from Daniel Koskinen

I’m really pleasantly suprised how well the desktop effects in Ubuntu Feisty work. They’re supposedly still pretty experimental, but the default compiz effects run just fine on my 4-year-old HP laptop with Mobile Radeon 9000 w/32 MB VRAM. And I’m using the open source ‘radeon’ driver. Obviously I’d get seriously better performance on a more powerful machine, but even on this old dog I’m enjoying a more pleasant experience with added depth on the desktop — the same reason OS X was and continues to be so cool. In addition to just simple 3D-depth, placing virtual desktops on the sides of cube considerably boosts their usability. It is now far easier to remember where something is when it has a physical place in space.

By default Ubuntu does not include a settings manager for the Desktop Effects, so I recommend installing gnome-compiz-manager (available in the Universe repository) or compiz-settings. The latter is less mature and more messy, although it doesn’t come close to the mess the Beryl settings manager is. I recommend the latter only if you want to try the compiz-extra plugins.

Original post: Compiz goodness