t’s cooler than anything Microsoft has by far, but is it really part of a better computing experience?
To get working well, it is essential to harness the 3-D rendering capabilities of your graphics card and setup the plug-ins with the composite window manager, This excerpt is from Chapter 3: Using SUSE Linux on Your Desktop, from the book By Chris Brown PhD, published by O’Reilly Media. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Section 12: Animate the Desktop with Xgl and Compiz
Given the rapid pace of software development in the Linux world, it is inevitable that some topics that are bleeding-edge as this book goes into production will be mainstream technology by the time you get to read it. One such is the Xgl X server and the compositing window manager compiz. Together with a modern graphics card, these components (which are shipped with SUSE Linux 10.1) offer some stunning visual desktop effects comparable (dare I say this?) to the best that the Mac has to offer. These effects include transparent windows, fade-in/fade-out of windows and menus, animated window minimization, and the ability to put four desktops onto four faces of a cube and spin the cube (in 3-D) to switch desktops. The overall result is to give the desktop a more fluid, organic feel…. Source: Linux Journal”
Moved: http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/ 
April 15, 2007 at 9:58 pm
I just want to say, that I’ve been using opensuse 10.2 with xgl+beryl (a fork of compiz) for some months now and I’m really impressed. It may just be me, but I don’t think i’ll ever go back to standard Xorg. Okay, the effects may not be very useful, but they make the hole experience of working with the computer more comfortable.
The effects are much better than Vista’s and MacOS X’s, and they’re running extremely smoothly (and my graphic-card are not the newest geforce), so unless it’s an old pc (the system requirements are actually not that bad), I would sure recommend you all to, at least, try it out. (For that purpose, there’s a Gentoo-with-Compiz live-cd called Koraraa. Try google it)
Faffnir (faffnir.ectaco@gmail.com)