OS X vs Ubuntu + Compiz-Fusion
- December 2nd, 2007
- 12:10 PM (GMT-5)
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Before I bought my first mac through the years I have always jumped between windows and Linux distributions. Linux had not had the best user interface like OS X, it was just never a nice on the eyes. Last night my roommate was telling me about something he had seen a while ago called beryl. We found out that the beryl project had merged with the compiz project to create compiz-fusion. An excerpt from the compiz website tells you exactly what it is.
Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager. Compiz Fusion aims to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness.
Although that tells you what it is in a nutshell there is nothing like seeing it in action to fully understand it so be sure to watch the YouTube video that I have embedded into this post. It adds some pretty slick visual enhancements to the window manager and in my opinion it’s pretty sexy. From what I understand this runs below the window manager so I think you can use it with any window manager you so choose. A lot of the effects that you will see are mostly just things you can do when you get bored but this is the future of operating systems. I have seen some stuff like this in OS X but not anything nearly as cool.
I just love how you can move the windows around really fast and make them jiggle like JELLO. As soon as I saw this I looked into the possibility of installing this side by side with OS X. I asked in a few IRC channels and people decided that they needed to be sarcastic and tell me sure you can, you just have to put the monitors next to each other. I finally figured out that it will install without any issues on a Mac, you just need to use a boot loader. My choice is rEFIt which I used in the past when I did a dual boot windows setup. I attempted to install Ubuntu using the CD ISO that I downloaded. It would not work for me. Not because I have a fancy Mac Pro but it is the fact that I decided to go all fancy with my mouse and keyboard. I have the Apple wireless keyboard and mouse which both run on blue tooth. This evening I will have to go pick up a cheap wired keyboard and mouse just to get through the installer.
The blue tooth stuff will work with Ubuntu once I get the OS installed, I guess the installer just will not detect them for me. I cannot wait to get this installed and see how fast it runs on my system. If I can get everything to work well with my work VPN connection etc (I’m sure there will be no problems) I might even decide to make Ubuntu my primary OS… Sorry Apple. If I do fall for Ubuntu I might just have to buy a cheap PC to install it on. I would sell my Mac Pro but with the way I can jump between OS’s I would prefer to keep it for the future 
