Compiz is a fairly generic ‘desktop effects’ package for Linux. Ubuntu (and maybe others?) users can enable with System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects, or you can be hardcore and type compiz --replace in a command prompt. (Be warned that it’ll kill your window manager and replace it with Compiz, so don’t do this if you have a lot of stuff open, in case anything goes wrong. Be further warned that if you do this and foolishly Ctrl+Z it hoping to then bg it, you’re going to lock up your desktop, since you just suspended your window manager.)

About all that you’ll notice with Compiz at first is drop shadows. It’s nice, but it’s kind of like buying a Ferrari and savoring the fact that it’s a stick-shift. What you really want is to customize it. System / Preferences / Advanced Desktop Effects Settings is how you do this. If you’re like me and this wasn’t installed with Compiz for some strange reason, you can use Synaptics (or apt-get) to install compizconfig-settings-manager.

Here are some things I do and don’t like:

• Cube, and Rotate Cube. (See my previous post on how to make it work if it does nothing for you.) This lets you juggle four virtual desktops by free-spinning a 3D cube. Once you do it, you realize it’s really intuitive. And insanely awesome. Ctrl + Alt + left-click enables this. (Ctrl+Alt+Right flips it.)
• Expo will “zoom out,” showing all your virtual desktops at once. Handy for an overview, or if you have your mail client full-screen and forget what desktop it’s on, I suppose. Not something I’d use a lot, though. Super-E does this. If you’re thinking that the Super key is perhaps next to the Any key… It’s actually the Windows key.
• Scale does what Mac users probably thought Expo does: shrinks down all your open windows to be simultaneously visible on one screen. You can map this to a corner of the screen, but Shift+Alt+Up is the official key combination. (Let up on the “Up” key and you can use the arrow keys to pan around, or you can just click on what you want.) I find this key combination really awkward, so this is a good place to mention that you can remap any of the key combinations it replaces.
• Shift Switch is a Cover Flow-inspired Alt-Tab window switcher. Shift+Super+S pulls it up, and then you can use right and left arrows to navigate. (Note that the windows loop.)
• Ring Switch lets you “go in a circle” around the open windows, and is Super-Tab, a slightly less-awkward key combination.
• Shelf is bizarre but cool. It shrinks a window down. There are three sizes. Press Super-L once to make it maybe half-size, and press it again to make it about a tiny little window. Press it a third time to restore it. You cannot interact with a “shelved” window, other than moving it around. The window will update, though, so if you have something running and are waiting for it to finish, you can shrink it down.

I doubt I’m going to use all of these, but I’ve enabled all of them right now, and I wrote myself a cheat-sheet. I think after a few days I’ll have a good idea of what’s eye candy and what actually makes my life easier. I think they all have the potential to do so, though.

Oh, a bonus tip? Gnome users, check out System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s something any power user ought to tweak to their liking.  (I set F1 up to launch a terminal, a task I must do 50 times a day. It masks the “Help” feature programs love to pop up when I overshoot the ~ key, too.)