Handle With Linux

Compiz is the worst tool to start this series with. It doesn't have anything that will convert a Mac-toting designer with. It might be cool to show on a train, but it's not a productive graphic design program.

You might want to run a grammar/spell check through your next articles too. Also Macs such as the iMac and the Macbook are not wildly overpriced. They are well in range and are highly capable computers. That's why people buy them quite a lot. I agree that the Macbook pros are likely about $500 overpriced and memory and other small upgrades are a complete ripoff with Mac. Seems like Apple isn't the only one doing that though. Dell also is guilty, though maybe not by as much.

You can't convert a Mac designer with Compiz. You actually need compatible efficient media authoring tools to do that, not gimmicky desktop water droplets and fiery windows. The cube, though cool, isn't helping me get design work done. Get it?

I like Compiz. You don't have to use all of the useless eye-candy. You can tone it down. Fedora enables the basic, and more useful, Compiz features. One of the benefits of Compiz is the smoothness of window operations. For example, if I move a window across the screen while a video is playing inside of it, the video continues to play while I'm moving it. Without Compiz, the video would freeze while I'm dragging the window. This may seem like a small thing, but the feature adds to the polish of how the desktop operates.

I also like that I can move the cursor to the upper-right corner in order to force Compiz to display all of my open windows in a tiled format so that I can easily find the window that I want; then click on it to bring it to the front. These, and other behaviors, are good usability features. I only use a handful of Compiz features, but the are very useful to me.

With that said, I disabled Compiz on my laptop, because I have a second monitor, and Compiz does not work reliably in Twin-View mode. However, where I can use it, I use it.

also the Mac has better progs for designers, which are more usable and more stable and therefore allows for higher productivity.

I am so tired of Compiz and that stupid spinning cube. Don't get me wrong... I love Linux and use it exclusively at home and at the office. But none of the Linux eye-candy I've seen really helps you be more productive or improves your user experience. Spinning cubes, burning windows, and springy things are fun if you are trying to show off your graphics card to your friends. What happens when you try to run Compiz and a 3D application? What if you want to use your graphics card for some real work? The whole system slows to a crawl. Do springy burning windows help me find my files faster or grasp their organization? Nope. They just slow me down. The docks I've tried have had so many redraw problems that I gave up on using them because they just got in the way rather than making launching programs a better experience.

If you want ideas for articles, why not look into aspects of Linux that actually make it a smoother user experience. Or talk about how to get desktop widgets that aren't ugly, that work properly, and don't just display geeky info that you don't really care about if you aren't running a server (do I really need uptime and kernal build info on my desktop? I don't think so.) I'd read those articles.

> Compiz comes with ubuntu by default. So the only thing you need
> to do is install the compiz settings manager. You'll find this
> in the add/remove programs menu

Well, that, but also make sure your 3D graphics drivers work, which they may in Ubuntu after an installation but they didn't at all in Kubuntu last I tried (8.04), or ever in my past attempts. KDE4 desktop also has impressive, if similar, effects as Compiz, and maybe even better due to a cleaner code base (and its KDE not Gnome, which is always sweet).

However, with the Novell layoff recently of (i believe) three of the five developers working on the Free-software driver for the RadeonHD graphics cards, it will be a while now before we get FLOSS drivers for ATi hardware.

This is what we need, and fast: open drivers for 3d acceleration and effects so that XOrg just works without the closed, proprietary NVidia and ATi drivers which can be a headache to install.

Compiz has at least several useful features. Scaling is my favorite. Definately preferable to digging around. Compiz is useful for those who make it so.

"Sure, Compiz is cool, and great eye candy. But how long can you sit around staring at cool eye candy?"

Apparently quite long, given the recent success of Apple.

I think the article is right, if we want to win over Apple users, it must look cool.

Compiz is gay. Too much eye candy looks extremely tacky. And nothing wrong with OS X or modern Macs. The user experience is very smooth which is twchnical speak for just enough eye candy to help but not hinder and a lot of underlying crap out of the users face.

I turn off Compiz right away on my Linux box at work. Did you mention any apps that crap out on Linux if you dont disable Compiz? No, you didnt. Imagine if you had ti turn of glitz in Aqua to make a program or two work on OS X.

I run Windows, Linux and OS X an cant stand these my platform had a bigget piece if wood thab yours rants no matter who yhr advocate chooses as their holier than thou os platform.

We develop for Linux but on OS X Macs, thats got to tell you something right there about the state if linux Desktop experience. Its just more of a joy to use the OS X desktop on a daily basis and have everything you need already buily in or just a toggle switch setting away...

You know, I was enamored with Compiz for a while, and it's a great source of eye-candy for people with older hardware. But after getting a new notebook with some current hardware and messing with Vista until getting my Arch partition set up, I realized just how far Compiz has to go. For all my judgement about Microsoft choosing eye-candy over an overhaul of their OS, I have to admit that they did it right. Same with Apple. It's clean and consistent. Compiz is just too clunky, and doesn't run anywhere near as cleanly as it should with the power of a Linux OS behind it. It's come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. Discerning users should look for the cool factor elsewhere.