Since my new laptop features shiny Intel graphics (and not the proprietary stuff from ATI or Nvidia), I can comfortably run compiz on it. None of my ATI or Nvidia machines did.

Face it: compiz is a window manager. It does that job okay. I somewhat still like openbox better, but compiz has it's bright sides, too. I'll probably add devilspie again, though. Too bad they removed the XML syntax and went to a lispy thing. Openbox had a nice XML syntax and had all the window matching functions I needed.

Now most people expect compiz to just magically add some 3D effects to their desktop. That's not entirely accurate. 3ddesktop worked like that, years ago. It worked with most window managers, by taking screenshots of your desktops. Maybe some of it's layouts could be added to compiz.

Compiz however functions different, and thats why it IS a window manager in itself (which has "outsourced" window decoration to e.g. gtk-window-decorator to achieve a metacity-like look). From my understanding, it basically has all windows placed off-screen and uses GL to draw them on the real screen. This will result in some speedups, actually, whereas 3ddesktop came only with slowdowns.

Anyway, so much for the theory. Here are my firsthand experiences:

• Performance is excellent on my i945 integrated graphics
• 3D drawing errors are minimal (playing with the cube settings and increasing the number of desktops to 8 caused some that eventually went away)
• Effects are much less annoying than I though. Some are actually quite pleasant, I find the "fading" visual bell useful. Cube switching at 8 desktops is more of a slide, and with a faster speed it's also nice, at least for adjacent desktops. I'd like to have a similar smooth transition for arbitrary desktops; no need to flash me the interim desktops.
• Expose-like overview is of course great. Except I use desktops to avoid any window overlap anyway.
• Wobbly windows still rather annoy me. I tried tuning them down to a faster and lighter setting, but failed. Any other parameters just made things worse, I found it hard to pick good parameters.
• the bad: every now and then, a window isn't drawn properly. Most often these are dialog boxes; there is no obvious pattern to when it works and when not. Today, the gnome-screensaver password prompt is invisible. Other dialogs are empty until minimizing them with the "show desktop" button and restoring them.

On overall, compiz doesn't distract from work that much; I had feared I would spend a lot of time just playing with the effects, but it's okay. (Try setting visual bell to shiver, start vim and press arrow up some time, and watch your window violently shake. Reduces stress when not finding a bug.)

So it likely is less harmful for the Debian etch release than Frozen Bubble 2.0 (which has a new 6-player mode, and is feared to have a similar impact as tetrinet...)

Whoever released frozen bubble 2.0 just now must have some evil plan of delaying the etch release.

[Yes, I'm aware of this compiz fork; but I'm sticking to Debian packaged software, so my system will upgrade itself. I don't think it's packaged yet?]