I tried compiz on my FC6t3 box today. Fun stuff! I think my favorite effect is the deformation that happens when moving windows around… don’t tell my boss but I spent a couple hours today just dragging a terminal window hither and yon. Surely, I thought, the window would tear down the center if I moved it hard enough. But in the end desktop physics proves deceptive — or windows are tougher than they look.

These effects are a great drug. Every release now seems to have some new GUI gadget that flashes or strobes or vibrates. I suspect that those of us who work on free software every day are becoming increasingly jaded, requiring ever-stronger fixes to achive the same “gee whiz high”.

Fedora Core 23 is going to be truly amazing. Windows will emerge from photorealistic 3-D forests, crouching and scowling. We will use Tarzan avatars to bend them to our wills. As their tails lash we will see progress indications, new blog posts, and stock quotes flicker into being and then disappear in the motion.

Subsequent releases will feature themes downloadable from motion picture and television studios. Angelina or Spongebob will dig through layers of rendered mud — mud which on inspection will be seen to have been constructed from the contents of our home directories — to find shining diamonds. We will peer into the diamonds and, deep within their artificial luminescence, we will behold a galaxy filled with Emacs lisp, each cons a star.