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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

"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...

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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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

True story !

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