Compiz-Fusion 0.5.2 is out!

The first real release of Compiz-Fusion (0.5.2) is now available as a prepackaged Debian/Ubuntu binary (and I believe there's a Fedora build too). So naturally, I moseyed on down to take a look.

I'm disappointed.

The first step was to get rid of Beryl. The second step is to add new repositories and install Compiz-Fusion. Unfortunately, I decided to be a smartalec and add the repositories then uninstall Beryl and install Compiz-Fusion as one step. The result was that I got rid of too much; I uninstalled the window decorators rather than upgrading them. Bad idea. Compiz wouldn't start. Finally I figured out about the decorators, installed them and restarted Compiz in the manner according to the semi-official HOWTO.

Compiz was running fine, but I was getting no borders. Some more reading later, I found that I should disregard the semi-official advice and instead run "compiz --replace -c heliodor" to actually tell it which window decorator to use. I don't see a way to specify window decorators otherwise, and there's no panel applet! A severe regression from Beryl - how have the Compiz folks done without it all this time?

The default settings are also pretty terrible compared to Beryl. Window animations are set too fast. Tooltips and menus are set to fade in AND have a focus shiver at the same time, which looks terrible; and the focus shiver is a completely different part of the badly-redesigned Compiz settings manager. Damn, I was just getting used to the Beryl Settings Manager (which I liked) and now this!

To add insult to injury, I cannot tweak the animations to perform at the speed I'm used to. The Burn animation no longer burns down the window; the window disappears shortly after the animation begins, and the burn effect continues even though there's nothing there. It's jerkier - uses too much CPU time.

I recently got rid of my task bar ("Window List") in favour of the Beryl Scale plugin. Well, the Scale plugin is still around and with some new features, but they've removed a crucial one: Showing minimised windows! Yes, there's no way to make Compiz-Fusion show minimised windows in the Scale plugin! Useless!

Some of the other new plugins run slowly (Expo runs at about 2 frames per second here). And I found some irritating errors in the settings program, where it continued to use a particular key for a particular plugin even after I told it not to use that key.

On the plus side, memory usage has improved. Menus are semi-transparent by default and look nice. The ADD plugin shows that the project is thinking about accessibility, and I'm sure it would be helpful. And on a fast system you'll love some of the new plugins. But I really think Compiz-Fusion shouldn't have released this - it needs another couple of months to cook. I preferred Beryl 0.2.0, and I hope that Ubuntu Gutsy includes Beryl by default rather than Compiz Fusion.

EDIT: I've been using Compiz Fusion for over an hour, and I'm STILL finding things about it which are REGRESSIONS from Beryl. For instance, switching desktops using Gnome's workspace selector causes the current windows to burn down and the new windows to beam in. Beryl did the logical, intuitive action of rotating the cube. Let's see if I can fix it.

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In non-Linux news, I finally bought the DVD of What A Girl Wants (the Amanda Bynes movie). I had a dream about her last night, so that's what prompted me to buy it. Mr Bean's Holiday has apparently been released, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

And I realised that I'm owed about $170 by various people. I'll get into debt-collection mode.