demo.

I always found it amusing that while I considered compiz a novel way to test that compositing was functioning, others considered it the entire reason to switch DEs, or even OSes.

Yeah, it struck me as switching to Linux so you could run glxgears.

I do remember that Novell used glxgears in their compiz demos!

I guess that rules out any chance of a port to Wayland.

You cannot port a Window Manager to Wayland. You rewrite a WM for Wayland.

(disclaimer: Co maintainer of AwesomeWM here, we are doing it by merging with the Way-Cooler project)

This is great news!

AwesomeWM user here - thank you for your efforts! :)

Development is happening here: https://gitlab.com/compiz

As others have said, total throwback to 2005/2006 for me — my last proper attempt to make Linux everyday OS. The early Ubuntu days were so fun!

I remember ordering the free CDs for Warty Warthog (Which I still have somehere), just for fun - absolutely installing that initial release, alongside some Compiz/Beryl packages in an attempt to have fun.

And then I remember upgrading to Hoary Hedgehog either early or right on its release — and downloading a brand new show that ABC was airing called “Grey’s Anatomy” — that I was angry had forced my favorite show “Boston Legal” into early hiatus. I have distinct memories of watching the pilot in one of the rotating cubes — but Wikipedia indicates Compiz’s initial release was later so I may have used a pre-release or another WM effect thing.

Anyway. It’s nearly 14 years later. Grey’s Anatomy is one of the longest-running TV dramas of all time. It’s creator signed a huge deal with Netflix after basically turnjjg Thursday nights into the biggest night on TV for ABC, and apparently, wobbly Windows are still a thing.

The Tumblr Pop Culture Died in 2009 is correct. Also, #getoffmylawn because I’m now in my 30s and old!

This comment was fun to read. I'm a couple years younger, but that Boston Legal part hit like a truck. Maybe it was the suggestion, but I can't knock the mental image of wasting hours futzing with compiz/Beryl/fuzion with Denny Crane in the background.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip and smile!

I've been using Ubuntu/Compiz for a couple years and it has some annoying quirks e.g. child windows that pop up on the wrong monitor! (thank goodness for WIN+SHIFT+arrow keys!!)

But... I have NO desire to go back to Win(10/8) horrible user/developer experience.

How did I not know about this keyboard shortcut until now?!? Being able to move a window between different monitors is such a great feature.

Thank you so much. Life will never be the same.

Hold down the Windows key to get a nifty shortcut cheat sheet.

Merry Christmas!

Now if someone can fix another bloody annoying thing i.e.: file dialog box... filename is highlighted... start typing... it directs the input somewhere else (into a search field). Such a basic and annoying UI faux pas!

I've never seen an expose knock-off that captured the magic. Even Apple managed to bungle it in recent releases. At it's peak, the feature really was perfect: perfectly smooth animation and a perfect-feeling organic layout. It didn't try to do too much and it didn't have an agenda of pushing some other feature down your throat.

i wouldn’t necessarily call it a knock-off. i could be wrong, but looks like spaces first came to OSX in 2006, which is the same year that compiz launched

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaces_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz

I think parent refers to the original Exposé, which didn't have multiple desktops but was first released in 2003 or 2004. That already had a few cool window animations.

Exposé predates Spaces by a couple of years. The two wouldn’t really be properly integrated (along with Dashboard which was practically abandonware even by this point) until Mission Control came along.

In Ubuntu 18.04 by default, if you hit the 'windows' key, you get a smooth old-style Expose effect that shows all the windows.

The only differences are that if you type into that view, it searches Spotlight-style and off the right side there's an auto-hiding multi-desktop switcher. Both are tastefully descreet and strictly improvements imo.

Exposé is what made me see that 13-inch laptops are a viable option.

PixelBook has something like Expose, but it’s no where as smooth. It snaps into place in weird ways and that kills the magic.

I personally feel Expose hit a peak in functionality with 10.5, went downhill with the forced grid and gaudy glowing blue, became useless and slow around Lion or so, and is now finally about back to where it was with Mojave.

In the interim I started using Hyperdock which brings windows 7 style window previews to the Dock and I feel like it scales better to large numbers of windows than anything official from Apple.

The organic layout was what made Exposé different and useful. Imagine this scenario: four fully maximized windows, one on top of the other. Exposé would put one window on every quarter of the screen, but their places and sizes would be different, so every window moved in a different way. That helped A LOT with eye-tracking. I remember the Compiz knockoff (of 12 years ago) simply assigning each window a quart er of the screen. Same core principle, slightly different execution, yet much much worse usability.

Exposé was a feature of a time when Mac OSX was at its peak. The OSX usability guidelines were very different to the Windows ones, and it showed (every user coming to Mac had to adapt). Apple decided to throw all this away a few years ago. Exposé was turned into Mission Control, which has more features, but worse usability and aesthetics. And macOS is more intuitive to Windows-trained users, at the expense of consistency and power-user productivity.

Compiz may be great but unless I am mistaken, these features are in a default gnome-shell install. Perhaps the Ubuntu version of gnome is very different to a Fedora install?

On Fedora, the 'windows key' by default shows me a mission control esque view of all my open windows, and ctrl+alt+arrow keys moves to other virtual desktops. They can be changed to directly from the right hand side of the 'mission control' overview. Are these features both off/disabled on Ubuntu?

Yep, this is what I was thinking. Ubuntu 18.04

To each their own, but I really don't like the Compiz style of window managers. I have better things to watch than my windows moving around.

I appreciated the novelty as well, fast forward many years later and I'm doing a bunch of Googling figuring out how to disable the fancy animations on the work issued osx laptop.

It's funny how common this story is in this thread; my first Linux system was Ubuntu + compiz and I loved every little effect; now that I'm old(er) and boring, I'm running a stripped-down Debian on i3wm. It's pretty amazing that I've managed to run such vastly different systems over the course a decade with only incremental changes and have it fit me like a glove the entire time.

Compiz was always about cool looking bling, it was never really meant to be functional, just something you could burn unused C/GPU cycles on and were usually only in a few places.

When animation became more ubiquitous (in app) it got toned down a lot and when those sorts of animations are turned off you notice the speed increase and that your brain can do the visual diff just fine.

There are still plenty of visual bling you can add to i3wm without sacrificing the "instantaneous" of it though.

During my Linux zealot years (started with Slackware 2.0 back in the day), I used to experiment and play with any window manager I could put my hands on.

Nowadays I just use the default configuration of whatever OS I am on, just with some minimal configuration changes like icon size or mouse double click behavior.

I don't think the level of customization has changed too much for me, but the objective of my customization has. In college having it be cool looking mattered a lot more to me, and now having it be fast and have an efficient and highly customized interface is.

Sticky/Elastic windows was definitely my favorite compiz option. It was just so ridiculous and entertaining.

Wow, this takes me back to 2004 or 2005.

I put together a compiz/beryl demo using the flame effects and cube switch in 2005 or 2006. It help converted a few friends over to run Linux on their home PCs (OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gaim (Pidgin) and Citrix).

The flame effects were really the wow factor that sold it. I think only one person stuck around past year 3 but it really help prove to me that non-tech folk could be somewhat productive on the Linux desktop.

It also legitimized a Linux loner laptop in the laptop pool of the company where I was working at the time. Not too shabby for 2006.

There is also bumptop from roughly the same time period https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ

Nooface has a collection of weird desktops. It's no longer maintained, so here's the Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20070226171735/http://nooface.ne...

One page 30Mb of GIF files.

I know that people likes autoplayed animation but please try to use <video/> tags. It can saves a lot of bandwidth and improve greatly the experience (especially on mobile).

I'm not sure why so many people here are arguing with the "little known" part. Like many of you I owe a lot to compiz due to trying to get wobbly windows working 10+ years ago. But my mother has never heard of it, despite the fact that she'd have a vague idea of what "Linux" is if I asked her. That's the point.

Yeah, I mostly titled the article due to younger engineers not being aware of how configurable Ubuntu can be (or them possibly being intimidated by Ubuntu). I didn't anticipate so many compiz greybeards would check it out, haha.

Anyone know if this could solve VirtualBox's drop of support for 3D acceleration for Linux guests using Wayland?

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/18116

> This is a consequence of our 3D acceleration for Linux guests, which was designed for a GLX only world and interacts badly with non-GLX applications. Since more and more desktop applications are expected to use Wayland rather than X11 I have simply disabled it for guests using Wayland, thereby fixing this issue.

I really want to update my old 14.04 LTS VM... however I need to find a way to keep 3D acceleration on (for front end dev, css animations and the like, plus overall much more responsive).

Though, anyone know what "disabled it for guests using Wayland" actually means? Will 3D acceleration work if I switch to compiz, or do they turn it off just based on the fact that it's a "Ubuntu" VM?

I remember using Sabayon Linux way in the early days it came with or probably I tweaked it with Compiz and Beryl. The ATI drivers were something. So bleeding edge distro that it was crashing randomly. I had a 6 sides cube with each side representing a different desktop screen and wall paper. Fun times.

Or use KDE and have all of this out of the box :)

Or use XFCE, get none of it, stop playing with your DE, and get back to work :)

Yes yes yes. A friend used to call compiz the “dancing balogney” of Linux. I agree.

XFCE is a true productivity DE. Gives you a few simple basic apps, and does a damn good job of managing windows. I so wish I could use it at work..

I don't get why KDE isn't considered a productive DE.

The dolphin file manager has an integrated terminal that automatically changes folder to match the one you've browsed to.

There's a ton of these small useful things that a light desktop like XFCE or LXDE wouldn't implement but are still useful.

KDE has too many options. That's the problem, there's too much desire to tweak just one more thing. By then you've blown a week of time. I've personally also had bad luck running KDE. I love the look however it's always run dog slow for me on any computer I've used it on when compared to other DEs. To each their own though, that's the beauty of GNU/linux.

>KDE has too many options. This a user problem, maybe some personality or mental issue that makes you waste time or get scared when you see options.

How you should approach this is to use KDE, then if you wonder ,"hi would be nice if I could put the notifications on left side since my right eye is bad -> then you go and find the option and move the notifications ,

Installing KDE and trolling to all options is a insane thing to do, do you also install Firefox and go into about:config and set all this options as you prefer ? Or you use Ff then ask , hey would be cool if Ff won't do this annoying thing , then you search the option and hope to find it

You're right, there's a desktop environment for everyone! And the good thing is that it isn't the wild west anymore. Almost all the DEs out there follow the common standards that make every app behave well, no matter what DE you're running.

I'd recommend you to try KDE again. I run Arch Linux and KDE in my main work computer and I find the default config is awesome, there's no need to tweak anything, and it runs real fast (on the other hand I remember Kubuntu being slow). Of course, there are lots of advanced config settings, but there's no need to dig in. The default config is perfectly usable. Plus, the apps suite is where KDE really shines.

Whoa, that's awesome. I've used Plasma for a year now and I'm still doing Actions->Open Terminal Here like a dummy. Any other crazy feature tips?

Plasma is great by the way. I think KDE's general busy look and poor performance over the years have really hurt its reputation - I tried it on a fast machine a few years back and it was just confusing and slow. But right now, in 2018, Plasma is easily the best desktop environment for ergonomics, features, and polish. It's really amazing what they've done with it. I encourage anyone who's written off KDE, like I did for many years, to give it another shot.

I find MATE a similar "back-to-basics" DE that I rather enjoy.

I use the Zoom effect in KDE for accessibility reasons not for playing around, compositing gives you more then fire and magic lamp effects, like it can invert colors, dim inactive windows, some animation can improve UX.

Wobbly windows just recently made a revival with the original author separating it from compiz: https://github.com/endlessm/libanimation

far more info here: https://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/libanimation-for-...

Having flashbacks to the cube with gears in that everyone used to love.

I hate animations now, they make the desktop feel less responsive in my opinion.

I used Compiz with 17.04 and it was nice, but I decided to give a shot at the native Gnome with 18.04 when I reinstalled from scratch. To be honest, it's not perfect but it does the job. So I will stick with it. And I don't want to install something that is not maintained anymore.

Little?10 years ago was the main way to get nice desktop effects

Lot of nostalgia. For those who want to try on mac you can have something similar with Deskovery

Wobbly windows. Tiling. Emerald window decorations. Rotate cube. Endless possibilities.

So it seems that a good chunk of us got interested in computers and programming due to wobbly windows. I guess that's Compiz' main legacy, heh.

Just reading the string "Compiz" gave me absolute nostalgia-whiplash.

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