Last night, in an uncharacteristic twist, I stayed up late to install XGL and Compiz overtop a Xubuntu installation. I used my fastest, fanciest machine — a 1Ghz Inspiron 8000 with an Nvidia GeForce4 440 (you may laugh if you wish) — to do it, and the results were fun.
I hadn’t installed XGL in so long, I forgot how slick it is. And in the months since I first tried it, it’s matured quite a bit. There’s now a theming and tweaking GUI, which is a godsend. And some more eye candy, like peeling the corner of a maximized window down to see what’s behind it.
You might think it frivolous, but it’s immense fun to tinker with.
Still seems like there’s a lot of Gnome underlying it. I don’t know if it’s worth the effort to install Xubuntu when so much of Compiz is still requiring Gnome’s infrastructure. It seems I could do as well to install Gnome, then pick up Xubuntu, then install Compiz. I’ll try it out some time, when I feel like rebuilding again.
