With fc6 compiz and AIGLX got into fedora and we should improve the user expirence with this in F7, not make it worse. We also need to integrate compiz better into our desktop.

Right now its easy to active and to disable with the "Desktop Effects" app. But this does not work correctly due to some regressions.

1)Compiz gets started from the session manager and so its not possible to switch compiz->metacity because compiz restarts itself. 2)The next thing is that if compiz is configured to use 4 Viewports and Metacity 4 Workspaces compiz will ignore its own setting and use the metacity one until X is restarted.

The god news are that this stuff is fixed, we only need to get the fixes into fedora ;) There is a patch for 1) in bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229113 As for 2) I have sent a patch upstream which is merged into current git. It adds a --ignore-desktop-hints commandline switch to compiz which fixes this behavior. We need to either make it the default by patching compiz or start compiz with this option from "Desktop Effects". ( I can send a patch for desktop-effects/compiz if needed)

After doing this the switching between metacity and compiz should work as fine as it did when fc6 got released. (The current f6 updates have the same problems). I am using a custom compiz package(git snapshot) with this changes and it works without any problems and is stable. (With compiz-0.3.6 the window decorator sometimes crashes but this is fixed in git; have not seen any crash with it). We have shipped a git snapshot in fc6 so this should not be the problem, also 0.4 should be out sometime soon.

The next thing is libwnck. Compiz supports the "Always on top" feature but it is not selectable in the menu because of a bug in libwnck. There is a patch for it in the gnome bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352383 The patch in question is the _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE.patch we should get this into our libwnck package. We already have patches in libwnck and gnome-panel for compiz integration so it would not hurt to add this small patch too. There is also the viewport.patch in this bugzilla entry. I am not using this myself right now (so I can't comment on its stability) but we also should aim to get this patch in too.

P.S: please don't start a compiz <> beryl flamewar