I still remember the first time I saw the demo video where they flip a window around and write a note on the back of it. Blew my mind.
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, 🙂
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Based on your username i guess you must be the bastard operator from hell ;)
Jokes aside, your story reminds me of my own, even though i needed to take a detour to realize i would love to make money doing that stuff.
Windows XP users were so jealous of my 3d and jiggly desktop.
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”.
I’ve used Linux exclusively since '06 when I was the nerdiest kid in junior high, I ran Gentoo and various tiling wms until KDE plasma 5 got good.
I’m a coffee roaster now, and my nerdy friend that went on that journey with me is a musician and fashion model lol.
Gentoo: not even once.
Every time I get a new computer I still come back to see how fast it can emerge world.
my nerdy friend that went on that journey with me is a musician and fashion model lol.
Maybe his/her experience in keeping the system simple and beautiful helped him/her recognise the passion in art.
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 wobble closing application by lighting the window on fire.
Fuck if this isn’t the truth… Saying this as a Sr. SRE with no degree or certs.
Damn that’s a trip down memory lane
Knoppix, my old friend
Wow, that’s a blast from the past! Last release from April 2021, that’s far more recent than I would have guessed!
Sorry but can someone please explain? 3D cube? Wobbly windows? SRE?
SRE is Site Reliability Engineer. I think the other two are screensavers maybe? I’m trying to decipher this myself.
Ok I think those are some kind of virtual machines or containers after reading other comments lol.
Aha - thanks.
I am on a desktop now and did some searching. I found this, which pretty much explains the OP’s smaller domino, I guess: https://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.
Here you go: https://piped.video/watch?v=kR8x5Wb26ew
I still have wobbly windows
And I still have the 3D cube (Desktop Cube GNOME extension).
It ran at like 1FPS on my computer (got it up to like 10 with some performance toggles), but I totally still needed to have it on!
I loved playing videos that popped out and wrapped around corners. How is this not a thing now? How is there no similar compositor?
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 would say the first step is wanting to make a cool myspace page
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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This is unironically true, just that i have yet to finish college
