This is not a “Which composition manager is the best” poll. It is a poll for which effects the composition manager gives the OS it is on.
Xgl - Windows stretch/skew when pulled, transparent titlebar, drop shadows, minimize/restore animations, close/open animations (windows and menus)
Aero - Translucent titlebar (uses transparency and pixel shaders), drop shadows, minimize/restore animations, close/open animations (windows and menus)
Aqua - drop shadows, minimize/restore animations, icon activation animation, open/close animation (finder windows launched from folders only, menus only animate closed)
If I left something out, let me know (don’t flame me) and I’ll put it in.
XGL also handles full window transparency and wobbly menus. There’s also a light window wobble effect with XGL’s expose clone. Windows will also change shape as they move across the corners of the desktop cube, helping to present the illusion of three dimensional space.
I second Xgl. it seems the entire focus on it was iCandy. Haven’t seen much of anything useful done with it (that wasn’t a direct copy of Vista or OS X).
I have a friend who’s a hardcore Linux user with all the bleeding-edge packages, and he gave me a thorough walkthrough of XGL a few weeks ago. It definitely wins for eye candy.
I second Xgl. it seems the entire focus on it was iCandy. Haven’t seen much of anything useful done with it (that wasn’t a direct copy of Vista or OS X).
Transparent windows with alt-tabbing. That’s a better solution to the problem than Flip3d. It’s still in it’s pretty early stages though, and still rarely used. I’m sure we’ll see some unique useful things come out for it in the next year or two though.
Well technically, Aqua is the UI theme, Quartz is the compositor. But Quartz & Quartz Extreme also allow for the effects such as the rotating cube and others. You can have transparent or translucent windows. You also have the ability for movies in menu bars (rosyna has showed us this).
Transparent windows with alt-tabbing. That’s a better solution to the problem than Flip3d. It’s still in it’s pretty early stages though, and still rarely used. I’m sure we’ll see some unique useful things come out for it in the next year or two though.
My friend runs XFCE with XGL on Gentoo, and watching him use his computer for a few minutes blew me away. I don’t think any of it will improve the UI, and I don’t see myself using it, but then again, my preference is for more bare-bones GUIs (my favorite interface, after all, is Mac OS 9 Platinum). In any case, I’m glad it exists, and I think it’s really cool.
