Project Looking Glass - yet another Window Manager?

In other news (or news which is hard to locate on the net), Beryl and Compiz have merged. So I'm stuck with a buggy Beryl from Ubuntu, and am waiting for the first merged release.

In my search for a better compositor, I came across Metisse and Looking Glass.

Metisse's concept is cool, it focusses on more on desktop efficiency, rather than great looks. Its called a 2.5D desktop. My best attempts at installing it failed, it'll be a while before I try it again. Apparently the Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition comes with Metisse bundled.

So I decided to try out Looking Glass. Looking Glass was a breeze to install, Sun provides a repository for Ubuntu from where I could just apt-get. After install, all I needed to do was logout and login back with Session type "Looking glass".


Looking glass is at the other extreme of Metisse - so I felt. Its more effects and no desktop efficiency. I might be wrong, I haven't worked with it for too long. But at the effects it does a great job! Technically LG demands a Graphics card - technically I have a Intel Integrated Graphics card, and it gave me decent results - not as smooth as Beryl. The cool features are of course how we can write notes at the back of the windows, and arrange windows to the corners of the screen. And the nice application list bar at the botton of the screen (I badly want that in Beryl - oops, compiz). You can do a lot more, which you usually won't want to do. And there are a lot of experimental 3D interfacing apps, which I felt are mostly crap. And by arranging windows in space (which extends to the left and right of your screen), everything eventually tends to get inorganised.



I could probably use it to impress some friends some day, I can't get work done on it;)

Long live Compiz!

(And for those who haven't noticed, I'm back into blogging:P )