[conspire] (forw) Re: Unity on Wayland

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> This stuff makes me crazy.  What is Compiz??  And why do a need a 3d
> window manager?

Compiz is/was the original 3D-compositing window manager for X11,
developed by Novell in 2006.

I was working at Cadence Design Systems in 2006, and got to see a demo
by the Novell people of the Novell Linux 9.0 beta, which featured
Compiz.  It was pretty darned impressive in its visual effects, which
included the now-familiar mechanism of six desktop spaces shown as
facets of a cube that you could spin around to switch desktops, seeing
the entire thing from a figurative middle distance as if it were a
weirdly cubical planet you were twirling around.  (See static picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager)

I personally don't have a lot of use for 3D on Unix, but a whole lot of 
people seem to like it.  (There are a few technical specialties that
have non-frivolous uses for the stuff, such as molecular modeling.)