Ubuntu 7.10 is the first major distro to ship Compiz enabled by default, for all users to have fun with.
So what is all fuss about these Desktop Effects?
Not only do Desktop Effects bring you lots of bling and shiny effects, they do offer a more natural feeling desktop, such as desktops sliding instead of jumping, scaling to see either all desktop or all windows and much more.
And what does the default 7.10 Compiz do?
One of the hardest tasks with enabling Compiz was finding the right set of plugins and features to turn on by default.
Alt-tab window switching
When you hit Alt-Tab, you get a bunch of little previews, allowing you to easily see and select the window you want:
Scale windows
When you need to see all the windows on a current desktop at once, this is what you need. Take a peek:
Wall of desktops
Much like scale is for an individual desktop, the wall of desktop shows you all the desktops and their open windows as if they were a wall:
What if I want more/less bling?
Given one of the strongest reactions against Compiz has been from users of more traditional window managers, such as Metacity (the GNOME default). Equally strong has been the reaction from people who want all the bling, all of time.
Fear not! If you are one of those users, your needs are well met. Just fire up the Appearance capplet and choose your level.
Source: corey.burger
After installed Gutsy and play around inside it, heres I see:
New toolbar additions—an indicator for which user is currently logged in and a quick-launch icon for the Beagle-driven deskbar search.
Firefox users should find more to love in 7.10, as certain extensions can be installed in a more system-friendly way, such as incorporating previous Web pages into Beagle searches, multimedia plug-ins and one-click theme integration.
Firefox now gives users a choice of Adobe Flash players: the standard, proprietary Adobe plug-in, or Gnash, an open source model which, thankfully, also supports 64-bit, PowerPC and other hardware not supported by Adobe's player, albeit only up to the Flash 7 level.
One really smart move for 7.10 was consolidating all the basic ways of tweaking the desktop into one menu item: Appearance. The "Fonts" tab offers a simple way of choosing the best-looking fonts for your system, but "Visual Effects" is where you get the good stuff—windows that fade in and out, reduce with the "genie" effect, and other stuff that makes Ubuntu look modern. "Normal" will be fine for most, "Extra" gets up to the "wobbly window" level, but those who want multiple desktops on a cube, flaming windows and other effects will need to install the extensive Compiz settings manager:
- sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
Totem, the default Gnome media player, has gotten a lot of polish since its last update. Along with a more slick look, the player has improved its assistance in finding and downloading the right codecs for "restricted" (i.e. not open source) media files, like MP3s and DivX.
Finally, here's a short list of the features and additions:
- Native support for WPA-protected wifi networks. Even my troublesome Ralink wireless PCI card found its router and connected, and hasn't yet asked for the password again.
- Printers are surprisingly, actually one-step setup, almost to the point of hidden. I plugged in my HP DeskJet 825c, hit "Print" on an OpenOffice document, and, lo and behold, my printer was available -- without a single pop-up message or hardware "wizard."
- NTFS-formatted drives are automatically detected and mounted for both reading and writing.
- The Tomboy note-taking feature now allows synchronization across platforms through WebDAV or SSH.
- Printing to PDF is now a default option, with the output landing in a "PDF" folder inside your home directory.
- Power management is supposedly improved as the result of an updated kernel incorporation, although that appears to be up for debate.
- It might not seem like a revolutionary feature, but users can now change their screen resolutions and refresh rates without having to log out or hack around in terminal.
The bad of all in Ubuntu I think, that still, the partition/install process, the almost-guaranteed quirks of Compiz and the handful of extra steps to get every kind of media playing nicely remain understandable frustration points for new users.
Compiz is a window manager, that means it takes care of all the basic needs to interact with the windows on your desktop - like moving, minimizing and resizing.
In GNOME the default window manager is Metacity. Most people won't have even heard about it, because it's integrated in the desktop environment and its name is nowhere mentioned.
The bottom line is: Ubuntu's desktop effects are not just an enhancement of the desktop environment but it replaces a specific part of it. Compiz has been integrated very well in the GNOME desktop of Ubuntu. Just like GNOME obscured the existence of Metacity, many people won't know they're running Compiz on Gutsy.
Certain options of Compiz can be configured directly through the panel menu of GNOME in Gutsy.
None of those entries are specifically related to desktop effects. While the brand new Appearance menu combines a couple of previously separate settings menus, the last two entries were until now exclusively to configure Metacity.
Furthermore if you install the CompizConfig Settings Manager provided by the Compiz Fusion project, you will get an entry in the panel menu, named "Advanced Desktop Effects Settings" The tab for the effects in the new Appearance menu introduced in Gutsy, replaces the separate Desktop Effects application of Feisty. The second screenshot demonstrates how the menu gets altered automatically, when the CompizConfig Settings Manager is installed.
