Nowadays we just have multiple monitors, and even windows supports multiple desktops with quick ways to change between them. Though I think the best thing to come out of that addition is the fact that waking up your computer doesn’t mess up your window layout anymore. Like it does for a second, but then it fixes them all less than a second later. It was honestly one of my biggest gripes with having multiple monitors.
There’s Wayfire. The github says that’s it’s inspired by Compiz. I’ve never used either of these so I don’t know how similar they are to each other. It is Wayland though so if you’re not into that kindof thing it could not be for you.
I am on a desktop now and did some searching. I found this, which pretty much explains the OP’s smaller domino, I guess: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE
Yeah that’s pretty much it. You had multiple virtual desktops that let you have different sets of windows up on each and when you switched between them it played this cool animation of them laid out in a cube that you rotated to the next face. Then the wobbly windows is exactly what it sounds like. They’d jiggle when you dragged them around or when you maximized them.
Ran like crap on my old laptop I used for school but my god it was necessary to have. Still brings a goofy smile to my face whenever I’m moving windows around today since it’s a thing you can still do in Linux desktop environments. Had I not had my Comp Sci degree pursuits disrupted by chronic illness I’d likely have had a similar experience to OP.
Haha your post made me reflect my journey. I had fun in college tinkering Arch Linux with i3. Now I’m an Infra Engineer (or DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, SRE, whatver) and still do the same job—keeping the system “reliable”.
Similar story for me, Ubuntu w/ wobbly windows and desktop cube in Jr High (I was a particularly nerdy kid), arch w/ i3 in HS and college, now I’m a DevSecOps Developer (engineer is a sacred term in Canada)
Learning to do naughty things to the WEP wifi around me is what led me to now doing penetration tests at my org.
Funny how goofing around on a computer as a kid can lead to careers and passions.
Its likely that I wouldn’t use linux today if it weren’t for messing around with compiz settings on school computers back when I was a teenager. Wobbly windows and desktop cube was such fun. I guess that’s how we can recruit new linux users. Get them while they’re young. “But does your windows laptop do this?” wobble wobbleclosing application by lighting the window on fire.
I went to university with David Reveman. He did his master’s thesis presentation about compiz (or actually glitz which was a precursor) as slides on the top of the cube, and everybody just assumed it was PowerPoint. Then when it was time for a demo he just flipped the cube around to the Gnome desktop. People’s jaws dropped, it was amazing, 🙂
I wish I would have taken a career in something related to Linux as I have always loved it and used it to a degree (stopped a bit when I got my first Mac, but that was after the career ended anyway), but I did in administration and now I’m unhappy I liked the heck out of Compiz though.
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