I heard Dick Wall on the JavaPosse podcast raving about his ‘wobbly windows’ in Compiz and wasn’t too sure what he was talking about although it sounded interesting. Over the weekend I downloaded the ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 release of Ubuntu to install on my laptop and found in the release notes that Compiz was included in the standard install. And, WOW is it impressive. The Windows subtly swoop and fade in and out when they are opened, and when you move a window around the screen it wobbles like it’s made of Jelly 🙂 Very very impressive, some very neat touches in there. I’m not considering upgrading to Vista because I don’t need to spend that sort of money, but you have to admit XP is looking really dated now. Mac OS X really is the best example out there for a good looking and easy to use operating system UI, but seeing Compiz on Ubuntu really did blow me away. The only catch is I can’t get WPA working with my Netgear WG511 card to connect to my router, so that’s ruling it out for me right now. I spent a huge amount of time getting wpa supplicant working on a previous version of Ubuntu on my laptop, and I can’t be bothered right now to go through that again to work out why it’s not working, so I’m stuck with XP on my laptop for now.
Here’s a video of Compiz and Beryl being demonstrated…. pretty amazing stuff…