Experiences with Compiz Fusion

After reading this article over att FOSSwire I decided to take a stab att installing Compiz Fusion on my toy Linux box as it seemed that there were now repositories with AMD64 binaries available. Since I didn't want to screw around too much I had previously decided to wait until there were binary packages available for my hardware, and as this was the case it was time to get to work!

Installation was uneventful and everything seemed to work quite well, ran very smoothly on a Geforce 7600GS at 1280x1024. I did discover a couple of minor problems that I have yet to bother with fixing. The first one was that I wasn't getting any window borders at first, restarting with the "-c emerald" argument did nothing. But after running the Emerald theme manager and manually picking a theme it worked. You'd think it would just run with the default theme though..

The second problem I had was that windows would always end up being created at 0,0, right where I keep my system menu. I couldn't really be bothered to fix this one since it's so easy to just alt-click to drag the windows to a better position. The only application I tried that didn't spawn at 0,0 was VLC which is most likely because VLC remembers where on the screen it was last time it ran.

To summarize, Compiz Fusion still feels a bit too immature for my day to day use but it does have some interesting features and I didn't detect any stability problems like the ones I had with previous versions of both Beryl and Compiz. I recommend that you give it a try if you're one of those who enjoy a lot of eye-candy, but keep in mind that Compiz Fusion is currently in deveopment and there may be some pretty bad bugs hiding in the source.