The Linux community has come up with a bunch of new technologies to bring the UI eye candy on Linux to the next level…following the path of a well established player : Apple with its 8 years old compositing window manager Quartz.

But as it may happen way too often in the Linux desktop community the emphasis is on the technical aspects , not at all on the ease of use and usability improvements: check the following nice/fancy/eye blowing demos, and after the wow effect … think about what it brings.

Here is an interesting Beryl vs Vista videos: the focus is on effects only, except form the clear Apple borrowing (dock, window in/out effects) the Beryl side is just as unusable as the Vista one can be…but you have eye candy , and a wiz/bang teenager environment (jackytouch for the frenchies )

Another one with Compiz-Fusion, same conclusion:

…just try to find a utility, a user experience meaning to this fireworks….well nothing, in the same vain as vista windows effects and switcher you deactivate to speed up your PC. Ok the 3D cube is lovely, but come on, playing a 3D game just to switch between workspaces can be called a waste of time, I want to be efficient to do the things I really care on my PC, which ARE NOT looking at the animation between windows!

Then come this little refreshing Linux gem, and, I want to say of course, it is not coming from the "raw" desktop engineering Linux community, but from a lab (ok, a french one ), Inria. It is called Metisse : and at last it clearly states "Usability study and experiment before nice effects!"

Metisse [1, 2, 3] is an X-based window system designed with two goals in mind. First, it should make it easy for HCI researchers to design and implement innovative window management techniques Second, it should conform to existing standards and be robust and efficient enough to be used on a daily basis, making it a suitable platform for the evaluation of the proposed techniques. Metisse is not focused on a particular kind of interaction (e.g. 3D) and should not be seen as a new desktop proposal. It is rather a tool for creating new types of desktop environments.

Quote from the Metisse web site.

Checkout this simple idea about copy/paste: why on earth it is not like that today….

This one shows also some interesting usability concepts: