The past weekend I had some time to play around with compiz-fusion again (yeah I should be doing other stuff I know :-( ). I tried out Beryl about a year ago and decided it was not ready for prime time. Now with a new Core Duo 2 based system and a tiny onboard Intel X3000 graphics card I was suprised at the latest results. The compiz-fusion devs have come a long way in the past year.

I checked out the xeffects overlay and emerged away the "stable" version. It all went without hitches. However starting compiz-fusion is still poorly documented with two different approaches on HOWTO compiz-fusion and Compiz Fusion. Despite that I got it working without too much trouble (hint: use the unkeyworded fusion-icon ebuild). When I finally got it launched I stumbled across a few other problems.

I really would like to see a better KDE configuration frontend as I find the ccsm configuration engine quite confusing with contradicting shortcut keys configured all over the place. Overall I found the scale plugin and the pane workspace shifter quite nice and can imagine that they could actually be of some use in daily desktop work.

However some missing things make me think it's not ready for my desktop yet. The KDE window manager kwin have the ability to store window placement on different desktops in the session profile. I really use this feature a lot and I couldn't quite find a way to do it with the kde-decorator from compiz-fusion. Also I miss my "send to desktop" right mouse click option. Do I really have to drag all windows around? Overall stability was much better than last time, though I lost window decoration a couple of times when I played around. Also I encountered an annoying bug where shadows from kicker and other applets were 10 px of whiteness instead of shadow gradients. It seems to be a bug in the latest versions of the i810 driver from Xorg.

So my overall conclusion is that compiz-fusion is getting closer but it's not yet ready for my desktop.

Update: Seems like the new window manager KWin Composite shipped with KDE4 will help with the window manager problems and perhaps even replacing compiz-fusion. Thx to Dan for the quick tip!